on friday night, with at least one beer in my system, i got in my only warmup match for the weekend: a classic game, against Grump, where i absolutely tossed it away in the last couple of innings and he popped off on me. a few minutes later we looked over the brackets. what feels like the Main Event for everyone in attendance, and everyone in this room, is Stars Off, which for the second year in a row would be six rounds of Swiss with a top cut for anyone with a 4-2 record or higher. my opponent, for possibly two matches on the next day, would be hellzhero.
one of the undisputed GOATs, hellz is someone who can seemingly do it all. he’ll crush you on both offense & defense, and the last times we’d played it had not ended well for me. fortunately i was in the room with another of the best players in the world - Super, who has consistently had the download on hellz. when i asked him about it, he brought up a small bulleted list - years old, he told me, but reassured that it still was applicable. the contents effectively boiled down to “play well, and look out for these good pitches”. armed with a little knowledge, i slept on it and gave myself a mission: you don’t have to win, but at least don’t get smoked.
upon sitting down next to hellz the next morning, i lose the coin flip, but he elects to choose the stadium. i know him to take people to peach’s garden, a wonky, super defensive stadium that warps a lot of drafting and hitting decisions. with that in mind, and armed with one ban, i leave him the option to take it. he bites, and we go into a wonky draft where i end up with a team i’m very happy with. going into the game, i keep my plan in mind and adjust both my offense and defense to fit it. it works — i find lots of hits, keep him shut out, and we end up in a classic - 0-0, 11 hits each going into the seventh inning. in the top of the inning, i give up my first run of the weekend, and then let another through in the eighth. 2-0 is not insurmountable, i remind myself, and with two outs in the bottom of the eighth, i load the bases with the bottom of my lineup. this takes me around to DK, who i made my captain, who could easily tie or go-ahead the game with a banana ball. hellz, who i had been taking ball 1 from all game, starts the AB with a pitch over the outside that i take for strike 1. it gets the exact result he wants — primed to chase, i go down swinging & losing my final star on two unhittable balls. in the top of the ninth, i burn out, and end up losing 0-7 in a game that i have to tell people was closer than it looked!
before i have time to pull up my matchup i get flagged down by my second opponent, my good friend elijahblue. meeting him in the 0-1 bracket feels like a relief — he is here for mario golf, first and foremost, and tells me after my 13-2 win that he is happy to have scored some runs and kept it close. keep it close he did; in fact, he led for the first three innings after putting up an RBI in the bottom of the first and keeping me scoreless for at least my whole first round through the lineup. he threw a lot of really good looking outside balls and strikes, and could play those mixups incredibly well, but would rarely put pitches outside of that zone. once i got that read on his game plan, i spent the rest of the game sitting on the far outside of the box and getting anything in range. it worked: my bats woke up, hence the final box score.
what do the best players, in their respective games, think about while they’re playing? this is a question that’s eluded me for a while, for obvious reasons (i have never been the best at any game). i’ve read and heard a lot about flow state, and have probably been in it on a few occasions, but i don’t quite have the sharpness at mario baseball this weekend to get there. as i sit down next to Nick in my second match, and i start striking out a lot, i start thinking about the exact opposite, something no top player has ever thought mid-game, which is how bad i am at the game. rather than locking in on the game and shaking off the negative self-talk, i focus in more on my own thoughts. why am i thinking about striking out so much? why couldn’t i think about the pitching mixups nick was sending my way? probably because i was too busy thinking. in this flow-less state, i watch helplessly as the mercy rule creeps up on me. by the 6th, my dixie pitcher is out. in the bottom of the 8th, as Nick scores his ninth unanswered run, i make a quick goalpost shift: you will lose this game, but at least make it to the ninth and don’t get shut out. for just a small moment, i’m able to connect brain and hands, and i achieve what i want - a small slap hit rally in the top of the 9th puts me on the board before i go down 1-9.
played at the top level, mario baseball is a game of skill. watching a top player precisely adjust their pitches batter-by-batter to draw strikeouts and sour contact demonstrates this to an undeniable degree. sure, the game can trend towards luck once bat hits ball, but the MO of a good player is to give their opponent as few chances as possible. watching back top games, you’ll often see low scores and hit counts to reflect this — two elite players will often have games decided by the slimmest of margins.
with that in mind, the game i played against Colby2D looked a lot more like a slot machine. at the beginning of the game, after hemming and hawing over whether i wanted first or second pick, colby asks what stadium i want to go to (in other words, to make his choice for him). immediately, this breaks the tension of tourney play and establishes something a little less significant. our game on Mario Stadium (chosen by me with a newfound intention to play one game on every stage) completely eschews the good pitching fundamentals i just praised (and played against) in favor of a lot of pitching to contact. this isn’t a strategy as much as it is a pull of the slot machine. your opponent will put the ball into play and it will be an out some percentage of the time. going into the bottom of the ninth, the strategy has worked well for me — in part, i think, because i have secretly Locked In and thrown some rare Good Pitches to get out of a couple jams. that said, i have been a pretty godawful player in the ninth inning, and this game starts to become another example of this trend. my six run lead becomes five, then three, then two. looking back, i don’t think much changed in my strategy, the luck just happened to go the other way for me. in the end, i shut it down, and got to stay alive at 2-2.
this year makes our fourth SLICE, and i’m very proud to have not missed a single one. every year, im committed to making it out to see my friends and play some great baseball. amongst this group, though, a perfect attendance is nothing exceptional — there are far more people at their third or fourth SLICE than their first. between the group, we’ve got a storied legacy both in LAN and online — looking around, i can say i’ve played almost everyone in the venue in a tournament setting. as i’m losing to my fifth round opponent, nuche17, i’m reminded of two years prior at SLICE 2024. in what would become a deciding match for our pool, i let a close game slip through my fingers. nuche makes it out of pools and i lose my last pools game to go 0-4. the parallels continue — in those same pools, i got smoked by BigNick in a manner very reminiscent to just a couple rounds ago. as we play, i dwell on the past and autopilot through the present, where i watch what i may as well see as a foregone conclusion, history repeating itself in a new room. several innings into our game, i notice that i’m getting out on sour contact a lot. the observation lands but i completely fail to adapt, and keep grounding out on inside contact. after the loss, i mention it to nuche, and he affirms that it was an important part of his strategy. with that loss, i’m out of contention, and nuche fights on at 3-2. i’m not hit with an intense disappointment or frustration, but i do feel bummed. last year, under the same pretext of 6 Swiss rounds, i had landed at 3-2 with an off chance of making the final bracket. the excitement and gravitas of getting to play one final deciding match for a chance at day two was something i had hoped for this year, but it didn’t come through. i dusted myself off, reminding myself that there’s always next year and the year after that. regardless, there was another game to play.
me and blaster’s game is a formality. neither of us are playing for much of anything; the stakes have never been lower. we are in Garbage Time. he establishes the mood at the beginning of the round by telling me he will be picking Baby Mario, one of the game’s worst characters, just because he wants to see someone play him this weekend. i decide to tag along on his journey, picking the equally godawful Baby Luigi as my ninth character. we both decide to put them leadoff to really make sure they get their time in the spotlight. somehow, we play my closest game of the weekend, an 11 inning nailbiter. ask either of us about the events of the game beyond that and we won’t have much to add. if i recall correctly, we both did a lot of decent pitching and awful swing-and-missing, i think we both t-ball-ified some of the baby at-bats to give em a chance to get on base, and i won in extras but lost on Andrew Rules. the following day, blaster admitted that he was so exhausted that he felt like he was falling asleep mid game. my weekend really ended at 2-3 but i ended with a 3-3 score. this is a downside of a swiss tournament — everyone technically has nothing to play for after their third loss. i think the appeal of LAN baseball, and the understanding of playing for the sake of the game, was enough to counteract this for most people. that said, having exactly one game that doesn’t count feels like the perfect wrong amount, especially considering the mental fatigue that can come at the end of a long day of games.