Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Pablo Sanchez animated for the first time
This blog speculated that the Backyard Sports reboot might be more about animation than new games, based on the talent hired at Playground Productions. Well, while we’re still waiting on more detail about the vaguely announced new Backyard Sports game coming eventually, Variety reported plenty of details about a new animated special coming next year.
The voice cast for the animated special will be announced in November, and it is set to premiere at select Dave & Busters locations in early 2026 before release.
Along with these announcements, we also learned Backyard Basketball 2001 and Backyard Hockey 2002 are getting rereleases simultaneously in November. It sounds like that will be the end of this run of rereleases for Playground Productions, but that’s not fully confirmed.
I also missed that Pablo Sanchez is getting NIL money, apparently: His visage appears on Smackin’ Sunflower Seeds, with the rebooted Backyard Sports logo on the wrapper.
MLB The Show coming to PC?
San Diego Studio, the developers behind the MLB The Show series, are making a “AAA PC title,” according to a new job listing for a Senior Graphics PC Programmer. The gaming news and deals aggregation account that goes by Wario64 raised the alarm on this one.
San Diego Studio have not worked on any games besides The Show since 2017 (they worked on StarBlood Arena and Drawn to Death then, which were two uh, bangers for sure). So this almost certainly means The Show finally making the leap to PC soon.
This is part of a growing trend of Sony releasing their “exclusives” on PC, usually after some exclusivity period on their own consoles. Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man 2, and the new God of War games have all made the leap, for example.
It has been a long time since the last AAA baseball sim on PC released in North America (Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025 was an exciting exception that unfortunately wasn’t officially for sale here). Major League Baseball 2K12 would be the last, and so it still gets fan mods with patches and roster updates to this day.
If The Show is kinder about encrypting its filesystem than Spirits was (maybe unlikely for a game that depends on selling you online currency…), then a PC The Show game could be a real playground for modders going forward.
A baseball card game based on Wizardry
A reader tipped me off to Wiz Ball (ウィズ・ボール), a fantasy baseball card game based on the groundbreaking and very much big-in-Japan video game, Wizardry.
Similar to a Blood Bowl or Mutant League Football, injuring or killing your opponent is a big part of the game. There are only seven players per team, and one way to win is to reduce the opponent to five or fewer active players through various spells, or weapons with a baseball theme.
There are a small handful of fan art illustrations based on the game, here on Pixiv. You can machine translate a blog here with a Japanese player’s experience playing the game. I love the art, and we badly need some fantasy or sci-fi baseball games back in the world again.
Song of the Week
“A Dream With a Baseball Player” by Faye Webster. An ESPN story confirmed this song is about a crush the Atlanta-based country/rock songwriter Webster developed on outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. while watching Braves games. An earlier (and much more steel guitar-heavy) song of hers, “It Doesn’t Work Like That,” has lyrics referring to Craig Kimbrel’s 2017 trade to the Padres.