I played a ton of baseball games on the computer back in the 1980s, especially once I got a Commodore 64; I loved MicroLeague, Street Sports Baseball and especially Hardball, the game I blame for my errant belief that “offspeed” was a specific type of pitch. (Pro tip: It’s not.)
When we got our first PC in the house, though — With a speedy 286 processor! And 256K of RAM! — I scored a copy of the game that might as well have been written just for me: Earl Weaver Baseball.
Advertisement
Most of the sports games I’d played to that point were action-based, meaning that you were controlling one of the players and thus the games were based on dexterity or quickness. There were a few exceptions — the first computer sports game I ever played was a football game on a TI 99/4A, a game that taught me what a screen pass and a prevent defense were — but there really wasn’t a good baseball game out there for someone who loved reading about trades and signings and prospects coming up, or who liked the nuts and bolts of in-game managing. Earl Weaver Baseball incorporated both of those things and did so with a unique engine that took players’ stats and used them to determine the probabilities of certain events happening when a specific pitcher faced a specific hitter.
In EWB, you could play GM to some extent, but true to the Hall of Fame manager whose name was in the title, it was the in-game strategy that made the game so good. You could see players’ stats but also would see ratings for their key characteristics, not too dissimilar in concept from the scouting world’s tools. Hitters would get ratings for power and speed, as well as their ability to execute a hit-and-run (which I assume Weaver loved) or bunt (which I have to think he hated); pitchers got ratings for velocity, control and stamina (called “fatigue”); fielders got ratings for range and arm. You could set your lineup and choose a starting pitcher, or just “let Earl choose.”
Within the games, you also could try various tactics such as a hit-and-run or a run-and-hit, taking a longer lead to try to steal, shifting fielders, holding runners, guarding the lines, or having the first or third baseman charge for a bunt. You’d also have to get relievers “ready” before you could bring them in, and could call for a mound conference if your pitcher was starting to struggle.
I spoke to Eddie Dombrower, one of the primary developers of the game (along with Don Daglow, creator of the games Utopia, Dungeon, and the 1972 text-based Star Trek game), about how the game came about and how the designers made it so far ahead of its time. “Don hired me to come work on a baseball game idea that we released for Intellivision called Intellivision World Series Baseball,” Dombrower recalls. (That game might be best remembered for its commercials, which featured the erudite author and sportswriter George Plimpton.) “It had old-timers (players), MLB wouldn’t give us permission to use their names, so we used their real stats but used the names of our staffers.”
Advertisement
“Don, like me, grew up playing games like Strat-O-Matic,” Dombrower says. “He was a big baseball fan and that was his passion. When he was in college he developed a precursor to the philosophy that he came up with for using statistics on a computer. It was pretty rudimentary in terms of inputs and outputs, but it was the basis of what we did over the next ten years at Intellivision and then at EA. He started the notion, like in Strat-O-Matic or APBA: how do you meld the hitters’ and pitchers’ stats together? How do you use statistical analysis rather than a dice roll?”
That alone set Earl Weaver Baseball apart from its peers, which could be fun but often felt more random in their outcomes because they actually were more random in their outcomes. If you looked at the ratings and the stats in EWB, you could make smarter decisions — much as Weaver himself had a reputation for doing with his famous set of index cards showing player stats and tendencies.
“Don realized because of the statistical model nature of the game, Earl was the perfect person to be the spokesperson for it,” says Dombrower. “He made the deal with Earl and brought Earl to us. We met them in EA’s offices in Redwood City. In the first meeting we had planned a bunch of questions about how he chooses lineups and some situational things, and he literally got up in the room and showed us how cutoff plays worked, how relays worked. He had everyone stationed around the room, and talked about lineup strategies.”
Dombrower did burst the bubble around Weaver’s genius on one point, though. “We worked with a new company called STATS Inc, they were just getting going. We were using the red and green books, using those yearlong stats.” If you’re not old enough to remember those books, which MLB published until they were discontinued in 2016, they included the yearlong stats for the American League (red) and National League (green) from the previous season.
“It befuddled Earl. He asked, ‘Why would you look at last year’s stats? Why wouldn’t you look at what (the player) is doing this year or in the last few weeks?’ So he’d have stats on individual matchups, on those famous stacks of cards of one-on-one matchups. It took a couple of matchups before he understood that we didn’t have that kind of data so we had to simulate it. Slowly but surely he got it, and he would help us refine how the lineup worked, saying, ‘Oh no, that guy would never bat No. 2.’ We did the same thing with substitutions, getting guys up in the bullpen, pitching rotations, pitching changes, and so on. We’d say, ‘this is how the game is simulating what you would do!’ All based on this initial statistics model.”
Advertisement
The other thing that set EWB apart, even with its pedestrian graphics to today’s eyes, was the way everything that played out on the screen resembled an actual baseball game. You could play in any current or historical stadium; if you played in Fenway Park, your screen would show the Green Monster, and a ball hit to left field would hit the wall and be played accordingly. Fielders would also move in realistic directions, something Dombrower describes as the players “acting autonomously based on what Earl tells them to do.” This showed up in large ways, such as fielders prioritizing stopping runners from scoring, and small ways, such as fielders moving into the right position to back up a play, even though it’s just cosmetic. “I got a call from one of the testers one day, saying, ‘We just had our first triple play! I’m so glad you coded it!’” Dombrower remembers. “I said ‘I never coded it.’ The players just knew to do it.”
I think back about Earl Weaver Baseball the way that many people speak about Strat-O-Matic helping build their understanding of in-game tactics like platoon advantages. Because the game modeled performance from statistics, considered many of the things Weaver pioneered on the field and wrote about in “Weaver on Strategy“, and attempted to model things like pitcher fatigue, it made players think about managerial decisions in a new light — especially if, like me, they hadn’t played Strat before. It was way ahead of its time.
Sadly, the sequel, Earl Weaver Baseball 2, was rushed to release, and the images it used were so large that computers of that time couldn’t process the graphics fast enough. The game was one of the first that was designed to allow players to mod it, and also had a manager editor that allowed you to alter any of the 20 managers who came with the base game.
There was an iOS app for a few years, which Dombrower coded as a “labor of love,” but otherwise EWB exists only on abandonware sites. Its spiritual successor is obviously Out of the Park, which has carried that torch for two decades now, allowing players to be would-be GMs as well as managers, but I’m not allowed to play that game any more — by myself, because I know I could spend way too many hours doing it.
(Photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
