Aaron vs. Ruth: Battle of the Big Bats

Title: Aaron vs. Ruth: Battle of the Big Bats

Platform: PC

Release Date: June 30, 1997

Developer: NuFX

Publisher: Mindscape

Calling to mind EA Sports’ One on One basketball series that included Dr. J vs. Larry Bird and Jordan vs. Bird, Aaron vs. Ruth: Battle of the Big Bats is a Windows 95-era PC game that imagines a schoolyard draft of all-time baseball greats. The game was developed by NuFX, who made the NBA Street series and the Sega Genesis version of Super Baseball 2020. A PlayStation version was also planned for release but was never finished.

Description

There are four gameplay modes: Game, Series, Season, and Home Run Derby. In a Game or Series, there are only two teams: Hank Aaron’s Hammers and Babe Ruth’s Bambinos. Both teams start with their respective home run king on the roster and then take turns drafting from the rest of the game’s roster of 36 all-time baseball players. In the Season mode, four more teams are introduced like the Say Heys and the Georgia Peaches, filled out with fictional players whose attributes can be levelled up as the season goes on.

When pitching, you choose from one of four pitches, then choose where you would like to throw, then press Spacebar to throw the pitch. After pressing Spacebar, pressing ++ on the keyboard will give more velocity than normal and — will slow the pitch down. On harder difficulties, the ball icon showing where your pitch will go is removed, so you have to blindly aim your pitch in the strike zone with the arrow keys.

When hitting, you can move left and right in the batter’s box and move a bat reticle straight up and down in the strike zone to aim your swing.

Baserunning and fielding are handled automatically by default. The game offers Microsoft and Gravis GamePad support, which might make handling fielding and baserunning inputs manually less daunting than it is on the keyboard.

Roster

There are 36 real players whose names and likenesses were licensed for the game. You can see a full list on the right side of the box in the Box Art gallery below. The roster is shockingly close to a list of the top 40 career Wins Above Replacement leaders, naturally missing a few then-active players in Rickey Henderson and Barry Bonds, and a few mega-all-timers who you imagine might have been too expensive or difficult to license in Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle. Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux are the only two then-active players included in the roster. Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige make sense as two inclusions to represent the Negro Leagues, and Japanese career home run record holder Sadaharu Oh is a fun inclusion on the game’s roster.

The season mode fills out the rest of the rosters with fictional players, whose names and basic attributes (handedness, skin color) can be customized.

Little Details

• Some care was put into making each individual player’s animations look faithful. Babe Ruth’s swing and baserunning animations in particular look like they were traced out of newsreel footage. The back of the box claims that “Advanced Motion Capture technology brings to life the most exciting baseball players of all-time with spine-tingling results.”
• Four parks are included: Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, Crosley Field, and Willcome Field, a cornfield-adjacent park and reference to Field of Dreams.