It couldn’t have come at a more crucial time, either. The real life pro characters served as an introduction to the league for a generation of fans. My brother and I called it a “computer game” and a console was a totally alien concept until a couple years later.īackyard Baseball really was a classic game. It’s so old that video game wasn’t even a term I knew.
Watching the juice-box go down taught pitcher fatigue, I learned how to mix speedsters with power and it was also the first video game I ever got hooked on. I was six years old when the game came out and clearly remember that it providing my earliest feel for baseball. Now, you wanna talk 2000’s nostalgia? Backyard Baseball will provide an enormous wave of it. As Ichiro walks away, Albert Pujols is now the only remaining active player from Backyard Baseball 2003. If you were born in the 90’s, the retirement of Ichiro hits in a different way. Ichiro Was One Of Two Remaining Active Players From Backyard Baseball 2003 When combining both his NPB and MLB stats, Ichiro is the all-time leader in hits with 4,367 and is a member of the major league 3,000 hit club. Ichiro also proved to the world that the NPB is a legitimate league and that image continues to this day. His success paved the way for other NPB players – such as Hideki Matsui, Yu Darvish and Kenta Maeda to get large MLB contracts right off the bat while delivering All Star caliber production. What Ichiro’s career has meant to Japanese baseball is unrivaled. Ichiro Suzuki will retire after a 19-year career in MLB.