Earl Weaver Baseball

Earl Weaver Baseball was ahead of its time, and was a primary factor in making me a baseball fan for life. I was 11 during the 1986 World Series between the Mets and the Red Sox, and that was the series that got the initial hooks into me. But it was a computer game really got me. The lack of games available for my Tandy 1000 made it an easy decision to check it out. While it was playable with a joystick, it was the depth of the simulation and manager mode that made the game special for me. Also, it included a roster of real baseball players to manage. You could have Hall of Famers from different generations go head to head to determine the best of all time. But the one feature that was most important to me was the ability to add my own players.

Every year as baseball season started, I would dutifully pick up one of the preview magazines with the stats from the previous year. I would make all star teams of current players to take on the all time greats. I would take the time to enter entire modern teams and have them face off, managing against the AI. I doubt there is any game in the last 30 years that I spent more time with than Earl Weaver Baseball. While all sorts of sports games have implemented manage only modes since then, the simulation stands up even today. (No one is going to hit 70 homers in a season of Earl Weaver. I guess they didn’t include virtual performance enhancers.) For that reason alone, I think the game stands up as an all time great.