Spring is here and baseball season is upon us making this one of my favorite times of the year.

As a teenager in the mid-80s, my two favorite hobbies were playing baseball and making BASIC programs on my Atari 800XL. In the summer of 1986, I got to combine both!

Our Senior/Babe Ruth Little League team had won the Maine State Championship and we were in Vermont for the New England Regionals. At some point the entire team stopped at a 7-11 to get snacks. On the way out, I spotted a folded dollar bill by the door so I picked it up.

On the bus ride back to the Bed & Breakfast where we were staying, I unfolded the bill to see that it was not a $1 bill. It was a $50 bill! I told the coach and he drove me back to the store to check to see if anyone had reported it missing. Apparently no one had because I got to keep it.

$50 in 1986 is equivalent to about $131 today, so this was a big windfall for me. We ended up losing in the regionals, so when we got back to Maine I consoled myself by using the money to buy MicroLeague Baseball for the Atari 800XL. I believe it cost $40 which reminds me that software was expensive back then! People complain about $70 PlayStation 5 games, but MicroLeague Baseball at $40 in 1986 is equivalent to $105 today!

MicroLeague Baseball

I recently picked up a boxed copy of this with the manuals, cards and diskette on eBay for a mere $15.

The disk actually worked! Loading up this game brings back memories. MicroLeague Baseball is a simulation so you don’t directly control the players. For each at bat you instead you give managerial suggestions for either the batter or pitcher. This means you can play a game pretty quickly. The graphics are rather bland, even considering this was released in 1984.

I would always play the 1975 Red Sox team (Yaz, Rice, Lynn!) against the other teams. MicroLeague Baseball doesn’t keep individual player stats so I would keep track of the stats myself using a home-made baseball score sheet.

I think this was probably the game I played the most. I don’t believe I ever got the related Team Disk that provided additional teams and even let you make your own teams, but it might be fine to try and find it to put together some current 2022 rosters.

Star League Baseball

Star League Baseball, released in 1983, is an arcade baseball game with an overhead side view of the entire field. You control each player with the joystick, swinging at pitches, deciding the pitches to throw and doing the fielding and throwing.

The players are pretty small because the entire field is squished to fit into a single screen.

Hardball

Hardball by Accolade was the best arcade baseball game to have. It came out in 1987 and boasted amazing graphics for its time, focusing on its high-quality close-up of the pitcher and batter.

Things were not quite as nice when it switched to fielding as it, like Star League Baseball, tried to fit too much on a single screen, which resulted in an outfield with unusual proportions. Because of this, throwing was slowed down from the outfield to try to better simulate how long it might actually take with more accurate proportions.

There were individual players in the game with their own characteristics and even a batting average, but I also would keep track of my player’s stats manually using my scoresheet.

I just picked up the cartridge version of this from eBay, which should be arriving soon. I look forward to playing this one a bit more often.

Real Sports Baseball

This game is actually a port of the Atari 5200 game. I never played this back in the day and it was only ported to the computer line in 2005 or so. Since the 5200 and Atari 8-bits are nearly the exact same hardware, ports were usually quick. But apparently this one relied heavily on the 5200’s weird controllers and took longer to do.

It’s a standard front view of a baseball game and plays OK, although the graphics are nothing special and only slightly better than Star League Baseball.

However this version speaks! It says “Strike”, “Ball”, “Yer out” and other things which is fun.