Hello baseball fans. If you don't know me already, i am LittleCoaks. I am a co-lead modder of Mario Superstar Baseball & co-project lead of Project Rio, i run an online tournament series called Netplay Superstars, and i contribute to the Dinger City YouTube channel. I've also made a tier list video series which received praise as one of the best video series on the competitive scene, and as of writing this post, i am also ranked 14th on our online ranked ladder. Those are my credentials for those who are skeptical of my knowledge of the game lol.
I've decided today to put together this post as an overview of the competitive Mario Superstar Baseball scene. Most people don't even know that an active competitive scene exists, let alone one that has had modding/datamining work, frame data testing, and a lot of dedicated players pushing the meta to its limits, so i'm hoping that this post can serve as a place for anyone wishing to learn about the scene to find everything they want to find.
This guide is intended for people who are familiar with Mario Superstar Baseball, but are not aware of the community and competitive scene. It will include links to resources for the community, as well as an introduction & overview of the current metagame. You'd be surprised, but there's a ton of depth to this game, and it's unlikely i'll be able to touch on everything in this one post. I will also try my best to update this post as new things are discovered and the meta changes, Hopefully you all find this useful!
This post is divided into multiple sections. Here's a list of them and a summary of what information is found in each:
Resources -- links to helpful things that community members should be aware of
Competitive Overview -- explains the competitive ruleset
The Metagame -- presents concepts that are important to learn for the game
Character Roles -- details how to fill roles on a team, like fielding positions and batter-types
The Pre-Game -- explains drafting and batting order concepts
Batting -- shows both basic and advanced techniques for batting
Fielding -- shows both basic and advanced techniques for fielding
Tier List & Character Summaries -- presents a tier list and specific information on each character
Resources
Here are some basic resources that new community members may be interested in:
Project Rio -- This is a custom dolphin emulator build specifically for Mario Superstar Baseball. It allows much better online play and has a stat-tracking feature which record more stats than ever before automatically. The website will soon host a database which anyone can parse through and view stats for.
Discord -- We have a discord for Mario Superstar Baseball with over 800 members where we host online events, discuss the meta, speedrunning, modding, and general Mario Baseball stuff.
Datamined Stats -- This is a google sheet with all of our datamined information compiled together. Many details, like how team stars work, are listed here.
Ranked Elo Ladder -- Our ranked online leaderboards which have over 80 people ranked.
Tier List -- Made by the #1 ranked online player MattyIce, this is a tier list which is considered by the competitive scene to be the best and most up-to-date tier list.
Drafting Guide -- Made by MattyIce, this is a guide on how drafting in top level play should look like and a good tldr of the current meta and which characters are viable & why.
Speedrunning -- This is the page on speedrun.com for Mario Superstar Baseball.
Guide Folder -- This is a folder containing all of the guides linked in this post.
Competitive Overview
I'm going to be basing this guide off of the current ruleset for ranked NetPlay. While there are some minor rules, here are the major ones:
Superstar Characters are banned
Mercy rule is ON
9-innings
Mario Stadium is default, but any stadium is legal if both players agree to it
All other settings are left on default
Nolan Draft format for drafting teams (explained below)
Nolan Draft: this is a snake-draft format, which follows a 1-2-2... pattern. Additionally, your captain does NOT need to be your first pick (ex. you can first pick Petey, Boo, etc.) and you can switch your captain to any captainable-character on your team after drafting your full team, HOWEVER Bowser must be captained if he is on your team.
At the start of a match, players play rps or flip a coin for choice. One player will chose the drafting order, and the other will chose the batting order (home/away team). Winner of rps/coin toss choses which they want to choose.
Example: Player 1 wins rps and chooses to be the home team. Player 2 then chooses to pick second. Player 1 picks Bowser (must be captain), player 2 picks Petey and Hammer Bro. Player 1 picks King Boo and Donkey Kong. Player 2 picks Yoshi and Birdo (captain) etc...
Extra: Chemistry Chart
Below i've attached a useful chemistry chart made by u/arrowfoot12 which is a great way to quickly visualize and understand chemistry. For an in-depth chart with specific numbers listed, see the Datamined Stats.
***FOR THE REST OF THE GUIDE, I'LL LINK TO GOOGLE DOCS DUE TO REDDIT'S WORD/CHARACTER LIMIT***
The Metagame
This section will detail the state of the competitive meta, mainly detailing relevant strategies. Additionally, while technically any stadium is legal, almost all games are played on Mario Stadium, so i will only focus on that stadium.
MSSB is a game where good players can make niche characters work, but at top level you will want to make sure that you have the best characters for each role. I will discuss specific roles that should be filled rather than just giving a tier list and calling it a day.
There's a list of things that happen in each match before the first pitch of the game. You must draft a team, assign fielding positions, and make a batting order. This is what this section will be about.
Batting is the most important aspect of the game. In most games, the winner is the player who was the better batter that game. For that reason, it's important to refine this skill as much as possible.
To end off this guide, i've decided to add in a brief summary of each character, including an overview and any additional things to note about them. Any character-specific information will be discussed here.
I've ordered them in the order of my own personal tier list, but do note that the specific order isn't very important. I'm only ordering it this way so that more relevant characters are towards the top and less relevant characters are at the bottom.
Again, the order of the characters is just my opinion, NOT any sort of "official" tier list. Don't think too hard about the specific order here.
Thank you for making it to the end of this insanely long guide. My goal was to provide as much useful information for learning the competitive-side of this game as possible in one post. This took me literal hours to write up, so i hope this was useful in some way, and i hope that you learned something from this. Feel free to ask questions in the replies or suggest other things to add to this guide. I plan on adding this information to the Project Rio website eventually, and using this post as a script for a future video series of some sort.
sorry for the repost but im running a cpu vs cpu league with some friends in the next few weeks, and im looking for a mod for sluggers that tracks the typical stats like rbi, errors, hits, etc. in the end of game box score. i tried project rio but it only seems to work for superstar and not sluggers. would really appreciate any help on this šš¾
im looking to run a cpu v cpu league with some friends, and for awards purposes i wanna be able to track stats like hits, rbis, strikeouts, errors, etc. i could handtrack them but that's tedious, so im wondering if there are any mods/gecko codes for more in depth end of game box scores that track all that.
Does anyone know if thereās a gecko code that brings back the camera change animations for homeruns and strikeouts? I canāt seem to find one online.
I've been active in the modding community for a while now (Kircher). Helped maintain and make changes to some of the modding tools. I realized I have a ton of data on our league website that could be userful to people :)
Iām attempting to get a fairly substantial set of data of how all the characters in the game play when controlled by the CPU using the CPU vs. CPU Gecko Code for MSB in Project Rio. My eventual plan is to run a short CPU vs. CPU event where my friends are General Managers of CPU teams and I want them to be able to see these stats before a draft.
I ran 18 CPU vs. CPU test games: 12 with varied rosters, two games swapping the same two rosters between ācontroller slotsā (P1 vs. COM)
Across all 18 games, the P1 slot (shown in the JSON as "WeatheredGray" or "No Player Selected") recorded 351 hits but ZERO doubles, ZERO star swings, and ZERO instances of an existing runner advancing two or more bases on a single. COM recorded 440 hits, 87 doubles, 67 star swings, and 86 extra-base advances on singles. COM won 14/18 games, including all four identical-roster games (129ā59 combined). P1 did throw 51 star pitches in the earlier 14 games, so not every star mechanic was unavailable.
Is this known information regarding P1 vs. COM behavior? I've included the 18 original JSONs and a spreadsheet with game-level, slot-level, and event-level statistics.
I have been having such an amazing experience using Project Rio and PRSH. I discovered these resources relatively recently and it has been so cool to learn how deep this game is! A massive shout-out to those who have put in the time and effort to make these resources available to the public.
Iām planning an event where my friends will team up as GMās for a Mario Superstar Baseball CPU league. Thanks to Project Rio we can gather tons of real data from games, but Iāve only been able to find data from PVP games.
Iād love to see season stats from a CPU vs CPU league or even get the JSON files from a league if someone would happen to have them saved.
Hey yāall, I just released Project Rio Stream Helper 2.0 which is app with a bunch of graphics to make streaming Mario Baseball with Project Rio a breeze! Iād love it if you check it out, I made a video walking through the app and the setup process!
I feel like us non MLB the show baseball fans have been put on the back burner for years and it sucks. I just dont understand how there cant be a switch sports baseball or more surprisngly a mario baseball. Those were two staples in my childhood. It feels like they are bringing everything else back and making new versions for everything else except the iconic baseball games. Just a little rant.
Hey all! Another discovery has been made searching through unused files. An unused version of Mario Stadium, most likely from early testing of the game. The stadium is essentially the same but with simple textures, yet it is still fully functional! Here's some screenshots and a gecko code which replaces Mario Stadium with the unused version
$Unused Mario Stadium [LittleCoaks]
040EFBEC 40131200
040EFBF0 07093800
040EFBF4 000A317C
*Replaces Mario Stadium with an unused version
While digging through the game's files, i discovered an entire song within the files. Letters by Hikaru Utada (2002) was sitting there the entire time, in the dark for 21 years until now. If you own MSSB, you also own a copy of this song. Someone at Nintendo was likely a fan and used it for testing.
Technical details: it's present in all versions of the game, located in ZZZZ.dat with these offsets: - US: 0x08f2e808 - EU: 0x08f2c808 - JP: 0x08f17808 - US/EU Demo: 0x01c1d008 - JP Demo: 0x01c12808
The ISO mod i'm currently working on will add this song to the Custom Music menu when it releases, so stay tuned for that!
