I’ve loved baseball video games for exactly as long as I’ve loved baseball. Ever since I can remember. My life has basically corresponded with the rise of video games. We had an Atari 2600 when I was 4 or 5. I still remember the day my Dad brought home Realsports Baseball for it. I was stoked! For a little while anyway. Until we played it and realized it wasn’t that great. Since that day I’ve logged countless hours on numerous baseball video games. MLB The Show is the premier baseball video game these days and with the general release of this year’s edition on Tuesday March, 28th, I felt like it would be a good time to list The Top Baseball Video Games…Of My Lifetime.

10. R.B.I. Baseball 2 (1990, NES)

R.B.I. Baseball 2 was (obviously) the sequel to the wildly popular R.B.I. Baseball. This game had all the current MLB teams and players, whereas the first only had 8 teams and the 2 All-Star teams. This game had improved graphics and interface. By all accounts it should’ve been more fun than the original. But it wasn’t. That’s not to say it was a bad game. It was still a lot of fun. Me and my cousins Micah and Zach played many intense games of R.B.I. Baseball 2 at my Grandma’s house when we first got our hands on a copy of it. What I remember most about this game is the instruction book. It had every player and their real-life stats from the 1989 MLB season listed inside. Also curiously, it had a speed rating for every hitter. There were no other ratings. None for power or contact or anything like that. Just speed. Ranked from 1-20. And Rickey Henderson had a 20. When I first discovered this I obviously exploited it to my advantage. Henderson could not be caught stealing in this game. This would lead to me and my cousins enacting “The Rickey Rule”. Rickey Henderson was banned from stealing during any 1-on-1 games. And breaking this rule would result in forfeiting the game as well as your next turn to play. We took our video game baseball seriously.

9. World Series Baseball 2K1 (2000, Sega Dreamcast)

World Series 2K1 was the best looking baseball game ever at its time of release in 2000. I was a huge fan of the 2K sports series on the Dreamcast as NFL 2K and NBA 2K were both amazing titles with unmatched graphics and game-play. So I had ultra high hopes for WS 2K1. It didn’t quite live up to the hype. The main problem was that you didn’t control the fielders in this game. That was a huge strike against it. But it was still really fun to hit and pitch. And the create-a-player was second to none. In fact I probably had the most fun with this game by creating a player for myself and 29 of my friends. I placed myself on the Braves and then assigned a team to each of the friends and simulated a season. It was fun to see everyone’s virtual stats and whose team won the World Series. Although I don’t remember who that was after all these years. It must not have been me.

8. MVP ’06 NCAA Baseball (2005, Playstation 2)

To my knowledge MVP ’06 was the first ever college baseball video game. It happened to coincide with Matt Wieters’ time at Georgia Tech and if you’ve read my post on top catchers, you would know I would have to have this game. Wieters was appropriately a beast in this game and I would spend an absurd amount of time playing with the Yellowjackets hitting awe-inducing aluminum bat bombs with him. That alone would be enough to include this game on the list but NCAA 06 also had mini-games like the one with the ramps on the field pictured above. Me and several of my friends would spend hours upon hours playing this mini-game, good old-fashioned pass-the-joystick style, trying to beat each other’s high score.

7. MLB Slugfest 2003 (2002, Xbox)

Slugfest was Major League Baseball on steroids. Uuurrrmmm….Slugfest was an arcade-style game that looked awesome and was tons of fun to play. This game was produced by arcade giant Midway that also brought us such video game classics as NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Slugfest was the baseball version of the over-the-top style that made such games so popular and addictive. The players had turbo meters and could catch on fire. You could bean hitters to reduce the likelihood of them doing so. You could fight the first baseman as a base runner. You could dropkick the catcher. The announcer was funny and full of memorable lines. All of these elements and several more made Slugfest a blast to play and it was even more fun against another person. Me and my friend Adam used to square off on the controllers all the time. He was also my NFL Blitz partner and as a duo we are still undefeated to this day. Even though I used to hand him L’s on a regular basis playing MLB Slugfest 2003.

6. World Series Baseball (1995, Sega Saturn)

Perhaps one of the lesser-known entries on the list, World Series Baseball was a smooth and polished game that was easy and enjoyable to pick up and play but also had the depth and intricacies to make it a joy to try and master. And try I did. Most of the time against my best friend Herndon. In a video game era where Playstation and Nintendo 64 ruled most of the market, Herndon and I both had a Sega Saturn and both had this game. I remember many nights spent playing this game against each other into the wee hours of the morning. Usually on the floor of my Nana’s living room or sitting on the bed in Herndon’s room. Most weekends at the time would find us staying up all night playing this game, talking about baseball and girls and teenage life in general. Life was good. And so was World Series Baseball.

5. Baseball Simulator 1.000 (1990, Nintendo)

There were a lot of baseball video games available for the NES from the mid 80’s into the early 90’s. The range of titles was eclectic and it was always something of a gamble when choosing a game from the rental store. This was well before the internet, so unless you’d happened to play the game at one of your buddies houses or seen a review in the latest issue of Nintendo Power, you were always taking a risk that your weekend would be wasted with the choice of a dud. You had to rely on your instincts and the back of the box. I didn’t really know what to expect the first time I inserted Baseball Simulator into my well used Nintendo. It didn’t have a MLB license, so there weren’t any real-life players or teams. It didn’t need them. It only had 6 teams. It didn’t need any more. It actually had 18 teams but only 6 in the Ultra League, which was the only one worth playing. The Ultra League games were played with Ultra Powers such as Shadow, Missile Hit, Spinner Pitch and many more. These unique little quirks added an extra layer of depth and strategy. The Ultra Powers were cool, but to me the game didn’t even need them to be great. The game play was crisp. The stadiums were well designed and I remember hitting HRs out of the stadium into the ocean in one park. Probably where the architects for the stadium in San Francisco got the idea for McCovey Cove. But where Baseball Simulator really shined was the season mode. You could customize all the teams and players. The game tracked your stats throughout the season. There was a newscast with other scores from the league between games. This game was way ahead of its time and I was hooked immediately. I would go on to spend many hours and rack up many dollars worth of late return fees playing this little known video game baseball gem.

4. R.B.I. Baseball (1987, Nintendo)

I can still hear R.B.I. Baseball when I think back on it. The music and sound effects are nothing short of iconic. That’s just one reason this game was great. It was the first game that had real MLB players, which were displayed on the screen complete with their stats from the season before. This was a huge deal at the time and undoubtedly led to the game’s popularity. I still remember being in awe while playing with the AL All-Star team and seeing McGwire, Avg. 286, HR 49. Even though he was on the bench and you had to sub him in. The graphics were nothing special. All the players were round. There was only one stadium. The bats looked like caveman clubs. None of that mattered whatsoever. R.B.I. Baseball was just flat out fun. You could move the players around in the batters box and on the pitching rubber. It displayed pitch speeds. There were fireworks when you hit a home run. I played this game a lot and against a lot of different friends and I never really got tired of the amazing baseball game hidden inside the funny shaped black NES cartridge.

3. MLB The Show ’21 (2021, Xbox Series X)

I’d played a few editions of The Show before ’21. Until 2021 it was a PlayStation exclusive title. I owned every iteration of PlayStation but I’d been gravitating towards Xbox and chose the Xbox Series X as my choice of next generation consoles. Partly because I was able to get my hands on one, with the PlayStation 5 being a little more difficult to attain. So I was pretty pumped when it was announced that MLB The Show 21 was going to be “cross gen”. That meant I was going to be able to play it on my newly acquired Xbox Series X. And to top it off it was going to be free with Xbox Game Pass, the monthly subscription service that offers free games for download. So it was a no-brainer that I would give it a try when it was released in April that year. Even though I’d played The Show before I’d never really gotten into online play. The Show had a wildly popular mode called Diamond Dynasty wherein you built your team from virtual cards acquired from playing the various games within this mode. These cards could be a mixture of current and former players. You could have a team with Ronald Acuna Jr. in right, Hank Aaron in left, with Greg Maddux on the mound. And on top of that The Show had a deal with Topps and the virtual cards were based on real-life baseball cards. Several of which I had fond memories of owning in my youth. You could acquire these cards without playing online but a lot of the higher ranked cards could only be obtained by playing against other gamers online. Also a new feature of The Show ’21 was player XP and parallels. You could increase the attributes of a collected card by performing certain feats with said card in a game. For example a base-hit would garnish 5 XP, while a home run would net 20 XP. You could accumulate XP and advance a card all the way up to Parallel 5. To reach Parallel 5 you had to accrue 10,000 XP with the individual card. And someone in the game’s development team had the brilliant idea to number these achievements. For instance, if you were the first to reach Parallel 5 with a card, it would display a 1/1 in the corner of the card, letting you and any online opponent you came across know that you were the first person in the world to achieve the feat. Getting a card to Parallel 5 took a lot of time and effort and it was somewhat of a bragging right if you had a 1/1 card. Online gamers began “racing” with cards to try and be the first person in the world to reach Parallel 5. I’m simultaneously proud and ashamed to admit that I had a few 1/1s. In fact I spent the majority of my summer vacation from work that year paralleling the card of Taylor Walls. Walls is a local kid that made it to the majors with the Tampa Bay Rays. All of these aforementioned factors led to MLB The Show ’21 to undoubtedly be the baseball video game that I’ve spent the most time playing in my lifetime. And that’s saying a lot.

2. Bases Loaded (1988, Nintendo)

My older brother, Lee, was always into video games. Which means I was always into video games. We were the first kids in our town to have a Nintendo because Lee asked “Santa” for one. It would be the following Christmas before Nintendo’s popularity would explode and most of my friends caught up and got one. That meant we had a year’s head start to stock our game collection. Not to mention the fact that our Santa budget that Christmas could be spent on actual Nintendo games instead of the console itself. While most kids at the time only had Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt, Lee and I had amassed an impressive array of Nintendo cartridges. Somehow the good folks at the local video store, Penney Video, caught wind of this. They offered us a “trade program”. We would let them borrow and rent out 2 of our games for a month and in return we would get to borrow 1 of theirs. This worked out like gangbusters for us. We were able to get value out of old titles we no longer played while playing games that were new to us for an entire month without racking up any late fees. One of the games we borrowed was Bases Loaded. Bases Loaded was a gorgeous baseball game for its time. It featured a television-style view from over the pitcher’s shoulder instead of the traditional top-down view of baseball games of the time. It was also more realistic than other baseball games during that time, even though it lacked the MLB license. After being hit by a pitch certain hitters would even charge the mound and in turn get ejected. I remember playing it in my room one day when my Dad came in. I could tell he was instantly intrigued. He played Nintendo with us sometimes and was actually a crack-shot at Duck Hunt, but he never played if it wasn’t with me or Lee. Bases Loaded quickly changed that. My Dad was hooked. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up in the middle of the night and find him in my room playing Bases Loaded with the volume off. He started a season with the D.C. team and even had a favorite player, Fendy. He would often call me in the room, if I was in another area of the house, to have me watch him bat with Fendy. And more often than not the at-bat would end in a home run. Sometimes even with the Bases Loaded.

1. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (1994, Super Nintendo)

Griffey Jr. Baseball was a baseball video game masterpiece. It was the perfect blend of arcade-style and realism in both game play and appearance. I particularly liked the fielding in this title. It was smooth, sleek and satisfying. The hitting wasn’t bad either, even though it could be difficult at the times, with pitchers being able to control the ball after release and unleash absolutely devastating change ups that were nearly unhittable. This would lead to a set of “house rules” that saw us adhere to the throw it straight down the middle style of play. Griffey Jr. Baseball had a MLB licence but didn’t have a MLBPA one. Which meant Griffey himself was the only real player in the game, but they were able to include real MLB teams and stadiums. This didn’t matter much because you could edit the names of the players. If you didn’t want to spend the time to edit the player names, which trust me, was very time consuming, it was still ok and actually in a strange way added to the appeal of the game. That’s because most of the teams in the game had a theme. For example the Milwaukee Brewers were all named after the secret identities of super-heroes. The was P. Parker and C. Kent instead of Jamie Navarro or Cal Eldred. There were also teams of actors, former presidents, authors, comedians and more. The players in the game had real-life stats of the MLB players they were representing and also featured that player’s likeness. So, even though the Twins were named after famous musicians, it was easy to tell that J. Hendrix was really Dave Winfield. The stadiums in this game were very accurate to the real MLB parks of the time and that was a huge plus. It was awesome to be able to smash doubles off the Green Monster in Fenway or hit bombs into the fountains in Kansas City. I was so obsessed with this game that I took my Super Nintendo and a 10″ tv with me everywhere I went for a while. Vacation, trip to Grandma’s for the afternoon, you name it, I was going with KGJ Baseball in tow. Ken Griffey Jr. is undeniably an all-time great MLB player and Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball is undeniably The Top Baseball Video Game…Of My Lifetime.