In Backyard Baseball, players take a managerial role by creating a team of different players to compete against opponents. As the game progresses, there are some professionals that become available or 'unlockable' including Randy Johnson, Derek Jeter, and Mike Piazza. Some of the professional players that were available included Chipper Jones, Frank Thomas, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano, Ichiro Suzuki, Sammy Sosa, Jim Thome, Albert Pujols, Nomar Garciaparra, Ken Griffey Jr., and Barry Bonds. Over the years, the idea of 'Pro players as kids' became popular, and the original statistics and looks of the players changed. The original game consisted of 30 neighborhood kids from which the player must build a team. Some of the game titles that were created include Backyard Baseball, Backyard Baseball 2001-2010, and Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers. There have been eleven different versions of the game since 1997. It is part of the Backyard Sports series. Later games were featured on Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Wii, and iOS. It was first released in October 1997 for Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, Wii, Windows, iOS, Xbox 360, Game Boy Advance, GameCube, Macintoshīackyard Baseball is a series of baseball video games for children which was developed by Humongous Entertainment and published by Atari.
