Video Games – Heart of Loia `'.,°~

If you got to live inside a video game world, which one would you choose?

I love sports, and I sometimes have dreams at night where I’m on a baseball diamond, standing at the plate with a bat in my hand, facing a nasty big league pitcher. I take his best stuff, his laser two-seam fastball, his biting slider, his knee-buckling curve, and I go yard with them. Upper deck, baby! In my dreams, right? lol.

Truth is, when I was younger, baseball was everything to me. I was hoping to make it to the big leagues, or at least have an opportunity to try out or something, just like my grandfather had.

He had the chance to pitch for the Detroit Tigers, but WWII had other plans for him.

I used to be really wrapped up in an online video game called “MLB 9innings 2o26.” It’s really in-depth, and there are players from all around the world and different clubs you can join.

I had three teams at one point, and I was in three different clubs. One of those clubs I ran and managed. Each club has a WhatsApp group and Discord. Your team and club have rankings. One of my teams was ranked 601 in the world, and the other 1025. And my one club “2hi2hit” was one of the elites. We were top 50 in the world.

Guys are constantly buying, selling, and acquiring new teams. It takes a lot of skill, time, and knowledge of the game to build a great team. The top teams are worth thousands of dollars. There’s big money in it. Some of the top players are spending $25-$50K a year.

I had a budget of about $100 a month that I spent on the game, and all my spare time went into playing, managing the club, recruiting, putting together rosters, and giving advice to all my guys in the club.

You battle other clubs, there’s tournaments, and all kinds of other stuff. It’s a big deal.

The year before I started blogging, I got sick and was unable to keep up with my daily stuff on the game because of my health. So I gave control of my teams and my club to some of my friends, and they took over for me.

Then, after a while, I just realized that I was wasting my life on this game. I decided to stop playing and use that time to blog.

I could have sold my teams and made a few thousand bucks. But I decided to give them to the friends who had been running them for me while I was sick that year. I just felt it would have been a dick move for me to yank them out from under those guys and sell them after all the time and effort they had put into them.

I still talk to everyone on WhatsApp. We’re a close bunch of guys from all over the world. But most of my club members are in the US and Canada. I’ve known them all for about five years now. Many of them get together and meet up and do things, like going to real games of their favorite teams and stuff or just hang out.

It’s definitely more than a video game. Baseball is life for them. ⚾️

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