A Stick of Deodorant and A Memory
How a smell drummed up a very specific period of my life and left me wishing for a new standard in baseball sims.
I bought a new deodorant recently. Nothing fancy, I don’t think. The brand is Cremo, so a slight touch more fancy than Old Spice I guess. The scent is Palo Santo. I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time picking out the scents to my deodorants. Like the movies and games I write about, I typically can spot something I am going to like from a distance. Palo Santo was the first Cremo brand stick deodorant I grabbed. I took a light sniff, decided I liked it, and threw it in the cart. I’ve noticed over the span of my ten years of smoking cigarettes, they smell different when you smell someone else smoke it than when you are smoking yourself. It’s odd and inexplicable, though I am sure there is a scientific explanation somewhere. As a matter of cause and effect I have learned the same principle applies to other things as well.
I noticed the scent the first time when I went to bed the night after I took a shower and deodorized with Palo Santo. My sheets, where I pull them up under my armpits, smelled like…something. I know, through obvious deduction, the smell came from my deodorant, but it wasn’t immediately obvious because it was slightly different. I thought about it for a few moments and slipped into sleep. The next day, when I went to apply some more, I stopped to smell the stick. It wasn’t exactly the same smell I had encountered on my comforter. This puzzled me, but the fast pace of the morning whisked me away to dress my children and run them off to school. Later in the evening, however, as I was cooking dinner, I reached for a spice and caught a whiff of my deodorant once more. The following several seconds played like a movie from the late 2000s, one of those flicks where the film grain is strong and the lighting is pale. A coming of age movie featuring a kid, in their room, playing videogames on their PS2.
I’ve been playing baseball videogames for as long as I can remember owning a system. It started on the SEGA Genesis. NEOGEO Super Baseball 2020. You play with cybernetically enhanced ball players on a field reminiscent of a baseball field but with huge alterations to foul territory and some quirky rule changes. You also hit balls thousands of feet. I remember playing the shit out of Super Baseball 2020 when by brothers and I were being babysat by Kacie Bates, a woman from our church, in their old house in North County St. Louis. When NEOGEO released a bunch of their games on modern consoles a few years back, I grabbed it immediately. Playing it again felt strange, but also sort of like coming home.
A few years after getting a SEGA Genesis for my birthday my mom got married and I got three brothers, a step-father I call dad, and a PlayStation. We had the multitap and a handful of controllers. But the biggest change was getting a baseball game aimed more at being a sim than an arcade experience. For years we were patrons of the 989 Studios experience simply titled MLB and the year it released. We had 1999, featuring Cal Ripken on the cover, 2001, with Chipper Jones, and 2002, with Andruw Jones. This was the true beginning of my baseball videogame career. I always played all 9 innings, I swapped pitchers appropriately, I tried hit and runs and double steals, I would bunt the man over in tight games. As a kid neck deep in playing baseball in the real world, I used baseball games as a means of study and escapism. I constantly imagined myself in a Cardinals uniform.
Then in 2003 EA made waves in the baseball sim space by rebranding their Triple Play series MVP Baseball. The 2004 and 2005 versions of MVP still hold up as incredible sims to this day. It didn’t hurt having Albert Pujols on the cover of 2004. But the joy would be short lived. In 2005 EA locked down exclusive rights to produce NFL games with their Madden series, killing the monumentally good NFL 2k5, a game I played the cover off of (On a totally separate note, and perhaps a whole written piece of its own, NFL 2k5 is still the best football game ever made. Hands down). This led to the rise of MLB The Show, a long running series of baseball sims still dominating the market today (again, as a side note, I don’t think it would be dominating the market if literally anyone else would make a licensed baseball game. The Show has grown stagnant without competition.)
I don’t remember digging into The Show until I got a PS3 in college. Take-Two Interactive sprung for the MLB licensing deal in 2005 (in response to Madden locking down football) and made a handful of pretty solid baseball games from 2005 to 2014, the height of which occurred between 2k11 and 2k13. But from 2007 to nearly 2014, one baseball game dominated my time. It featured a pinstriped Jared Weaver of the Long Beach State Dirtbags.
Smells are constantly tied to memory. Something about smell pathing differently in the brain. It’s similar to the reason you can remember every word from a song you heard in middle school but can't remember what you ate for dinner yesterday. Something about our senses engrains memory in a way that a single whiff or a few seconds of a tune teleports us right back to the moment we experienced it first. A few years ago, when Outer Wilds came out, I played the game while listening to Thank You Scientist’s album Terraformer. To this day, Terraformer elicits memories of Outer Wilds. When I hear Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls, I am immediately placed in the back of my now wife’s best friend’s silver Saturn, driving to one of my baseball games in 2007. Or Ay Bay Bay playing in the same car on the way to the Illinois State Fair, the same year.
Memory is such a strange thing for this exact reason. Unknown neural pathways, strong as steel, pathed between sounds and smells to memories so vivid you feel like you have been removed from your current setting and placed firmly in within the walls of said memory. So there I was, cooking dinner, reaching for the black pepper, catching a whiff of my new deodorant, whisked away to a warm, poorly air conditioned, second-story bedroom 17 years ago. The fight song of Rice University is coming out of my tv. I’m not sure why, but what I just caught whiff of has moved me here. I don’t remember anything smelling like this in particular. Nothing specific. But I do, in this moment, know exactly one thing. I turn to my wife and excitedly say, “I got it! I know what my deodorant smells like!” My wife looks at me, interested but puzzled.
“It smells like MVP 07: NCAA Baseball.”
I wish I was exaggerating when I told you I am convinced MVP 07: NCAA Baseball is one of, if not the best baseball sim made of all time. The first game in the series, 2006 introduced a “Load & Fire” mechanic to hitting. You would pull backwards on the right analog stick to make your batter load backwards and you would push forward to make them swing the bat. It took skill other hitting mechanics didn’t really require. For an inside pitch you had to load and attack the ball early. For outside pitches you had to delay your swing, keeping yourself from rolling over. But what really stood out in this system was the diversity of batted balls it created. While it may not have been a system truly based in physics it emulated physics really well. Push forward a little late on an inside pitch and you got jammed, sending a trickling grounder or a weak pop up to the opposite side. Push early on an outside pitch and you would drive the ball into the ground or lift a weak fly ball to the pull side. Each swing would give you a pop up feedback window on the bottom of the screen, telling you how your timing fared to the path of the ball.
MVP 07 would also implement this system in their pitching mechanics, introducing what they called “Rock & Fire.” Instead of picking a pitch, locating it with the analog stick, and pressing X to throw the ball, you would completed the first two steps and then be prompted to pull back on the right stick until reaching a marked point on a meter, and then push forward matching the lateral location you chose. Aiming for the left of the plate? Pull back, wait, and push forward towards the icon on the left. Both of these systems were immediately imitated in 2k and The Show offerings. But they have never felt better than they did in MVP 07.
I played with Rice University. A powerhouse team in the late aughts. I would, as a result, end up applying and being accepted to Rice, though I decided to go to another school for a better chance to play ball. A decision I would pretty quickly regret, but, what can you do, right? I played hundreds of hours of MVP 07, eventually recreating my summer ball team as Rice players. I still have the PS2 and the memory card with the save files.
Thanks to this little olfactory total recall, I have been jonesing for some MVP 07. A feat I’m sure will prove to be a little complicated, considering I’m not exactly sure where my PS2 is. Perhaps some PC emulation is in store. But it has also prompted something else in my brain. It’s reignited my desire for a quality alternative to MLB The Show in the licensed baseball sim space. Fans and players of The Show as a franchise have long been calling for more comprehensive updates to the game year-to-year. As it stands, most serialized sports games have reached a state of borderline stagnation. Small feature updates and slight graphical tweaks come down the pipeline, but the glaring issues in most of these franchises remain unaddressed.
While I was actively streaming back in 2020 I made a point of drilling down on some of these things. The Show doesn’t appear to accurately reflect the scale of stadiums, for one. Players are unable to accurately round first after hitting singles because, in my estimation, the fields are too small. This doubles and triples as an issue when fly balls get tracked down too easily and the outfield and infield have limited space for grounders and line drives to sneak through. As a Cardinals fan, the 2023 season was marred, at least in the first half, by a pervasively unlucky tendency to give up strange bloop singles and waffling doubles. Balls not hit hard, but hit just hard enough (or soft enough) to find gaps. The phrase, “couldn’t have placed it better if you threw it there yourself,” comes to mind. This also means there is a deficit in real life plays being mirrored in the sim The Show offers. Off-the-bat ball spin is one-sided, saved only for balls hit to the opposite field, meaning you never really see a batter turn on one, hook it around the base, and send it caroming off the wall. And, what’s more, if you do get a play like this to happen, the batter is often thrown out at second base simply because the field is too small to allow the realistic play to transpire.
Remember the “Load & Fire” introduced in MVP 07? Turn on a ball on the inner half and the batted ball would dive towards the hitter’s side of the field. Again, not a physics simulation here. Instead, a deeply quality system of input and response. MLB The Show approaches this level of gratification, but misses the mark more often than not.
I’m not entirely sure what the solution is here, but I do know one thing: Baseball games felt better than they do now. Perhaps it's a bit of sanding off the edges for wider audiences, maybe it's the lack of competition in the space. As a lifelong baseball fan I want these simulations to feel more realistic. I want to have my manager get mad at a bad call and get thrown out to motivate my team (another excellent mechanic in MVP 07), and please - for the love of god - finish Ballpark Village at Busch Stadium. You only have one job (satire), and it's to make a baseball sim capable of evoking the real experience. When the skyline of the stadium I got to a dozen times a year doesn’t match, more than three years after construction has been finished, I have a hard time saying it’s the result of anything but complacency.
Thanks Cremo Palo Santo deodorant, for this rant.
~Caleb