All fear the mighty Bill Hall by Jared Carrabis
Teacher who won $1 million by throwing perfect game in MLB 2K11 feared Bill Hall the most


I have a confession to make: I'm not a video game guy.

However, I do own PS3, and Xbox 360, but the PS3 was purchased for the sole purpose of playing Beatles Rock Band, and the Xbox was purchased so that I could watch Netflix on my TV. I do play Call of Duty occasionally, but admittedly, I'm not that great at it. To get my digital baseball fix, as some of you may know, I still play MVP 2005 with Manny on the cover for PS2, and if you hook up a Nintendo 64 and pop in Golden Eye, I will dominate you.

Anyway, I saw this post on HardballTalk, and found it to be quite fascinating.

I'm sure you've all seen the commercials, but for the past few years, 2K Sports has released their new MLB video game with a promotion. Be the first to throw a perfect game with any pitcher of your choosing, and you win a million dollars. Simple, right?

Well, it's a lot more simple than most may have originally thought. As it turns out, the man who won the million dollars this year had no prior knowledge of anything to do with the game of baseball.

The school teacher, Brian Kingrey, turned to valued internet baseball tool Baseball-Reference, and searched the internet for information on baseball blogs and in Rotoworld forums.

Some of Kingrey's research was justifiable, deciding on using Roy Halladay as his starting pitcher - of course - but the team his threw his perfecto against, the Houston Astros, finished the year at tenth in the majors in batting average, but did, however, rank fifth from the bottom in runs scored in 2011.

As you'll see in the video below, he feared former Red Sox utility infielder Bill Hall the most. Kingrey threw his perfect game in May, so Hunter Pence was still in the Astros' lineup, so I'm not sure what blogs he was reading (It may have been SoxSpace. Okay, there's a chance that it was SoxSpace. Alright, fine. It was SoxSpace.), or what numbers he was scanning, but with all due respect to Bill Hall, he was not the man to take a conscientious approach with.

As an appreciator of Bill Hall, even I get a chuckle out of hearing, "If somebody's gonna hit the ball, It's gonna be him ... You have to have it in the perfect spot, or he hits it. Once I got past Bill Hall, I knew I had it."

Bill Hall, a video gamer's nightmare. Who knew?

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Published on October 25, 2011

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