Backyard Baseball

Backyard Baseball
The current Backyard Baseball logo.
Genres	Sports
Developers	Humongous Entertainment
Publishers	Humongous Entertainment Infogrames Atari The Evergreen Group
Platforms	Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, Wii, Microsoft Windows, iOS, Xbox 360, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo GameCube, Macintosh
Year of inception	1997
First release	Backyard Baseball 1997
Latest release	Backyard Sports: Baseball 2015

Backyard Baseball is a series of baseball video games for children which was developed by Humongous Entertainment and published by Atari. It was first released in October 1997 for Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Later games were featured on Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Wii, and iOS. There have been eleven different versions of the game since 1997. Some of the game titles that were created include Backyard Baseball, Backyard Baseball 2001-2010, and Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers.

The original game consisted of 55 neighborhood kids which the gamer could choose to play. Over the years, the idea of "Pro players as kids" became popular, and the original statistics and looks of the players changed. Some of the professional players that were available included Chipper Jones, Frank Thomas, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano, Ichiro Suzuki, Sammy Sosa, Jim Thome, Albert Pujols, Nomar Garciaparra, Ken Griffey Jr., and Barry Bonds. As the game progresses, there are some professionals that become available or “unlockable” including Randy Johnson, Derek Jeter, and Mike Piazza.

In Backyard Baseball, players take a managerial role by creating a team of different players to compete against opponents. In the different installments, a player could play an exhibition game or a 14, 16 or 32 game season (different versions vary) followed by the “Backyard Baseball League” playoffs, which contains the American League and National League divisional series, the AL and NL championship series and finally the “Backyard Baseball World Series”. Series games will vary per game.