Baseball File

Imagine a game where the players play for the love of the game, not the money. A game where multi-million dollar contracts are unknown. A game where everyone gets to play. Imagine a game just like it was with the youthful innocence of a child. This, my friends, is Backyard Baseball. Backyard Baseballtakes you back to when you were a kid, when baseball was a game, and the team was hastily put together among the kids in the neighborhood.

Playing for Real

Humongous Entertainment reached back into the past and captured all those childhood memories of baseball and digitally assembled them into this game. All the details that make the memories real are here – from the kids taunting the pitcher to the child with the asthma inhaler. Do you remember picking teams, taking turns picking from the best players until only the bad players were left? Do you remember picking someone’s little brother because his big brother was a good player? It’s all here. Nothing was left out.

Players choose from fields such as the sandlot, the urban parking lot, and the rich kid’s backyard. Pitchers throw crazy pitches such as the “Elevator” and the “Crazy Ball.” Background ambient noises and the taunting by the opposing team add to the rich atmosphere that you can almost smell.

Everything about this game is charming and cute.

Swing and Miss

Gameplay includes all the necessary elements. Pitchers choose the pitch as well as the placement. Hitters swing at the ball and can even see the strike zone. Fielding is accomplished by clicking where you want the ball thrown, and running is as simple as clicking in the direction you want the runner to advance. Everything is here, and everything is easy enough for kids. The pace is a little slow, but not too fast for children. Each batter has a distinct personality – from the boy who hops to the plate to the girl who says “my game is really tennis, anyway” when she strikes out. I was extremely impressed with all the details of each character.

I have a few complaints about the game. This game doesn’t install any files to the hard disk – everything is run from the CD. For some reason, each swing of the bat causes the CD to be read. This makes the animation choppy and the mouse click to hit feels sluggish and unresponsive. While the game is playable with this problem, it makes hitting the ball a little difficult. Instead of getting better the more balls I hit, I never really improved. I think this is because I never was able to time when I hit the mouse button and the player started their swing. That little delay when it read from the CD just ruins the hand/eye coordination.

I tried copying the entire 270MB of CD data to the hard disk to see if that improved performance (note: this is not an option in the install menu, I just copied it by dragging the contents of the CD into a new folder on my hard disk.) It did speed up the game somewhat, but the batting problem didn’t improve significantly.

What is Baseball.dll? What Does It Do?

The Baseball.dll file is 0.87 MB. The download links are current and no negative feedback has been received by users. It has been downloaded 705 times since release.

National Science Standards: Science as Inquiry, Physical Science, Life Science, Science and Technology, Science in Personal and Social Perspectives.

Most students play sports. And when they become old students, they enjoy watching sports. Many sports involve throwing or kicking a ball and all sports are played within the Earth’s atmosphere. So aerodynamic forces play a major role in many sports. We have devloped several software packages to help students better understand, explore, and visualize the aerodynamic and gravitational forces that act on a ball in flight. These forces affect the motion of the ball according to Newton’s laws of motion. A ball in flight is exactly like a gliding aircraft in flight.

CurveBall Student Using the CurveBall Student applet, students learn more about aerodynamics by controlling conditions of a big league baseball pitch. The parameters that affect the flight of the ball include stadium location and weather conditions, which affect the air density, speed of the pitch, and spin on the ball. You set the conditions for the pitch using the input boxes, sliders, and choice boxes on the program display. CurveBall Student version is a two dimensional simulation that neglects the effects of gravity and drag on the ball. As the ball travels from the pitcher to home plate, the ball can only move side-to-side under the actions of the aerodynamic force. To better understand what is happening to the ball, we include a “Wind Tunnel View” of air passing the ball.. A probe is provided so that the student can see the change in velocity and pressure around the spinning ball.