MLB The Show’s celebration of Black baseball is the best thing in sports video games this year
Sports occupy one of the more curious niches among video games. They’re tremendous sellers, huge money-makers, and yet they’re so taken for granted that nobody really talks about them the way they do a Resident Evil re-release, or Bethesda Softworks’ next RPG. But if you have an Xbox and a Game Pass subscription, at least, you really owe it to yourself to download and play MLB The Show 23’s outstanding Negro Leagues storylines mode. If you’re not a sports fan, it will teach you a necessary part of American history. And if you are a sports fan, it will tell you something you don’t know about the National Pastime.
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I say this as someone who considered himself educated on the history of segregated baseball, the times before Jackie Robinson kicked his toe into second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. “Storylines,” the new historical re-creation mode that SIE San Diego Studio introduced for MLB The Show23, begins with the eight stories of Black professional baseball players, forbidden from the National and American Leagues by the tacitly understood “gentleman’s agreement” that preceded Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947.
Satchel Paige, a name broadly known to popular culture, whose curriculum vitae is not understood as well, gets a tremendous close-up to start the mode. Pitching with him from his flamethrowing youth through his beguiling senior years (no one, frankly, really knows how old he was) deepens your understanding of someone who was likely the greatest pitcher of his time, and all time. It closes out with the sui generis Martín Dihigo, national hero of Cuba, the most complete baseball player God has ever made, who played all nine positions on the diamond and excelled at every one of them.
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