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.

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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?