MVP Baseball series

MVP Baseball was a baseball game series published by EA Sports, running from 2003 to 2007 with five games produced. In 2003, MVP became the official successor to EA's long-running Triple Play Baseball series, and it simulated Major League Baseball from 2003 to 2005. However, an exclusive licensing deal between Major League Baseball and Take-Two Interactive in 2005 prohibited EA Sports from making another MLB game until 2012. In response, EA made NCAA college baseball games in 2006 and 2007, but discontinued the series in 2008 because of poor sales.

MVP Baseball 2003 was released in 2003 as the successor to EA's Triple Play games, though it bore little more than a graphical similarity to its predecessors, which had been heavily maligned by critics in the series' final years.

Introducing an innovative pitch meter and zone-based hitting system (see below), MVP 2003 was well received by critics, most of whom considered the game's overhaul to be a major improvement over Triple Play′s last entry. At the review-aggregation site Metacritic, MVP 2003 was given a score of 81/100 for the PlayStation 2 and 82/100 for the Xbox.

Randy Johnson and Miguel Tejada were the cover players.

There is a glitch in the franchise mode. The 2003 schedule is the real-life MLB schedule, however, once the player enters into the 2004 season, the game generates a random schedule of teams to play against. The teams you play based on the generated schedule stay exactly the same each year there after, in the same schedule order. Ex. 2004 and 2005 and further you will always have to play against the same interleague teams, unlike real MLB schedule which rotates interleague play divisions through a cycle.

The 2003 game is the last game that uses a points system for player's salary, starting with the 2004 game an actual dollar amount is used for salaries. The 2003 game does not penalize a user for releasing a player during the season in franchise mode, whereas the 2004 and 2005 games invoke a salary penalty for releasing a player under contract.

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