Super Baseball 2020: A 29 year-old video game that somehow knew baseball would be extremely weird in 2020
Super Baseball 2020 is a video game that I first played in 2020. That makes sense, until you realize that the game came out in 1991. The game is a sci-fi near-future take on the sport of baseball. Well, the near-future is here so what better time to dive into this old game.
If you’re also unfamiliar with Super Baseball 2020 then you are in for a treat because this game is bizarre. I can’t imagine there is any other baseball video game that tweaks the rules of the sport more than this one. There are landmines in the field, robot upgrades(and downgrades), new rules to the field of play, jetpacks and other oddities.
Back in the ‘before times’ this game seemed absolutely absurd. Why did they think baseball would change so much in less than 30 years? But over the last few months, having looked at the rapid and seemingly random changes to real life baseball this year, I’ve come to appreciate this game’s take on an unknown future. It’s not easy predicting how something will be in 30 years and this game actually came to some interesting conclusions. Some very wrong conclusions, sure, but still interesting. We’ll cover the world of Super Baseball 2020 and see what predictions they got right and wrong about it’s real-world counterpart.
It’s also a video game that’s meant to be fun so we’ll look at the actual gamey-ness too and see whether it’s worth your time to play. Unlike a lot of games from 1991, this game is playable on PS4, XBOX One and Switch so you don’t have to jump through many hoops to try it yourself.
Elements that were predictive(Kind of)
The Crowd Protection
Super Baseball 2020 has a wonky fan situation that foresaw a future in which baseball games were simply too dangerous for fans to be exposed throughout a ballpark. There is essentially a hard transparent roof over the fans. If you’ve ever been to an aquarium you can imagine what is going on. Instead of walking under a swimming shark the fans are rowdily cheering as a popup clanks on top of them and bounces back into play. And yes, it is in play, at least part of it. If a “foul” ball lands in the stands further down the line than the dugout it is actually a live and fair ball. It’s reminiscent of the back netting in the Arena Football League.
The purple line shows the border of fair territory. Notice that many balls that land in the stands are fair balls.
This concept is super weird and doesn’t really provide a good gameplay experience. I’ve played enough baseball video games in my life to have an instinctive reaction to hitting a foul fly ball. There is typically a momentary annoyance, perhaps even a small break to munch on a salty treat. But not in Super Baseball! You must wait to see if it lands in the “fair” portion of the stands.
Since the release of Super Baseball 2020 in 1991, real life baseball has taken precautions to keep fans safe. Especially over the last decade, fan safety has become a large topic as visual distractions like smart phones have increased the danger of fans sitting along the foul lines. As of 2018 all MLB teams have had protective netting extending to at least the end of the dugout, with many clubs having netting that goes all the way down the foul line. This protects the fans from line drives that have proven extremely dangerous over the years.
Fans in choice seats are now caged. They can’t interact with players as they used to, they are blocked from grabbing most foul balls and their view is compromised - source
That overly dramatic description of modern baseball actually describes Super Baseball 2020 really well. So in that sense, Super Baseball 2020 was dead on in it’s prediction of fan protection.
But it turns out, the video game didn’t take it far enough because in 2020 MLB took their protection from foul balls further than ever by only allowing fans to show up as card board versions of themselves. As I haven’t had the fortune of going as cardboard yet, I can’t say how that status changes the experience. But at least nobody is getting hit in the head with a line drive this season.
Home Run Emphasis
Super Baseball 2020 foresaw a future baseball landscape where homers were too easy. That, in itself, is a fairly accurate take on modern baseball. Super Baseball 2020’s solution, however, is where things get weird. In a world where player’s are too strong and hit the ball too far they decided to drastically shrink the width of where a homerun can land. Instead of foul-line to foul-line home runs now have to be hit in a specific zone beyond centerfield. Otherwise a ball yanked over the fence down the line just bounces back in play. Think of the baseball field in Super Baseball 2020 as having an impossibly high Green Monster in left and right field.
The green border is the only place where you can hit a homer. At the bottom is the foul territory, bordered in light purple.
This fundamental adjustment to the rules works pretty well in video game form. The early 90’s era of baseball video games was all about swing timing. Shrinking down the possible homerun territory puts a ton of emphasis on perfect swing timing. Sure it’s a bit frustrating when you blast a ball that would be a home run in any other video game but I overcame that frustration by simply viewing that hit as a slightly mistimed swing. It’s all about hitting it back up the middle. It’s satisfying and makes homers feel even better than a regular baseball video game.
As much as I mostly like it in the game, I would hate it as a solution in real baseball. Homers yanked down the line are the most visually appealing hit. It’s the type of homerun that looks the most impressive because they go further into the stands than centerfield homers. The audience gets a jaw dropping perspective seeing a ball land in the upper-deck at a distance that would be a wall scraper if it were hit to center.
So Super Baseball 2020’s solution to a home run problem is funky and wouldn’t work in real life but even the fact that they viewed home runs as something that would need to be quelled in the future is interesting on it’s own. Back in 1991 baseball didn’t really have a home run problem. This was before the steroid era of the late 90’s; before the new ballpark boom that started in the mid 90’s and brought a bunch of new(and smaller) parks into the league; and well before the current juiced ball era and subsequent Fly Ball Revolution that started in 2016.
Homer Runs Per Plate Appearance
Various solutions to the homerun problem have been brought up including, deadening the ball, or adding a league-wide humidifier but those aren’t exactly video game mechanics. The smaller home run zone is a creative tweak that is perfect for a video game and nothing else.
Robots
Perhaps it’s a stretch to say that this is in the predictive category given how robot-less modern baseball is but I still think they were on to something interesting. Super Baseball 2020 has robots all over the place. It’s more than just robot umps too, as robot players are common and even the human players have robotic aspects like jet pack boosted jumps.
The robots are charming as hell too. Just look at them run.
Robots aren’t perfect though as just like humans, they can get overworked, leading to them blowing up. It’s quite visceral, and sad. The good news is that it doesn’t kill them(can robots die?) it merely saps their skills. It’s much easier to be ignorant to the dangers of pitching in real life where pitching injuries occur under the surface.
Real life baseball clearly doesn’t have robot players yet but the game is much more robotic now than it was in 1991. For one thing, we have replay reviews which are essentially using technology to fix mistakes by the umpire. Speaking of umpires, MLB doesn’t use robot umps yet but the umps are graded by a robotic strikezone and robot umps are a hot topic around baseball. It feels completely inevitable that the near-future will contain a fully electronic strikezone. The game relies on “robots” much more today than it did in 1991 so I think Super Baseball 2020 was clearly on the right track, even if we are nowhere near the robotic nonsense that the video game contains.
Here’s a look at the technology that the robot umps use on close calls.
ELEMENTS THAT WERE Wrong
Meta Currency/In-Game Upgrades
In-game upgrades in a sports game immediately perks my ears up. I love the turbo meter implementation in a game like The Bigs or catching fire in MLB Slugfest. I thought Super Baseball 2020 might have been the precursor to all that. It turns out the feature is less awesome than the previously mentioned games but it’s still a feature that truly makes the game stand out.
The implementation of in-game upgrades is quite different than in those newer titles though. The Bigs and Slugfest operate under more of a “get a boost during this important moment” model. Super Baseball 2020 is closer to an RPG where you can upgrade various things for the rest of the game. Each player has an “A” “B” and “C” level of upgrade that you purchase for increasing costs. Yes, for some reason, “C” is a better upgrade than “A” in this game.
The ability to purchase these upgrades comes from cash rewards during the game for all sorts of results. For example: getting a base hit gets you $300, a solo homer is worth $4,000, making a jumping catch is $1,000. Once you search through the menus enough to find the upgrade screen you’re left with a very unsatisfying understanding of what your purchase actually gets you. Hmm, my second basemen is now on level “B”…okay. Then the game turns into a “Where’s Waldo” of trying to notice anything different about your second baseman. Was he that color before? I swear, he’s moving faster now. Maybe.
But sadly, real baseball has never come close to heading this direction. This feels like something that will forever be only found in a video game. The only real world possibility would be some type of mid-game steroid injection. Not likely.
BOMBS in the field…
This one is pretty self explanatory. Real life baseball doesn’t try to actively kill it’s participants. Super Baseball 2020 does. This was a very poor prediction for how baseball would be in 30 years.
Here’s how it works. After the first inning the umpire comes out and says that “crackers” have been placed throughout the field. Each subsequent inning, more landmines get placed. When you step on a land mine. Boom.
You can see where they are and they are extremely easy to avoid. It’s also impossible for your player to run into a mine if it’s off camera. So you don’t have to worry about your centerfielder never showing up to the warning track that you’re running him towards. The landmines are a big part of the overall experience in the game because you see them placed between every inning, yet they almost never affect the gameplay because it’s rare to actually step on them. I never saw the computer step on one and it only happened to me one time(see above). It’s definitely a let down as far as a gameplay mechanic.
Women in the Big leagues
I was a bit surprised when I found out this game had women in it. They don’t even make a big deal of it, they are just in the game. It’s pretty cool. There’s even two all-women teams. Side note: I haven’t mentioned how dumb the team names are yet so here’s your first example, the all-women teams are the Tropical Girls and the Battle Angels. Eeesh. It’s a video game from the early 90’s so no surprise that the women are sexualized but having females players in a baseball game is progressive in it’s own right. No baseball video game had ever done that. Even today you still can’t be a women in the create-a-player mode in The Show. For years video games have been improving in including women in lead roles, or having the option for the your character to be a women but the sports genre is behind and it needs to be fixed.
Since Super Baseball 2020’s release there have been some big moments for women in baseball but we still don’t really feel that close to seeing someone reach the Big Leagues. We’ve seen Mo’ne Davis take the world by storm when she threw a shutout in the 2014 Little League World series, but she plays softball now. So too does Melissa Mayeaux, who was a prominent baseball player before being forced into softball because no baseball program would give her a scholarship. We even saw a fictional TV show based on a female pitcher’s rookie season in the Majors. Sadly it was cancelled after one season. It’s clear that gender equality in baseball is nowhere near the lofty expectations that Super Baseball 2020 set.
BUNTING
This is a weird one but the computer constantly bunts in this game. It happened to me as often as four times in a row. And I can’t exactly say it’s a bad strategy. Fielding is clunky in this game and one of the most annoying quirks is that you can’t move your fielder after he has the ball. Aside from making a “pickle” extremely easy for the base runner, this makes bunt defense even tougher. If the ball is bunted to the first basemen he is unable to pick it up and run to the base.
One thing that is a viable strategy in Super Baseball 2020 is bunting with the bases loaded. The catcher comes screaming out but as soon as he picks up the ball it’s an easy run because the catcher is glued to the grass no matter how close to home plate they are. You might think this is just a quirk that only a human would take advantage of but this is programmed into the AI. The AI bunts at least 30% of the time when they have the bases loaded. It’s hilarious, frustrating and absurd, all at once.
Meanwhile, in real baseball 2020 has killed the bunt faster than cruise liners. This season brought the designated hitter to the National League which has all but ended the sacrifice bunt that was already on the decline. This season Baseball Reference tracked 126 sacrifice bunts, but remember the season was shortened. In a full season we would’ve expected 340 sacrifice bunts this year. Back in 1991, when Super Baseball 2020 was made there were 1624 sacrifice bunts and no sign that it was going away, but also no sign that it was becoming more popular. The bunt totals remained fairly consistent up until 2013 when they dropped below 1400 and it’s been a fast drop since. Down to 776 in 2019 before the DH instantly cut that number in half this season. The bunt is clearly going extinct and Super Baseball 2020 did not see that coming.
Is this video game actually worth your time?
There is a chance you’ve made it down here thinking, wow I need to check this game out. But sadly, once you get past the enjoyment of discovering some of the oddities, what’s left is a baseball game that is simply not that fun. I had hopes of mastering this game; playing as every team and completing a season. In the end, I had to force myself to play this game and couldn’t get myself to play much more than 10 hours of it. It is dated beyond belief and the gameplay just doesn’t stack up compared to the litany of good baseball games that came out in the early 90’s.
Super Baseball 2020 is full of game design choices that are complete head scratchers.
Remember when I said I liked the smaller home run zone? Well for the same reason, the increased fair zone down the line is bad. Shrinking the home run zone rewards good timing. But the seating area down the line that is in fair play rewards bad timing. Often I would have a crappy emergency swing that produced late contact and was rewarded by the ball going down the line and landing in the bleachers for an easy double. Meanwhile you could absolutely crank a ball, I’m talking Bonds at Yankee stadium style, and it’s also just a double, or even an out because the base runner is slow.
If the second basemen throws out a runner at first on a ball that goes off the wall, that’s a sign that the game is broken. The speed of play and field proportions are just off.
Real life baseball has this issue too; there are bloop doubles and line drive outs, but Super Baseball 2020 kicks it up a notch.
One of worst things this game does is make you watch the computer root around through the menus when they make a roster change. I thought my controller had been taken over by a ghost when all of a sudden the game started clicking and moving in the menus when the computer wanted to make a pitching change.
In a continuation of general interface and menu issues, this game is frantic. There are no aspects of this game that give you enough time to properly read information. During team selection you have 5 seconds to choose what league you want to play in, then 10 seconds to choose your team. That’s not an exaggeration. When there is an umpire announcement, which happens between innings or after an injury, a huge wall of text pops up and you have one eye-blink to take it all in. Everything in this game is at warp speed and it’s to the detriment of actually enjoying and taking in the good parts of this game.
The culmination of this lightning pace is the arcade style timer that the game has. Every five minutes the game just stops(even if it’s in the middle of a play) and forces you to ‘put more coins in.’ Of course, since the game is on a console I only had to hit a button to continue playing but the disruption never stopped being annoying. Eventually I found out a way to add time to the timer in the settings, making it possible to go a full 30 minutes without the interruption, but you can’t remove it entirely.
The only thing worse than the timer is the "Game Over” screen that can strike seemingly whenever. It completely ends the game and takes you back to the title screen. Doesn’t matter the score or inning. It seems to usually happen in the 4th or 5th inning.
This game is something else. I’m glad I discovered it and I’m glad I tried it out. It does a lot of wacky things and even made some solid predictions about baseball 30 years in the future. Aside from the novelty though, it’s just not a game I would recommend playing.