I recently decided to revisit the game. I was a bit disappointed, albeit unsurprised, to find that the game is incredibly easy, even on the most difficult settings. There's a very brief learning curve. By the end of my third game, I was blowing away the competition just as I did when I was younger. You have to swing earlier in Backyard Baseball than in a typical video game, as it's designed for kids, and kids have slow reaction times. Once you get that figured out, there's really no challenge whatsoever.
In the midst of my seventh game, a 22-0 bludgeoning of the Wombats, the game began to lose its bit of sanity. At one point, Ken Griffey Jr. hit a ball off the wall in right field and four players chased after it. None of the four were the right fielder. The four continued running to the ball in this giant clump, frequently bouncing into each other. The poor Wombats' pitching staff was thoroughly depleted. When a team on Backyard Baseball 2003 runs out of pitchers, the game goes into a state of panic. With anything resembling a decent pitcher out of stamina, the computer-operated team searches frantically for anyone that can throw a ball in the general direction of home plate. Eventually, the four or five pitchers that the team had used throughout the game get rotated in and out every few pitches, sometimes in the middle of at-bats. Sometimes a single at-bat will see two or three different pitchers. Anything even slightly resembling logic is gone. There's more reasoning in a North Korean political summit.
It was during that massacre at Cement Gardens that I had an epiphany. As I gazed through the dust and debris, looking at the shredded remnants of the Wombats, I asked myself a question. "Why should I let Backyard Baseball 2003 self-destruct when I can break it myself?" From the carnage at the Gardens, a new idea was born, rising from the ashes like a phoenix. The Wombats did not die in vain, for their death led to the birth of a brave new idea: Breaking Backyard Baseball.
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