Playing God In High Def

By Nick McCann

It is easy to complain about the San Diego Padres (see: 99% of the content on The Kept Faith), but it isn’t easy to ignore them if you are emotionally invested in their performance. The hardest thing to deal with when your team isn’t winning, and you can’t avoid them because they share your environment, is that you cannot do much to change it. This lack of control of a situation can cause a desire to run away.

In this case, you can either do drugs, or you can play a video game by yourself.

On Sunday afternoon, while watching the Padres lose to the Florida Marlins on my beautiful new 42-inch Hi Def flat screen TV, I decide it was time to play God. I picked up my unused new copy of MLB The Show 08 and popped it into my brand new Playstation 3 (made possible by George W. Bush and his destructively awesome short term Republican logic) with the clear intention of creating my own version of the 08 Padres in my own image using the latest and greatest digital technology created by man, so that man can be God, even though he doesn’t really know how to be God, or if God really even exists.

This is the story Nick’s 2008 Digital Padres. Please have faith in me that it is true.

Setting up the game

Because I was playing from a divine place, I decided that time didn’t need to apply, so I set my season to 29 games, and the length of the individual games to 6 innings. I did this because I knew I would be playing God in front of a woman (my girlfriend who is a Boston Red Sox fan). I don’t believe in playing God through video games in front of women because of two reasons (A) they are of the earth and they do not understand, nor appreciate, digital merits and (B) I went to SDSU when the first Tony Hawk game came out and I remember seeing a lot of drunk highlight ridden worldly skanks dawning bored faces at parties because they were being ignored. Those faces haunt me to this day, along with flashbacks of puking into toilets while listening to Sublime records on repeat.

Game One
At Boston

I decided to go with the lineup provided by the “game”:

Brian Giles
Tadihito Iguchi
Kevin Kozmanoff
Adrian Gonzalez
Khalil Greene
Jim Edmonds
Josh Bard
Calvin Macnulty
Jake Peavy

It didn’t matter who hit when or where because my Digi-Pads were going up against Digi-Josh Beckett, a digital pitcher designed after dominating the 2007 World Series. Even a God needs to learn his craft through early failure (see: the platypus).

Innings 1 through 4

I struck out 10 times out of the 12 possible outs in the first four frames. Digi-Fenway Park was beautiful and Digi-Beckett was dealing. My earth was in the bathroom washing her face and I decided to make Jake Peavy throw a pitch at Digi-Manny Ramirez’s head. He went down hard, but my Earth didn't care. She asked, “Is there fighting in this game?”

I replied, “If it were a game, there would be, but this is more.” Then she shrugged, and left to go to the store to buy…things.

The 5th Inning

I looked up and realized it was 9-0 Digi-Boston. Digi-Peavy was pitching like shit, and I had to help him, so I called in Digi-Cla Meredith from the digi-bullpen. I wanted to have control over something different and beautiful. I wanted to throw side arm digital pitches, because in my digital reality I had given up on things like making a “comeback” or showing “pride”. I created my team to escape that stuff and I didn’t want to turn back.

Cla came in and held off the Digi-Sox nicely. I was proud of my creation, so I pressed pause on the game to check if I could change the weather. I wanted to go into the sixth with rain from the heavens coming down. I wanted control, but it wasn’t there. Maybe MLB The Show 09 will be better suited for giving the 1st Player God dramatic license.

The 6th

Digi-Beckett struck out the side and the game was over. I felt numb. I saved the game and then turned it off. It felt like coming back from Narnia through the wardrobe if I had left before Aslan had come back to life.

When I switched back on the TV to the “real” Padres' post game show, they had predictably lost the game and were still among the worst teams in the league. I could do nothing about it. I was just a man.

I hope the Digi-fans of my Digi-Padres keep their faith in me.