Baseball: the sport that nerds won, is back! Welcome to 162 games of beer sucking boredom accompanied by Aaron Judge smashing ding dang dongers off your terrible relief pitchers and the Red Sox in year two of their six year dynasty.

God, this sucks.

There has got to be something better than bachelor parties in Brady jerseys hooting at a Mookie Betts double, and Bryce with the Philadelphia Nationals.

That’s it! Fantasy baseball…

No! put away your fifty bucks! Forget about your joke of a keeper league. I’m talking about true escapism, baseball without any limitations, baseball without… all the baseball in the way. I give to you the only fantasy league you’ll need for the 2019 season. Get up Ball’s fictional box scores!

In this multipart series i’ll be watching baseball scenes from movies and television, attempting to accurately score them to the best of my ability. Hoping to derive some sort of meaning out of the rows of numbers and crude markings. Trying to answer one question: how much baseball was that? Please enjoy part 1.

Opening Day: Dragon Ball

We’ve got a double header for opening day. Fictional games of ball are played in Dragon Ball Z/Kai and Dragon Ball Super. Let’s break down the Kai episode first.

Dragon Ball Z / Kai: Gohan Goes to High School

We don’t know a lot here… but let me set the scene. It’s team A vs. team B, with the score of 0 – 0 going into the top of the third. That’s all that is for certain based on a quick look at the scoreboard.

Based on the first play we’re shown – already in action – we can gather a few pieces of information. A batter has just hit a double with no one on base and an out. To mark it on a score sheet would be a bigger waste than the 199 episodes it took Dragon Ball Z to get to this point in the series. An event Dragon Ball Kai was able to get to in just 99. That’s 100 episodes of spirit bomb content lost to the wind, was it worth it? While you ponder that I’ll leave you with the very next play that results in the end of the inning. Sharpner (P) at bat smashes a first pitch fast ball deep to right. Gohan (RF) flys what is said to be 25 feet in the air to save an absolute no doubter, maintaining Vidal’s (P) shutout. A stunned baserunner at 2nd apparently forgets to get to 3rd due to their awe and commits what can only be scored as a base running error. Gohan gets the rare 9-5 double play. Rare because the out would have been at 2nd.

What an absolute nightmare you just read. It’s nonsense if you don’t know both 90s anime and baseball. But of course you do, because that seems to be half the content we write here at “the gub”™. All of which could have been conveyed to you with this.

That’s the kind of advanced analytics scouts these days can only dream of. There are 0 runs scored over the first 2 and Sharpner is pitching so I don’t think it’s out of the question this inning featured the 7, 8, and 9 batters, but that’s about it. The 9-5 put out is so weird I don’t even know if that’s how you write it? go ahead and twitter me all about it. now let’s take a look at the offensive output of team B

Jesus. Okay someone says Gohan is “number 8” so he absolutely bats in that spot. Vidal is pitching so she should be batting 9th following that logic. Gohan reaches 1st on a HB (hit batter), which is a bit of a theme across these two games. Other than that, this is nothing. Let’s move on.

Dragon Ball Super: A Challenge From Champa! This Time, a Baseball Game!

‘This Time, a Baseball Game’ is right. Or maybe ‘This Time, a Baseball Inning’ is more appropriate. You know what, I’ll let the stats do the talking. Here is Universe 6 @ Universe 7

Let no one say that is not ‘This Time, a Baseball Game’. So many numbers, or zeroes, and names, and positions. We were even able to record the pitcher of record. Really only two things to touch on in this bout. Team captain, Yamcha a.k.a. “The Wolf” is having none of Goku’s perfect start, so pulls him in favour of himself… which results in 2/3 of an immaculate inning, okay, yeah, The Wolf is sick. The premise of the walk off inning is Yamcha being able to Rickey Henderson his way around the bases, stealing one after the other after getting beaned and given first. However going back and scoring it, he reaches 2nd on an obstruction error and reaches home on a sac fly from 2nd. Which is… actually very funny writing. Not much else to say about Dragon Ball’s delve into baseball. How much baseball was it? Some. It was some baseball.  Hope you enjoyed this more than White Sox at Royals.

Happy opening day everybody.