The image is iconic.
A smiling, chubby, cartoon child in a banana-yellow backward hat. Two jet-black eyes just below the hat’s blue brim dot the center of his head the size of a prize-winning pumpkin. On that massive melon, which is responsible for more than half the kid’s body, lies an elongated grin shaped like a boomerang. An ill-fitting white T-shirt with red trim, revealing a paunch and a belly button, completes the ensemble.
This is Pablo Sanchez, the most legendary, mythical video game character that never was.
And he’s back, with all his friends.
Backyard Baseball, the iconic point-and-click video game from the early 2000s, is set to be refurbished and released by a company named Playground Productions “in the coming months.” Specific details remain scarce; no gameplay footage has been released. But there exists an interactive website, quotes from Playground Production bigwigs and even an online shop full of Backyard Baseball brick-a-brack.
There’s also a “Backyard Sports Official” Instagram page, a statement that would have made zero sense in 1997, when the original Backyard Baseball title was released by Humongous Entertainment.
That game, which featured 30 bespoke, highly detailed, playable neighborhood kids in a point-and-click setting, became a massive success. Its successor, Backyard Baseball 2001, took things to the next level by including 31 MLB players as kids within the game. That title became something of a cult classic even as the Backyard Sports series dwindled into irrelevance by the end of the decade. There was a resurrection of the series in the mid-2010s, which produced an unsatisfying, mobile-only version of the game.
And so the return of Backyard Baseball — brilliantly teased in a 45-second YouTube video — is enough to make this dorky, 28-year-old baseball fan jump for joy. I cannot be the only one.
For anybody who engaged with the game growing up, the new trailer conjures up a firehose of memories. Sitting at your parents’ computer for hours upon hours, until your eyes turned bleary and bloodshot. The computer’s floor-bound desktop, roaring and whirring like an airplane engine. Play for hours, and the machine would heat itself up like a cast-iron skillet. Point-and-click, point-and-click, taking the Melonheads to glory as time froze and sped by at the same time.
The 30 playable kids, with elaborate background stories and endearing personalities, became your friends. From the barefoot, frog-toting, country-bumpkin energy of Marky Dubois to the baseball-hardo dedication of Stephanie Morgan to the rock-music-loving, headphone-wearing Achmed Khan. The sheer diversity of the character group was rare for an era filled with interchangeable, white-dude video game protagonists: Half the playable characters are girls, 16 present as minorities, and Kenny Kawaguchi plays from a wheelchair.
It’s no coincidence that the game really took off when the pro players — one from each team, plus two Cincinnati Reds because Ken Griffey Jr. joined the team late in the game’s development — were added for the 2001 edition. The confluence of imaginary neighborhood kids and the sport’s most famous characters created this beautiful combination of limitlessness and accessibility. You saw yourself in one of the fictional kids, which made the pros feel like your friends.
Since its demise, Backyard Baseball has become something of a social media engagement nostalgia bomb. One can simply send out a picture of Pablo Sanchez with the caption “real ones know” and watch the likes stream in. Sanchez, with his diminutive stature, squeaky voice and oodles of skill, became the enduring image of a game that, for many, was left in the past. Shirts with his likeness have been available online for years, and scores of Twitter accounts sport his avatar. Multiple professional players have used Sanchez’s custom, in-game song as their walk-up song.
And just last week, Royals superstar shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. used a bat featuring Pablo’s face during Players Weekend. Witt, like Pablo did so many times in the virtual world, went yard.
Backyard Baseball has also lived on thanks to the efforts of a small but ferocious online community of players who found a way to make the 2001 version of the game compatible with modern technology. There’s even an active competitive league. But while interest never dwindled among young adults, the success of the new title will hinge on whether Playground Productions can make the game compelling for a younger generation.
Yahoo Sports learned that the initial version of the game will not feature current MLB players. In order for that to change with any future releases, Playground Productions would need to reach a licensing agreement with the MLB Players Association. It’s likely that the production company wants to see how successful the new release will be before committing to a licensing deal like the one MLB The Show has. It’s also worth noting that to use MLB team uniforms and logos, Playground Productions would need to have a separate agreement with the league.
Until then, it’s Melonheads, Bombers and Wombats galore.
Even though users won’t be able to launch 2D moonshots with Shohei Ohtani right away, the return of the Backyard Sports universe is an undeniable good. The entire series did such a great job of tapping into the wonderful innocence of unorganized, youth pick-up sports. For now, the lack of active MLB stars will put more of a focus on reestablishing the fictional characters that gave the series its trademark charm.
And while the user base of that original release is approaching or beyond 30 years old, there’s no doubt that whenever the new Backyard Baseball drops, it will make waves. Similar to the hype around the recently released NCAA Football 25, there’s nothing wrong with feeling young again, nothing wrong with a return to simplicity.
Nothing wrong with a little point-and-click.
