The History of Baseball Stars

The cartridge, released in Japan as Baseball Star Mezase Sankan O and in arcades through Nintendo's PlayChoice-10 system, holds eight built in teams (among them the American Dreams, the Ninja BlackSox, the Japan Robins, the Ghastly Monsters, the all women Lovely Ladies, and the SNK Crushers) and room for six created ones. A created league can run six teams through up to 25 games apiece, a 125 game schedule at most, with the top ten leaders tracked in batting average, home runs, RBIs, ERA, wins, and saves. Winning earns money scaled to the prestige of both rosters, and money buys player upgrades or free agents priced from $5,000 to $2,980,000. An EA producer, David Littman, later said the GM mode in EA's NHL series was originally inspired by this game. The full list of firsts is on the firsts page.

Baseball Stars Professional (1990) was one of the first Neo Geo games published, a launch title for the MVS and an original pack-in option for the AES, carrying all the NES teams onto SNK's own hardware. What it did not carry was the point: the teams' features could not be changed, so gamers could only play as them. Baseball Stars 2 (Neo Geo, 1992) widened the spectacle instead, with 18 teams across two leagues, an Exciting League and a Fighting League, mid game pitcher and batter changes, and power up batters whose bats visibly grew. A separate NES Baseball Stars 2, published by Romstar in 1991 and 1992, was far less popular than the original, in part because created teams and players could no longer even be renamed. The name traveled to SNK's handhelds as Baseball Stars and Baseball Stars Color on the Neo Geo Pocket line, and the Color edition returned in the Neo Geo Pocket Color Selection Vol. 2 in 2022.

Every sequel improved the presentation and none recovered the original's depth, which is why the retrospectives keep returning to the 1989 cartridge: Nintendo Power's readers once voted it the most popular baseball game, and the book Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library gives it a perfect five star rating. The lesson the series teaches is the Library's favorite kind: the feature that mattered was not the graphics chip. It was the battery, and the front office it powered. The machine the sequels were built to sell is documented on the Neo Geo history page.