Backyard Baseball 2024: Revisiting the Idea of a Revival

I’ve had a fairly busy month for writing. There was of course all of my Hall of Fame coverage; that always keeps me pretty packed.* I also just published a very large playlist covering the music I listened to over the last few months of 2023 over at Out of Left Field; as a reminder, if you want to see my non-baseball writing, I have a separate mailing list for that! I’ve even started prepping for the 2024 installments of my Future Hall of Fame series, so expect that in the next few weeks.

*I also had another Hall of Fame article that I put a lot of effort into, but I ultimately had to scrap because I couldn’t get it to where I wanted it before the results came in. However, I may try to rework it into something new once the Future Hall updates are done, so maybe keep an eye out for that. Plus, I have a few other music and video game pieces in the works.

But I can’t resist taking a break for a fun idea. So when I learned that Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce is a fan of the Backyard Sports series and has actually looked into buying the rights to revive it, it was too good to pass up. And it makes sense; for people of a certain age, those games were incredibly influential, and for pretty good reason! I wish him luck in his quest to bring them back!

My angle on this is pretty obvious: What would a Backyard Baseball roster look like going into the 2024 season? I’ve actually looked into the idea twice before, back in 2017 and then again during the delay of the 2020 season, so it’s been a little while. Back at their peak, Humongous Entertainment’s individual sports series were releasing new games every year or two, so four years should give us a decent amount of turnover.

Built with ConvertKit

As a quick refresher, I’m using the rules of Backyard Baseball 2001 and 2003, where the developers would include 31 real pro players (one from each team, with one team getting two, which I’ll get into more later). Later games would stray from both rules somewhat,* but this gives us a little more structure. Plus, I think it’s more fun this way, sort of like getting to pick the face of a franchise at a given time.

*Also, those later games just generally weren’t very good anyway, although that’s less of a deciding factor.

While there weren’t hard-and-fast rules beyond those, there were a few other you could see trends. You’d generally want mid-career stars, although older stars at the end of their careers could be added if they were big enough names, like Cal Ripken Jr. or Tony Gwynn (sometimes, though, neither were available). Players were strong favorites to return if they were still on the same team, although not guaranteed (about 14 out of 18 eligible players from 2001 were back in 2003), and some big enough names came back even after changing teams (i.e. Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi). Positionally, there wasn’t a huge attempt to balance things, so it’s not a huge issue if we’re not even ourselves. However, one thing to note is that pitchers did feel like a bit of an afterthought (2001 included just 2, 2003 had 3), so it’s probably fine if we focus on position players first and foremost.

Let’s begin with the spots that give us an easy starting point: only thirteen players that I picked for the 2020 roster were even still with the same teams in 2023. However, three of those thirteen are already guaranteed to be elsewhere for 2024 (the retired Miguel Cabrera, the released Madison Bumgarner, and the traded Chris Sale), and another, Joey Votto, is still a free agent (and one who seems likely to sign elsewhere).

How are the other nine looking?

Building a Backyard Baseball 2020 Roster

[Also up over at The Crawfish Boxes]

I wanted to do something more lighthearted to help cheer up what would have been the last week before Opening Day before everything went into quarantine. And one of the most lighthearted topics I could think of was to revisit one of the earliest things from my baseball fandom, Backyard Baseball.

For those of you who didn’t have a chance to play the series growing up, Backyard Baseball was a series of video games by Humongous Entertainment that debuted in 1997. The premise was simple: it was a basic, arcade-style baseball game where all the players are kids and all the parks are just places they might play around their neighborhood. In that sense, it’s kind of like a video game equivalent of The Sandlot or The Bad News Bears. The series was aimed at kids, but the underlying game was actually very solid, and had a unique aesthetic sense that helped engrain it in the mind of young sports fans, making it a cult classic that has endured the years.

Backyard Baseball 2001 https://t.co/XPyMWJgybn

— Céspedes Family BBQ (@CespedesBBQ) November 24, 2019

After the success of the first game, the team expanded into other sports, where they hit upon another big idea: adding a handful of pro players (as cartoon kid versions of themselves, naturally) to the list of selectable options. When they circled back around to a sequel for Baseball, Backyard Baseball 2001 (so named for its release year: 2000), they upped their ambitions to that point and added one MLB player to represent each team, more than doubling the original thirty-person roster (one team go two representatives, but we’ll come back to that).

What Would a Hypothetical Backyard Baseball 2017 Look Like?

The recent Hall of Fame induction ceremony gave me a lot of varied ideas for articles. This one might be the silliest though, so of course I had to follow through on it.

Few things have been as influential a part of my life as baseball, but video games are up there. Maybe you already knew that though; after all, I sometimes even write about them. And, like many kids my age who grew up with a love of both things, one title reigned supreme: Backyard Baseball.*

*You too can enjoy having this song stuck in your head, just as I did while writing this (in alternating shifts with this, of course).

For those who might not be aware, Backyard Baseball was a series that started with a computer game released in 1997. The premise was generally pretty simple: it was a relative simple baseball game* aimed at younger audiences, with a colorful cast of neighborhood kids, straightforward and easy-to-understand gameplay, and a slew of cartoonish elements serving as the main selling points, and it made a strong enough impression that in spawned an entire, multi-sport franchise that became a cultural touchstone for a generation of sports fans.

*Fun fact: in researching this, I read that the original game was made in a point-and-click engine, which seems like a strange way to build a sports game, but makes more sense given that maker Humongous Entertainment was known for that style of game.

The second game, released in 2000 (but titled Backyard Baseball 2001), is probably even better known, however, as it tightened up things from the first game and added a bunch of features, including one of the things the series is most known for, the addition of 31 major league stars as kids to the game’s roster. A 2002 follow-up (but again subtitled 2003) would repeat the formula with a slightly shuffled set of 31 players (then subsequent games would shuffle the formula even more as the series generally declined in quality, but we won’t go there).

What got me thinking about it in relation to the Hall of Fame was that, as the writers at Cespedes Family BBQ noted, two of the inductees were on the Backyard Baseball 2001 roster. Indeed, Ivan Rodriguez and Jeff Bagwell are actually the eighth and ninth Backyard Representatives in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But it was their reference to Tim Raines that got me thinking, where they called him “one that would have been had the game been made 15 years earlier”; it’s been even longer than that since the release of 2001. What would a Backyard Baseball 2017* installment look like, as far as major league stars go? Since the series is functionally dead at this point, this will forever be stuck in the realm of fantasy, but it’ll still be a lot of fun to think about.

*Keeping track of 2001 and 2003 is already hard enough, so I won’t be calling this one Backyard Baseball 2018. Sorry.