The 5 – My top baseball video games from my childhood

December 3, 2019

As I was scouring the Black Friday deals on Amazon, I saw a baseball video game that lead me down a rabbit hole to some of my favorites from my youth. We won’t go past NES as that was the pinnacle of my video game playing days. I’d love to hear your favorites as well, so please drop them on Twitter.

5. Reggie Jackson Baseball – Sega Master System

We’ve mentioned this before, but me and BeefLoaf are typically contrarians. Sometimes it works really well for us and other times, we ask our parents for the Sega Master System instead of the Nintendo Entertainment System. One of the great 8-bit mistakes of all time. But it did lead us to this baseball game. I honestly don’t remember a ton about this game except two things: the field would change colors game to game and most importantly, it featured bench clearing brawls.

4. Super Baseball – Atari 2600

I had to fish around through pictures on the internet to find the name of this game as Atari apparently had a shitload of baseball games, all slightly different, all fairly terrible by today’s standards. However, you have to remember that this was the early ’80s and we had like 5 channels on TV. This was top tier entertainment and we loved it! Not a lot of nuance to this one because, well, you had a joystick and one button. Nevertheless, I had a ton of fun playing this as a kid. Well at least until BeefLoaf would win and I’d try to strangle him with the joystick cord.

3. Baseball Simulator 1.000 – Nintendo Entertainment System

It was really a toss up here for me between this and Bases Loaded. But I remember being able to choose some crazy ass pitches in this game and absolutely loving it. It’s around this time, the games are starting to get a little more realistic and we’ve switched to Nintendo, so I actually owned this one. The game is just real enough and just insane enough to be a perfect early ’90s gem.

2. RBI Baseball – Nintendo Entertainment System

I don’t think we owned this one. I am pretty sure we were still full Sega when this came out. But right down the street, Polish with Extra Onions had it and we’d opt to play it often. You know, when we weren’t cheating at Track and Field by jumping off the power pad. I am not sure if it is the first game to feature real players, but it’s the first one I remember and we loved it. Years later, as adults, Slim Mick ran a RBI Baseball league in his apartment and even kept stats. I distinctly remember a game where Slim Mick was sitting on a chair, keeping the stats of the game, while others were playing and he just fell out of the chair. Did I mention we’d be absolutely hammered when we did this?

1. Baseball Stars – Nintendo Entertainment System

This isn’t even close. This is my favorite baseball game ever, not just of my childhood. This game had all kinds of great stuff: creative opposing teams, secret codes to get amazing teams, a theme song that gets stuck in your head for 20 years, and most importantly you could juice up your players after every win, buy new players, and cut bad players. Maybe this is why I love PEDs so much. Baseball Stars was showing me, in my youth, that you can use your resources to turn a lead off hitter into a home run monster if you chose to. Thank you Baseball Stars for showing me the way.