This website aims to cover all baseball video games. Baseball and video games each have jargon that may need explaining, and a large number of baseball video games are developed and released only in Japan, so there are some terms that may not be familiar to everyone.
30-30 Club – The group of baseball hitters who have hit 30 home runs and stolen 30 bases in the same season. These are the members of the club for MLB as of the end of the 2021 season, in chronological order:
- Ken Williams
- Willie Mays
- Hank Aaron
- Bobby Bonds
- Tommy Harper
- Dale Murphy
- Joe Carter
- Eric Davis
- Howard Johnson
- Darryl Strawberry
- Jose Canseco
- Barry Bonds
- Ron Gant
- Sammy Sosa
- Dante Bichette
- Ellis Burks
- Barry Larkin
- Jeff Bagwell
- Raúl Mondesí
- Larry Walker
- Shawn Green
- Alex Rodriguez
- Preston Wilson
- Bobby Abreu
- José Cruz Jr.
- Vladimir Guerrero
- Alfonso Soriano
- Carlos Beltrán
- David Wright
- Jimmy Rollins
- Brandon Phillips
- Grady Sizemore
- Hanley Ramírez
- Ian Kinsler
- Matt Kemp
- Ryan Braun
- Jacoby Ellsbury
- Mike Trout
- José Ramírez
- Mookie Betts
- Ronald Acuña Jr.
- Christian Yelich
- Cedric Mullins
- Julio Rodriguez
- Francisco Lindor
- Bobby Witt Jr.
And here is the 30-30.club for the Japanese League, NPB, as of the end of the 2021 season:
- Kaoru Betto (1950)
- Yoshiyuki Iwamoto (1950)
- Futoshi Nakanishi (1953)
- Isao Harimoto (1963)
- Koji Minoda (1980, 1983)
- Koji Akiyama (1987, 1989, 1990)
- Tomoaki Kanemoto (2000)
- Tadahito Iguchi (2001)
- Kazuo Matsui (2002)
- Yuki Yanagita (2015)
- Tetsuto Yamada (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019)
Change – Japanese baseball video games often say the English word “change” on screen when the third out is recorded in an inning (except for the final out of the game, which instead is “game set”). Because the teams are changing sides, switching which one is hitting and which one is fielding. In English a commentator would usually say something like “Side retired” instead.
Deadball – For Americans, deadball (or dead ball or dead-ball) refers to an early era of Major League Baseball, from 1900 to 1919, when the baseball didn’t fly as far as in other eras, making power nearly nonexistent until Babe Ruth became a home run-hitting star in 1919. However, in a Japanese context, “deadball” (said exactly like that, as an English loanword) means “hit by pitch” or “hit batsman.” So in a lot of the games covered here, you might see “deadball” appear on screen when a hit by pitch happens.
Game console abbreviations – I’d like to avoid acronyms and abbreviations to keep things clear for anyone who might read this site, but sometimes, especially in my YouTube video titles, I might drop in an abbreviation for a game console. Some of these abbreviations aren’t totally straightforward, so here is a list of the ones I might use:
Famicom – Family Computer, the Japanese name for the Nintendo Entertainment System
GCN – Nintendo GameCube
NES – Nintendo Entertainment System
PSX – Sony PlayStation
PS2 – Sony PlayStation 2
(and so on for PS3, PS4, and PS5)
SNES – Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Super Famicom – Japanese name for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Koushien – (can also spelled Koshien or Kōshien, or in kanji as 甲子園) The national high school baseball tournament in Japan (Koushien is also the name of the stadium where these games are played, the home park for the NPB’s Hanshin Tigers). Similar to March Madness with college basketball in the U.S., Koushien is a hugely popular amateur sports tournament. A decent proportion of Japanese baseball video games are set in high school rather than their professional league. College baseball exists in Japan but is much less popular than high school and pro baseball.
Kusayakyuu (草野球) – Literally “grass field ball” or “grass baseball,” this is the Japanese term for sandlot or amateur baseball.
Ni-gun (2軍) – Pronounced “knee-goon.” Literally means “second army.” A term for the NPB farm league. Teams in this league share the names of their NPB affiliates (snooze). You might less often see the terms ichi-gun (1軍) (for the top-tier NPB team itself) and san-gun (3軍) (either for a bonus affiliated minor league team, which a couple NPB teams have currently, or as a term for the Japanese independent leagues).
NPB – Nippon Professional Baseball, the Japanese professional baseball league. Like MLB’s American League and National League, the NPB is split into the Central League and Pacific League.
Old Boys (commonly abbreviated as OBs) – A Japanese term for former baseball players, sort of like “old-timers” in English. You’ll see the term pretty frequently in the Powerful Pro Yakyuu series.
PC Engine – This is a late ’80s, early ’90s home game console made by NEC, no relation to a Windows PC. Much more popular in Japan than in the U.S. (where it was called TurboGrafx-16).
Yakyuu (野球) – Japanese for the sport of baseball. Can also be spelled yakyū or yakyu. A literal translation of yakyuu would be “field-ball.” You’ll see yakyuu a lot in game titles on this site. The ball used in the sport baseball is just called a “ball” (the English word) in Japanese.