A man has spent 6 days trying to throw a Roy Oswalt perfect game in MVP '05

You can hear the urgency, the stress, the anxious excitement, almost immediately when Jay Lucarelli picks up the phone.

Over the last six days, for an average of close to eight hours per day, the 31-year-old Ohio native has -- for some reason -- attempted to throw a perfect game with Roy Oswalt in the video game MVP 2005. He plays on an emulator off his laptop.

He lost one on a comebacker injury to Oswalt in the seventh, he lost another on an errant throw by Adam Everett in the eighth, he's lost some on the first pitch of the first inning.

"Yeah, one of them I did spill ravioli and I threw a meatball to Johnny Damon," Lucarelli said.

But he's toiled on for more than 1,600 tries. He's kind of had to.

What started as a fun little thing to do on his new Tik-Tok account has blown up with hundreds of viewers commenting on his pitch selections, social media posts following his every stream and articles reporting on his quest. Even Oswalt, himself, sent in his reaction to MLB.com on Friday.

"I only wish I could have pitched 2,000 games in MLB," the Astros Hall of Famer said. "Good luck!"

So yes, he can't stop. His mood, when you ask him how he's doing, sort of depends on it at this point.

"Better ... if I can just get this perfect game done."

Before the obvious question of why would someone spend time doing this at all, why is Lucarelli using Roy Oswalt every single time? The answers kind of go together.

"There were two athletes from when I was a kid that meant more to me than anything," Lucarelli, who lives in Akron, told me. "I'm a Guardians fan, but the Astros were my team in the National League. Roy Oswalt and Grady Sizemore. If you put those two together, they'd be better than Shohei Ohtani. I just thought I could get people rooting for one of my favorite pitchers and see how good he was."

Still, Lucarelli, who has some downtime before pursuing journalism school at Kent State, didn't expect his Operation Perfecto to go so viral. It was more of a way to introduce himself to Tik-Tok Live. But since July 30, when he created the account, he has about half a million impressions.

"I was a trending U.S. topic on X," Lucarelli laughed.

His setup is, well, what you might expect from a guy trying to throw a perfect game in a video game for nearly a week straight.

He lives in his mom's basement, although he does tell me, "It's not as dire as it sounds, it's a nice basement."

Lucarelli plays in the kitchen, drinking about two Red Bulls per day to keep focused.

He'll move around from the kitchen chair to a couch or loveseat in the adjoining living room to keep his back in shape and blood flowing. He paces around while on offense to relieve some stress. He's been icing his hands when they cramp.

He also would like me to assure people that he does, in fact, shower.

The rest of his family? He said his sister has a "normal job," while his mom spends most of the time in the TV room watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey. She'll sometimes yell to him to ask him how he's doing.

"They just think I'm out of my mind."

Lucarelli has faced off against 10 or so teams with Oswalt, but mostly it's the Red Sox -- who were the best team that year after winning the World Series in 2004.

"Do you want to win the Indy 500 against a bunch of grandmas?" he said. "Or do you wanna go against the best?"

But as Lucarelli has learned over the last 120 hours, maybe a team of grandmas would've been a better option.

He's lost multiple perfectos in the late innings -- any pitcher's stamina, like in real live baseball, gets low and it's hard to time Oswalt's pitch meter to that disappearing green zone you want to be in. He's learned that you need to throw slower pitches earlier in the game, so you have more of that stamina at the end. Like most fans or pitchers, he's found himself sometimes blaming the umpires for ball-strike calls, saying "they are extremely strict." He has, though, after thousands of at-bats, figured out how to pitch to the dreaded cover athlete Manny Ramirez.

"What I found that works on him is inside low slider, high heat on the outside corner and then you finish him up with high heat on the inside and it works almost every time," Lucarelli told me.

The worst perfect loss was what's now known as the Mirabelli Meatball with two outs in the ninth. Doug Mirabelli came in to pinch-hit for Curt Schilling and laced a mistake pitch right up the middle.

"That one really did me in," Lucarelli said.

MVP 2005 producer (and titular character) Jon Dowd even weighed in on the difficulty of Lucarelli's journey.

"Throwing a perfect game is very hard if I remember correctly," Dowd messaged me. "I think I threw one with Randy Johnson against Tampa? Virtually impossible against good teams."

Still, you can add Dowd to the list of people viewing the arduous attempt.

"This is going to be on my laptop in the background for the rest of the day," Dowd said. "Thanks for passing along."

Oswalt never had a perfect game in his career -- though he did pitch the first inning of a combined no-hitter in 2003 -- but he's, of course, a great option to try and pitch one. The three-time All-Star had a Hall of Fame-caliber stretch from 2005-07 and was fantastic during that entire first decade of the 2000s.

Maybe a video game, after thousands of tries, is the place he can finally pull off one of the game's rarest feats?

The morning is getting on now, and Lucarelli has to get off the phone to get back to his stream. Thousands of followers are waiting for the game to start. Roy Oswalt, redefining the term workhorse, is ready to take the hill for maybe the one hundred thousandth time this week.

Lucarelli, who's at this point having MVP 2005 dreams, says this is the day he'll do it. If he doesn't, he'll keep going until he does. Hopefully before he has to head off to school in the fall.

He's not sure what trying to pitch a perfect game with Roy Oswalt on a video game that came out 22 years ago will do for him. Maybe it'll help with his journalism/media career? Maybe he'll just be remembered in some corner of the Internet as the guy who tried this weird thing that one time? Either way, he's happy with the little moment he's created for now ... even if he is feeling just a little bit of pressure.

"I've created this community where people will be like, 'How far has he gone?' or 'You need to click his profile and see the Mirabelli Meatball,'" Lucarelli said. "My stream is bringing people back to a simpler time [with MVP '05].

"But it's also creating extreme tension with every single pitch of the ball. I literally have a Game 7 of the World Series feeling every time I release a ball."