Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
New Backyard Baseball merch on the way
Video game merch site Fangamer added a Backyard Sports collection available for preorder this week (no release date announced yet). This includes a Backyard Sports T-shirt with series main character Pablo Sanchez, a pin set of team logos from the original game, and a pin of Pablo Sanchez as a bobblehead.
But most importantly, this plushie:
The Backyard Baseball character designs were flawless at the time and they’ve continued to power the franchise for 30 years now. A pretty cool achievement for what was originally an unlicensed baseball game by a company that made adventure games.
MLB The Show adds torpedo bats
The hot topic of April 2025 MLB is now in MLB The Show 25. Torpedo bats are now available in-game. You can see a screenshot of what they look like on Operation Sports here. If you weren’t consuming any media about the league back in April, these are differently-shaped bats that bulge out a bit around the bat’s middle and thin towards the end of the barrel. The general idea behind these bats is to put the most oomph into the parts of the bat the player tends to make contact in, which for a lot of players tends to be a little bit on the handle side of the sweet spot.
These are purely aesthetic, for better or worse. There’s been no attempt to model how these might affect the hitting stats or style of the players involved. The talk around torpedo bats has definitely died down since that first week or two of the season, but it looks like they’re here to stay for at least some hitters around the league.
MLB Power Pros 2009 roster translation mod
Power Pros modder stylite69 has released another partial translation mod for Jikkyou Powerful Major League 2009, the Japan-only sequel to MLB Power Pros 2008. This mod translates the game’s rosters, so you can read player names without having to know katakana.
You can download the mod here, then follow these steps to apply it in your Dolphin emulator:
- In Dolphin, go to Options > Graphics Settings. On the Advanced tab, make sure “Load Custom Textures” is checked in the Utility section.
- Unzip the mod folder.
- Copy the contents of the folder called R4WJA4 in your mod into the Dolphin emulator’s \Load\Textures\ folder. Depending on your version of Dolphin, this folder will either be in \%appdata%\Dolphin\Load\Textures\ or \Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Load\Textures\.
The same modder previously made a partial menu translation for the game, available here.
Check out a collection of other baseball game translation mods on the encyclopedia part of this site here.
A Japan-only MLB 2003 for PS2?
I got this in the mail this week: a Japanese copy of MLB 2003 for PlayStation 2. I love the bold red cover art with Hideki Matsui. Usually the Japan-specific cover art is a little more basic, like this basic Spring Training-ish Matsui photo for MLB 2004, or this bizarre sky-ribbon of baseballers for MVP Baseball 2005.
But there’s something else odd about this game… MLB 2003 didn’t come out for PlayStation 2 in America! Did Japan get their own next-gen version of the game?
Well, Sony (and many other companies) had a bad habit of naming baseball games after the next calendar year. Japan apparently wasn’t on-board with this plan, so the game pictured above is actually what Americans would call MLB 2004 (the first PS2 game in the series). This continued on with Japan getting MLB 2005 as MLB 2004, and on until MLB 06 The Show started using real years on the cover.
This is no problem, unless you’re trying to build out an encyclopedia of baseball video games. Then it’s a bit more complicated what to call this thing…
Song of the Week
Kind of a basic choice for a blog that covers Pawapuro frequently, but I’ve been listening to this one a lot this week: “Tomorrow~Mirai e no Tsubasa~” by Keiko Horiuchi, the opening theme for Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 9.