2K Sports Botches Their Perfect Game $1 Million Contest

from the it's-just-so-baseball dept

Ah, baseball. The national pasttime (for every month the NFL isn't playing) is rife with the most wonderful of traditions: Fenway's Green Monster, cheating, Wrigley's ivy, cheating, the divisional rivalries, cheating, the evil empire Yankees, and, of course, cheating.

Yes, it seems that for as long as baseball has been in existence, scandal has followed in its wake. We're finally beginning to emerge from the steroids era, but those of us that love the game are also familiar with the spitballs, corked bats, stolen signs, Pete Rose, and the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. And so it's perhaps with little surprise and a shrug of the shoulders that we receive news from Deadspin that at least one of this year's $1 Million dollar candidates of 2K Sports' MLB2K12 Perfect Game Challenge rigged things in his favor. And there may be more.

For those of you not familiar with the game or the promotion, for the past several years, 2K Sports has paid out $1 Million to the winner of their Perfect Game Challenge. If you can manage to pitch a perfect game against the computer opponent (no hits, walks, or errors in a complete game shutout), you're entered into their bracket to play against the other perfectos, culminating in a championship being awarded on Spike TV. It's a big deal, especially for a game franchise that basically has this contest going for it and nothing else. But, as Deadspin's Owen Good notes, there's a problem:

"Two days ago, I reported on an exploit within MLB 2K12's $1 Million Perfect Game Challenge, in which contestants in the qualifying round of the contest could substitute opposing batters before the game began and still throw an eligible perfect game. I reported very strong evidence indicating that one of the eight finalists 2K Sports is flying to New York this week used the exploit in pitching his perfect game. And that same person has said he believed others in the finalist pool used it too."

That player was William Haff, who insists that his perfect game is legitimate. Ah, it's so simple! Just sub out every good hitter on the other team before the game starts! Face nothing but .200 hitters and we're in the clear.

In the end, I don't know that I can put the blame for this on Haff or any of the other finalists who may have also used this exploit. The blame belongs on the game developers and the ones running the contest. The very idea that 2K Sports would have allowed this in their famous (now infamous?) contest surely caused the kind of stunned embarassement that would result in a heartfelt mea culpa, right? Especially since there was something like 900 other players that threw perfect games, most of which likely were far more legitimate than Haff's substitution-filled no-no. According to 2K Sports...not so much.

"The contest was run properly," 2K Sports said. "We look forward to awarding someone a million dollars on May 10 in New York."

In the end, I'll feel a bit bad for the honest gamers who threw a perfecto and won't get the chance at the money because of dubious actions such as those of William Haff. But mostly I'll chuckle at the fact that 2K Sports' game at least got one part of their baseball simulation correct: cheating. Haff used the exploit that 2K Sports allowed for and explained it away by pointing out there's no rule against it in the contest...much the same way as Jose Canseco could explain his steroid use in the 90's by saying Major League Baseball had no rules against it. And technically, both of them are right.

But they're also both wrong. 

Filed Under: baseball, cheating, mlb2k12, perfect game
Companies: 2k sports

Robot Journalist Writes A Better Story On College Baseball Perfect Game

from the who-what-when-where-why dept

A few weeks back, there was a fun story about how the website GWsports.com, which (as you might imagine) covers sports at George Washington University, became something of the laughing stock of the press world by publishing a game recap on a game between GW and the University of Virginia. The game recap reads pretty straightforward, opening with the fact that the GW team lost, and then spending a few paragraphs covering the various efforts by different GW players. It's only in the seventh paragraph, out of a grand total of eight, that it finally gets around to mentioning that the opposing pitcher, Will Roberts, threw a perfect game. If you're not a baseball fan, a "perfect game" is extremely rare. As the article does (finally) note, this is only the eighth such perfect game in NCAA Division 1 history (since 1957) and the first since 2002. Normally, you would think that any press coverage would start with the perfect game bit.

The national press, including the Washington Post, picked up on this and GW folks tried to defend the writing by noting that they're only in the business of promoting their own teams, not others:

“This is the George Washington website,” GWU sports information director Dave Lubeski tells Romenesko. “We’re in the business to promote our athletes and our team. We’re not claiming to be journalists.” What some call “the buried lead” was discussed after the story was posted, says Lubeski, and it was mentioned that the perfect game could have been noted in the sub-hed. But “we’re not in the newspaper business,” notes the SID.

I had sent that story around to a few people, because I thought it was pretty funny, but didn't have any obvious reason to post it here... until now. Apparently, in covering the story, Deadspin wondered if perhaps the original article hadn't actually been written by a newfangled automated software program that's been touted as being good enough to write sports stories.

Well, it turns out that the people who wrote that software, Narrative Science, were offended that their program might be thought of as having written an article so badly written, and fed their program the data from the game, and it popped out much better versions. They actually did two versions, a "neutral" point-of-view one, and one designed for GW fans. The "neutral" one brings up the perfect game in the first paragraph. The GW POV one does wait until the third paragraph, but still seems much better than the original...

So, perhaps the author of the original has passed the reverse Turing test, when you can't tell if a human is actually a human or a robot...

Filed Under: baseball, george washington university, journalism, perfect game, reporting