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During the 8 bit era there were so many baseball games both licensed and unlicensed. I had already fallen in love with baseball via WPIX Yankees games and Micro League Baseball on my Apple II. I loved the depth and strategy of the game and got mixed results from NES games. Major League Baseball had real teams, but wasn't that great. RBI Baseball was really fun but a bit mindless and random. Bases Loaded, and especially Bases Loaded II, almost got it down right. The pitching and batting interface was really good and worth investing time in a season, but the fielding, especially when playing now, is very poorly implemented. 

I played all of these games a lot trying to make the best out of them. Everything changed when Baseball Stars came out. 

The first time I encountered Baseball Stars was at a friends house. He had rented it earlier in the day and when I came over to hang out with his sister, which, in retrospect, might have been my first chance to date someone, I sat down and began watching him play the game. 

I remember the home run image, with all of its pomp, really drawing me in. A few inning later, my friend climbed a wall to make a catch, which absolutely blew our minds. When he fell over a wall later, we couldn't even believe what we were seeing in front of us. 

I rented the game myself a few days ago and then bought it a few weeks later. One of my favorite aspects of Baseball Stars is all the little things about it that really made the game sit apart from others: you could climb walls, you could stop runners, and trick the AI, and generally the play control was so smooth. There was a woman's team and you could buy women to play on your own team. The additional RPG elements that allowed you to level up your players as you played through a league season added depth that allowed me to play the game on and off for at least three summers that I can remember. 

Like I said, I kept playing Baseball Stars for a lot of my adolescence. Every summer I would put together a team of friends and people from school. In private, some of them thought this was cool. Many just thought it made me a dork.

Because you could put women on your team, I could put a few crushes in my lineup. My heavy hitting, after some leveling up, lady catcher was my big middle school crush. All of my pitchers were her friends. My short stop was another young lady I liked a lot, but felt weird about it because I mostly liked her for her looks, which made me very uncomfortable. 

The bottomline is Baseball Stars gave me an outlet to have a space where I had friends that I did not have in real life. Looking back, that is really sad, but at the time, it was part of surviving. 

I cannot stress enough how much video games saved my life back then. Games like Baseball Stars gave me that outlet to get away from the horrors of my day to day life at school and, once my father was unemployed and then having to commute three hours a day in a horrible economy, at home. I escaped into them and, at times, still do today. 

I hate how so many episodes of this podcast have this sad tinge to them. It's one of the realities that made me want to do it though. 

I am pretty proud of the fact that when I began playing Baseball Stars this summer I remembered the code to get a pretty good team from memory. It doesn't guarantee domination though as some players will have pretty oblong skill sets that need to be leveled up. I did win the quick league I created, but I picked up a few losses along the way. The ability to do RPG style leveling up in a sports game felt revolutionary, just like it did in fighting games like River City Ransom, even though now it would be mundane. 

The game plays well still. The play control is so good and very smooth. Fielding was often the aspect of the game that wasn't as good back in the NES days, but Baseball Stars absolutely nails it. I can pick this game up now and feel like I am 11 years old again. I sat down each afternoon and played a game in my league and it felt totally natural to play this game despite it being over 25 years old. Much like other games of the era like Tecmo Bowl, there is a timeless quality to Baseball Stars that will make it playable forever. 

SEGMENT SIX TOP 5 BASEBALL GAMES
I originally made this list based off of a conversation on the Press Row podcast last year about the best baseball video games ever. Obviously Baseball Stars is my #1, but the rest would be...

#5 Sports Talk Baseball: This Genesis game has not held up so well, but it was revolutionary for the time because it had commentary. The announcing was pretty slow and often way behind, but a sign of what would come. I played a season in this game with Atlanta because I knew their players so well from watching games on TBS waiting for wrestling to start on Saturday evenings. 

#4 RBI Baseball: A really fun game with players and teams from my beloved 1986/1987 seasons. I played countless hours of this game using one of the black Tengen cartridges. These days I find it a bit tedious because it is very random, but for the time it was solid. 

#3 Micro League Baseball: My first baseball game...it combined turned based play with almost D&D style dice rolls for decision making along with current, in the mid-eighties, players plus a disk of old teams. I learned a lot about the history of baseball by playing this game and researching players at the library and in encyclopedias. My early love of rotisserie, what people now call fantasy, baseball came because of my love of the intricacies of this game. 

#2 MVP Baseball 2005: The best modern game before EA lost their license. The play is smooth both at the plate and in the field. I love that there was a minor league system to bring players up from if you needed them. This series was just hitting a peak when it went away. 

And I want to give an honorable mention to Little League Baseball, which uses the same engine as Baseball Stars but with little league teams instead of adults. This game was a nice surprise during a curious rental in the early 1990s. If you like Baseball Stars you will also enjoy this game too. 

It is not a retro game, but we need to also give some props to Super Mega Baseball, which is a modern baseball game in the vein of Baseball Stars. I absolutely loved this game when I played it last year and a sequel is apparently coming soon. Modern sports games are often very sterile or focused on "ultimate team" nonsense, but Super Mega Baseball sticks to fun and delight. I highly recommend it. 

Again, the Giraffe Feels podcast is written, edited, produced, and performed by William Wend. Giraffefeelspod is the user name to follow on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. We have a Youtube page that is linked on the website.

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