4. Earl Weaver Baseball; Electronic Arts
The old warhorse. Whenever the topic of “best baseball game” comes up someone undoubtedly mentions this Amiga classic – and for good reason. This was a landmark achievement in baseball game design.
EWB was a true original because not only did it produce realistic games but it looked stellar for its day and even had voice synthesis on the Amiga version. For 1987 – that was truly amazing. So was the fact that you could play an entire season. Not just one-off games but a real baseball season. You could simulate the CPU games. I cannot express how shocking of a development this actually was at the time—particularly for gamers who came over from boardgames.
EWB was also one of the very first games, if not the first, to try and achieve “believable hands-on” gameplay – meaning you could play in manage only one-pitch mode but you could also play it in “arcade” mode and yet it still produced a very “real” version of the sport. Before EWB it was completely arcade or manager mode ala Micro League. Earl changed all of that. Stadium creation, team creation, additional modes via the Commissioner’s Disk – you name it and Earl Weaver Baseball at least attempted to simulate it—even umpire ejections at the request of Earl himself. (Earl Weaver was infamous for umpire rants.) The game was so far ahead of its time that its impact is still felt today, and when a “modern” game displays Bad News Bears level AI just remember – chances are Earl got it right…20 years ago.
There is another legacy here with this game, though, and it’s a sad one. Earl Weaver Baseball was one of the first sports franchises to suffer from corporate greed. Electronic Arts shoved the sequel out the door before it was ready and it had game crippling bugs that rendered it nearly unplayable, and thus the franchise for the most part fell into oblivion.
3. MLB 08: The Show; Sony Computer Entertainment America
You can certainly make a case for this being number one, and given ample time to truly appreciate it, The Show might force its way into that position. But for a game that has been out for only a month as of this writing—to be ranked this high shows you just how special it really is.
The Show owes a lot to the games that have come before it but it also stands on its own with truly “next-gen” gameplay of the likes we have never seen before and really could never have dreamt of back in the days of Hardball and Earl Weaver. Not only does it look remarkable—easily one of the best games on the PS3, but it plays such a realistic brand of baseball (for the most part) that it puts faith back into the team sports videogame in a time when the entire sports genre is languishing behind exclusive licenses and rushed designs. The Show is polished.
