Solving the mystery within Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

The man on the phone had all the answers and I couldn’t believe it. After all these years, could it really be this easy?

I was a freshman in high school when I first played Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. Real ballparks, real teams, real logos, funky MIDI tracks, big bright colors, cartoonish renderings of muscle-bound players that in retrospect look like a subversive wink to the steroids era — the Super Nintendo classic was a marvel that now doubles as a digital time capsule. It has maintained a loyal following, particularly among those who prefer their mid-’90s nostalgia in 16-bit increments. Its most distinctive charm was embedded in one of its few flaws.

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The only real name in the game was Griffey’s. The other 699 were fakes, albeit attached to players with actual stats, jersey numbers and characteristics. Without a license from the players’ union, the designers turned to pseudonyms so whimsical that they remain etched into my memory to this day. Some sounded familiar: L. Tolstoy, M. Brando, B. Abbott and L. Costello. Others smelled of phone book randomness or computer-generated babble: Q. Trombone, B. Bambam, P. Ugly and B. Ullrich.

Every roster looked like a puzzle hiding in plain sight. Each seemingly had its own theme. For instance, my hometown A’s featured literary greats, so Tolstoy became the alias for a fellow with a lot more pop, the great centerfielder Dave Henderson. With many teams, however, spotting a pattern felt impossible. A few even concealed unexplained wrinkles. The Red Sox roster featured a combination of local landmarks and barflies from the old show Cheers. Hence, B. Common stands in for utilityman Luis Rivera, and C. Claven for pitcher Scott Bankhead. This made it all the more baffling that leftfielder Mike Greenwell was renamed T. Denholm. Even now, with the benefit of search engines, that name looks maddeningly out of place.

I figured out a few of the themes over time. During my sophomore year, a cute girl, let’s call her J. Stephanie, came to our geometry class wearing a Ramones T-shirt. Sure enough, J. Ramone was Jeff Kent of the Mets, whose roster was stocked with New York punk rockers of the 1970s. But I never did solve the riddle for every team, and it drove me nuts.

Through the years, as part of my well-practiced regimen of procrastination, I’d poke around online for clues. Because the internet is a hellscape where amusing little curiosities go to die, I figured it was only a matter of time until someone delivered a spoiler. It never happened. A few of the answers could be found on the game’s Wikipedia entry, but not all of them. Sometimes, I’d get hyped up to chase this white whale and finally do the reporting myself, only to get lost in the grind of covering real baseball.

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Then came a pandemic. There was no longer real baseball to cover.

In a world without sports, The Athletic challenged its writers to get creative. The instructions were simple: “let’s get weird.” My response was to revive a project that I’d built up in my mind to be filled with false leads and dead ends and hard-fought breakthroughs. Thanks to LinkedIn, it was over before lunch.

“It’s an interesting question,” the voice on the phone said a day later. “I get that one a lot, actually.”

With that, I spent the next 45 minutes gathering the puzzle pieces that had eluded me for 26 years.

“So, you have to understand the time when that game was coming out,” said Brian Ullrich, the creative force behind Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball.

Upon its release in March 1994, everything about it felt new. In that way, it was a perfect reflection of baseball itself. Before the season became known for the strike that crippled the game, it had been a time for shaking up the stuffy old order.

The leagues expanded from two divisions to three. The Ballpark in Arlington opened in Texas and Jacobs Field debuted in Cleveland, part of a building boom that ushered in five new venues in five years. The venerable Tigers introduced a new logo. The Indians, Brewers, Giants and Rangers ditched their ’80s duds for revamped uniforms, following the lead of the Angels and Mariners, who had done the same the year before. Teal was so in. In Seattle, blue and gold were replaced by navy and a color called Northwest green. It all looked so sleek and modern, just like the city’s emerging superstar.

Griffey, one of the few players whose popularity transcended team allegiances, gave the era a vibrant new face. He wore his cap backward, rocked high-top Nike cleats, scaled centerfield walls like a superhero, and hammered baseballs into orbit with a smooth left-handed stroke that would inspire a generation of Little Leaguers. They had something else in common, too: The Kid liked video games.

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It all made too much sense. Nintendo, a Japanese corporation, set up its U.S. operations just outside Seattle. The company exploded in the 1980s, when video games moved up from the basements of hobbyists to the living rooms of the mainstream. By the early ’90s, rumors emerged that Nintendo might buy the perpetually struggling Mariners. They eventually would. But before that, Griffey signed on as a spokesman and lent his name to a baseball title.

Ullrich spotted an opening. Raised in Spokane, Wash., he shared a hometown with Ryne Sandberg. It seemed preordained that he’d become a rabid fan of the Cubs. He also collected interests like others might baseball cards. Once, he saw Lou Carnesecca’s sideline coaching theatrics and couldn’t get enough, triggering a lifelong love for St. John’s basketball. In college, he studied English and appreciated all forms of storytelling, including films and comic books. Musically, he gravitated toward everything punk.

And, of course, there were computer games. Among his favorites were TV Sports: Football, which he and his friends used to create their own players. Then there was Earl Weaver Baseball, which was designed as a hardcore simulation rather than an arcade experience. Ullrich played it and imagined something that would blend both. “It was the first game that I really wanted to make,” said Ullrich, who turned his passion into a job with Nintendo. But achieving his vision meant having the freedom to lead the project, a chance he was unlikely to get at such a sprawling company.

Ullrich resolved to seek opportunity elsewhere. His search led him across the Atlantic.

“When I got over there, I was really the only one who knew baseball,” said Ullrich, who moved to Manchester, England, in 1992 to join Software Creations. It was there that he’d be given free rein to build the game that became Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. Step one was teaching his new colleagues about the foreign sport at the center of his vision.

“I remember early on, we were going to build a prototype,” he said. “I was sort of explaining the pitcher-batter interface. Then I had to go back to the U.S. for about three weeks to sort out the rest of my move before I came out for good. When I got back, they had the pitcher batter interface mocked up. But the pitcher was bouncing the ball into home plate because that’s what they knew. It was cricket.”

The group, like Ullrich, harbored an array of interests. Kevin Edwards, the lead programmer, recalled how typical office banter included the latest from “Coronation Street,” the long-running U.K. soap opera set in Manchester. Ste Ruddy, another programmer, loved the greater Manchester-based Wigan Warriors, considered the Yankees of English rugby. Ste Pickford and Chris Collins, the artists who created the game’s signature look, enjoyed the pulsating nightclub scene that came to be known as Madchester. Before long, the group’s knowledge base would also include baseball.

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Production lasted about a year. Nintendo struck a deal to publish the game. That gave Ullrich’s project a public face in Griffey. The superstar center fielder involved himself in the process. “Ask him how he enjoyed ‘designing’ that game,” Ullrich said. “He was telling anybody that would listen. I teased him about it.”

No detail seemed too small — except for one. It involved the game’s opening sequence, which featured an animated rendition of Griffey’s unmistakable swing.

“Back then the resolution was such that a pixel here or a pixel there could make a big difference,” Ullrich said. “I remember we were showing it to Griffey and he was fine with it. But his wife was complaining that his butt was too big, so we had to shave a few pixels off. But then he looked too skinny. It was a very small amount of surface to work with. But I’ll never forget that. He thought it was great. It looked just like him — and then it’s ‘you made his butt too big.’”

Back-end issues aside, the game rounded into Ullrich’s vision. The final product would look and play like a miracle.

Despite the limits of electronic memory, it was loaded with so many of the little flourishes that I came to love. The grass looked like grass. The lettering on the uniforms made all the new ones look that much better. Hit a ball to left in Fenway and it would ricochet off the Monster. Hit a ball to center and it would rattle around the Triangle. Ivy covered the bricks at Wrigley and the wavy roof shaded the outfield pavilions at Dodger Stadium. The Warehouse stood guard over rightfield at Camden Yards.

In full-season mode, the game kept track of cumulative statistics. The end of every contest featured a box score presented in a newspaper, complete with headlines that blared “REDS PITCHER VOWS TO START BEANBALL WAR” or “DODGERS MANAGER WINS ALL YOU CAN EAT PASTA CONTEST.”

With a few weeks left to finish production, the player ratings, statistics, and likenesses were complete. All that remained was filling in the names. The plan all along had been to use real ones. Negotiations on a licensing deal with the Major League Baseball Players Association went on all throughout development. Ullrich recalled being hopeful. A similar agreement was reached with Major League Baseball, which granted use of actual team names and logos. With the players, however, there would be no such luck. Suddenly, Ullrich and his team had 699 problems, though Griffey wasn’t one.

“I remember scrambling a little bit,” said Ullrich, who shared the task of naming the players, though he took on most of it. There was no Google to help fill in the blanks. So he data-scraped the recesses his brain. Every interest, hobby and acquaintance became a resource.

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The Cubs sounded fictional because they were. Shawn Boskie (Q. Trombone), Kevin Roberson (B. Bambam) and Sammy Sosa (E. Crash) were named for players that Ullrich and his buddies had created in TV Sports: Football. Only one name on that roster came from real life — B. Ullrich for Ryne Sandberg, of course.

The White Sox roster paid homage to Ullrich’s beloved St. John’s basketball team, the Texas Rangers to famous Wild West gunslingers, the Phillies to figures tied to the City of Brotherly Love, the Tigers to former stars of Stax and Motown. The Yankees’ rich history shows through with references to New York City itself, which is why I. Horse stands in for Don Mattingly and L. Harlem for Kevin Maas.

As for the seemingly random T. Denholm with the Cheers-inspired Red Sox? “My friend Thom is Mike Greenwell,” Ullrich said. “He was a big Red Sox fan and loved Greenwell, so he probably asked me to do that.”

Various writers populated several teams. Gertrude Stein once wrote of her old neighborhood in Oakland, “there is no there there,” yet there she is batting ninth for the A’s. The Astros adopted cartoonists and comic-book legends. Secret superhero identities, private eyes and literary spies made up the Brewers. The Reds represented a collection of Ullrich’s personal favorites from Hardboiled fiction and other genres, so B. Stoker stood in for Tom Browning, I. Fleming for Jose Rijo, and E. Queen for Chris Sabo.

Punk rockers from the ’70s provided the namesakes for the Mets, Dodgers and Padres. American presidents begat the Royals, while legendary comedians filled out the Cardinals. The silver screen gave rise to the Rockies, Angels, Indians and Orioles. In order, they were inspired by exploitation film references, Hollywood legends, actresses and pin-up girls, and characters from the films of Baltimore native John Waters.

The Blue Jays honored greats from the Wigan Warriors rugby team while the Expos formed a collection of Madchester-era musicians. The Braves paid tribute to famous DJs, which is how John Smoltz became A. Sasha and Mike Stanton became J. Digweed. Ullrich rounded out the roster with two of the most distinctive names in the game — D. Crime as Fred McGriff and D. Neon as Deion Sanders. Fans picked up on those references faster than Sanders fled baseball for the NFL.

“Coronation Street,” the British soap opera, provided the names for most of the Pirates. K. Barlow, the pseudonym assigned to Tom Foley, refers to the longest-running character on the show. The rest were Ullrich’s friends, including members of his old softball team. “There’s a guy named Steve Messerer who is a pretty good friend of mine, but he does not play video games,” Ullrich said. “I never told him. And about five years ago, his brother started playing the game on an emulator or something. He tells this guy Steve, ‘hey you know you’re in this game?’ And he had no clue.” That’s how the real-life Andy Van Slyke came to be represented by S. Messerer.

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Before working on the project, the team at Software Creations couldn’t tell baseball from cricket. By the end, when the Giants became their designated team, they apparently knew enough to make themselves into the lineup’s heaviest hitters. Will Clark, Matt Williams and Barry Bonds are S. Ruddy, K. Edwards and S. Pickford.

Nintendo claimed the Mariners, which is why a few of their executives surround Griffey in the starting lineup. The Twins featured a celebrity mishmash. “Eventually I ran out of stuff and I remember towards the end I was just naming teams after kids that I went to elementary school with,” Ullrich recalled. Indeed, the final puzzle piece was the Marlins. According to Wikipedia, the roster “has random names with no known common bond or claim to fame.” It turns out that there’s a good reason for this. When Ullrich ran out of former Nintendo coworkers to fill in the blanks, he resorted to using his childhood classmates in Spokane. That’s how Jeff Conine and Brian Harvey came to be L. Vogelman and G. Valkenar.

“I’ve worked in the game industry my whole career and you couldn’t get away with that now,” Ullrich said. “There’s too many levels of due diligence. Back when we were doing (Griffey), MLB didn’t even look at it really. They just wanted the check.”

Ullrich, who’s now 55 and living outside Seattle, has witnessed exponential growth. The main team that worked on Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball consisted of five people. Later in his career, when he worked on the NBA Live series, that number grew to 60. The last big game he worked on required a staff of 200. Everybody grew up — the gaming business itself, the people who worked in it, and those who spent hours playing the final product. But before that coming of age, there was still room for mischief.

Without a license from the union, Ullrich and his team leaned upon an old video game tradition. They included a feature to edit the names. All it required was time. I had plenty. One of the first books I bought with my own money was an almanac for the 1993 baseball season. That way I could match the real name to the corresponding players based on stats. It was a two-day exercise in tedium. And because a bug in the game sometimes caused the names to disappear, I suffered it more than once. I’d always wondered if I was alone in this. It turns out that I wasn’t.

“I had to take that day’s edition sports page, go down in my basement and just change every name on every team to the best of my ability,” said Alexander Scott, who has reviewed hundreds of retro video games on his YouTube channel, SNES Drunk. “That took all day.”

The game was a commercial success, selling more than a million copies. It endures partly because of the arcade-like ease of its gameplay, which Ullrich had prioritized years ago.

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“It’s really tough to get a baseball game down because there’s really three elements you need to get right,” Scott said. “It’s the pitching, the hitting and the fielding. If you don’t nail all three of those things, your game is not going to be very good. That’s the thing that Griffey nails.”

When Rory Murphy recently organized a retro video game league as a fundraiser, he needed a game that would be easy to play. He found an answer in Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. “The idea of needing to put in the hours to get decent at MLB The Show or something is overbearing,” Murphy said. “While you and I have already put in our 10,000 hours in Ken Griffey Jr. baseball.” Food banks in the Washington, D.C. area, where Murphy lives and works, will receive all entry fees from the Social Distancing Baseball League.

Detecting the game’s influence within baseball is easy. “Loved Neon D.,” said one former big leaguer, who we’ll call I. Snowman. One current major leaguer, C. Rouge, recalled how the outsized depictions of players left the impression that “everyone was on steroids.” A current beat writer, F. Gator, drew stares at a recent Winter Meetings when his phone went off and the ringtone was the game’s opening theme. Another beat writer, J. London, still uses the cover of the box as his Twitter background.

“I just think that it’s cool that people still care about this stuff,” Ullrich said as we wrapped up our phone conversation. “It was a game I worked on really early in my career. It was definitely a labor of love. I basically moved to a foreign country so that I could do it. And it did well.”

Baseball titles before Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball felt flat and lifeless by comparison. And while those that followed have come closer to capturing reality, they’ve rarely recreated the same kind of simple fun. Even Griffey’s direct sequels failed to match the original.

It isn’t difficult to find tributes online. “Ken Griffey Jr. Presents, to me, was perfect,” said Alex Crisafulli, who penned one of those odes. “I think I describe this in the piece, but a grounder that would be a double play in real life baseball felt like it was a double play in Ken Griffey Jr. A ball to the gap was a double. It just felt right.”

Alex Freedman, who grew up a Cardinals fan in St. Louis, recalled seeking help to decipher the names. “There were definitely some I could figure out, and there were some where maybe I could tell the theme a little bit, like the one with the old comedians,” said Freedman, who now broadcasts games for the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate in Oklahoma City. “But I didn’t know every single one of them, so I’d ask my dad, ‘Do you know what this one could be or that?’ and he’d explain it. I think that was a little game in itself.”

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Scott, a Twins fan who grew up in Minnesota, once had a friend who amused himself by transforming entire rosters into porn stars. Otherwise, spotting the name origins turned into a group exercise, one that often incited debate. “I remember me and my neighborhood friends put our heads together,” he said. “And we’d try and come up with who the heck are these people?” In his review of every Super Nintendo baseball game ever released, Scott declared Griffey “the crown jewel.” Personality, he said, endowed the game with its enduring charm. There were people — colorful people — behind the whole thing.

Recently, when I fired up the game on my laptop emulator, I could sense it everywhere. Sometimes, after strikeouts, batters might scream “aw, come on!” It’s a sample from an old Jim Belushi movie. Or the dejected hitter might sigh and slink away, or even explode in anger and snap a bat across his knee. When the umpire makes calls, the voice belongs to a real-life ump, Steve Palermo. Dennis Eckersley (C. Bukowski) throws sidearm. Tom Henke (T. Alamo) wears glasses. A tiring pitcher left in too long breathes heavily. A man covering second on a double play jumps to avoid the slide. A play at the plate would end in a comedic collision that looked as if it came straight from a Saturday morning cartoon.

And, of course, there were the fantastic names. There was C. Mullin for Ellis Burks, R. Balboa for Darren Daulton, O. Redding for Lou Whitaker and W. Earp for Jose Canseco, whose hypermuscular likeness seemed to take up half the screen. It felt like seeing old friends again.

The pandemic has turned us all into shut-ins. Through social media, it’s been fascinating to watch how the world has coped with social distancing. There are neighbors singing from balconies. There are famous DJs entertaining the masses on Instagram live. There’s a mad rush to create the ultimate TikTok. We’ve also flocked to our old standbys like comfort food after a bad day. Naturally, my thoughts drifted back to video games. The last time baseball went away for an extended period of time, I got my fix through Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, which was released a few months before the strike. All these years later, I was leaning on it once more. Let’s get weird, indeed.

I recalled the hours I spent turning over in my own mind all those strange names. I thought of how the licensing had fallen through at the 11th hour. I cringed at the thought of things breaking the other way. Sure, actual player names would have added to the game’s realism, but the cost would have been its mystery.

“I really didn’t think anyone would make the connections,” Ullrich wrote in an email a few days after our chat. “I could have just used a phone book and filled out the rosters but this was a fun little in-joke.”

It felt good to finally be in on it, too.

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