Swing and a miss

One of the side benefits of having a pair of PS3s in the house is, predictably, gaming. I've always loved video games and have spent many an hour with a controller in my hands.

That said, I'm not a "gamer," at least within the confines of the current definition. I don't plow through dozens of games in the span of a year. In the life span of my old system, a PlayStation 2, I owned a total of 10 games. Many of those were updated versions of the same franchise. So, really, it was more like four games.

And they were always sports games. EA Sports in the mid-2000s had a good thing going. But when it lost the MLB license, I started to lose interest. As recently as November, I was still playing MVP Baseball 2005, the least EA-made MLB game.

The first game played on the PS3? Red Dead Redemption. (Brief synopsis: You're a former outlaw tasked by the government with rounding up your old gang and cleaning up the west. The locals despise both the government and the outlaws. There are lots of bullets.)

Game number two: Back to baseball. MLB 2010: The Show. This game, when it was originally released on PS2, was a turd. Just ... bad. After playing a demo for the new version, though, I was in.

In real life, I was never really a very good hitter. Too slow, too little coaching, all of that. I had a nice arm, could catch most anything and could run pretty fast, but that's it.

As it turns out, I can't really hit anything in this video game, either. I have games where I'm hitting everything in sight to both fields. A few home runs, even. But then the next game I get one hit. One? And it was an infield hit, to boot.

True, the learning curve on new games is sometimes steep. And when you consider how many new things I've had to learn in video games over the past five years (that would be none), my complete lack of ability makes sense. It also explains the many, many deaths of my character at the outset of Red Dead Redemption.

Task list by Opening Day: Learn how to dominate this game.

One has to have goals.