“It’s time to play some ball. Minnesota takes the field. Up to bat, number five. It’s a change-up. Ball one.”
Sega Genesis
Released by Sega in 1992
Grade: B-
Sports Talk Baseball is arguably the most beloved baseball game on Sega Genesis. It’s super fast, super simple, and the play-by-play announcer is often hilarious, lagging behind the speedy action.
Where it falls in the series
Sega released Tommy Lasorda Baseball in 1989, and we can call Sports Talk Baseball the sequel to that. Sega then shifted gears drastically with the realism-focused World Series Baseball in 1994, followed by three lazy rehashes.
It’s not the first ever game with a play-by-play announcer. That honor goes to Joe Montana II Sports Talk Football, released by Sega in 1991. The announcer for both is Lon Simmons, who announced San Francisco 49er games as far back as 1958! He also called games for the San Francisco Giants, Oakland Athletics, and Golden State Warriors.
Praises and gripes
Pitching uses the familiar primitive-retro style, where you press a button to throw and control the ball mid-flight. The good thing this game does — in stark contrast to other old baseball games — is limit the movement on pitches. The side-to-side “curveball” can only curve so much and mainly in one direction, and the change-up isn’t that much slower than the fastball. It’s interesting how each pitcher’s attributes are represented by a simple four-pointed shape, showing his range of velocity and side-to-side movement. There are no cheap sinkers either. This makes pitching more strategic, and it makes hitting more fun.
Batters can move around in the box and simply press a button to swing. It takes some practice to start hitting well. Overall, the game is awfully challenging, with no option to adjust the difficulty. The shrewd CPU opponent mixes up pitches, works the count at the plate, and steals bases aggressively.
And if you’re really up for the challenge, you’ll attempt manual fielding, but yeah, good luck with that. The control is sluggish and inexact, which can be extremely frustrating when trying to turn a quick double play or even just catch a routine fly ball. I prefer auto fielding, which makes the players run to the ball automatically, and I just throw.
With an MLBPA license, you get real players on knock-off teams that are often more colorful than their real-life counterparts. “Pittsburgh” is navy and yellow. “Atlanta” is purple and red. “New York A” has the famous pinstripes in a brighter shade of blue than the MLB’s Yankees.
The graphics during at-bats are cute and effective. The graphics from the fielding view aren’t as impressive, looking like they were ripped from an old Nintendo game. Although the game prompts you to select from three stadiums, this only affects the fielding view. The at-bats always take place on the same field, in what looks like a 80s-style dome with dim lighting.
I like how fast the game goes from pitch to pitch, batter to batter. Those little moments in between the action are barely even there. It could be a double play, a home run, a pitching change, no matter what it is, you’re back in the batter’s box in a flash.
And mind you, the play-by-play announcer says something about every pitch, every hit, every throw, and every out, all in the same rhythm and tone. “It’s a change-up, hit to third base, here comes the throw, he’s out, here comes the throw, safe, the batter is number sixteen, it’s a fastball, strike, it’s 0 and one.”
It can be pretty funny how far he lags behind, or pretty annoying, depending on your mood. The extra challenge of this game is to keep yourself together enough to focus. It’s mania trying to remember how many outs there are when you’re listening to this guy NOT EVER SHUT UP.
He even talks when you’re on the pause screen. I press pause to go to the bathroom, I come back, and he’s like, “The score is Oakland, one, Milwaukee, nothing. The runner’s on first,” followed by a cute organ tune and a big ovation, like some lady just took off her top in the stands.
If I can stop joking for a second, I sincerely applaud the effort. Commentary in video games had to start somewhere. Also, worth noting, you can turn off the commentary if you want, and the audio is pretty good otherwise.
Anyway, this game is standard old-school stuff, but it’s a solid, hard-hitting version of standard old-school stuff.
Published May 23, 2017
Updated November 14, 2024