Backyard Baseball '97

Backyard Baseball is a baseball sports video game designed for and aimed at children. There are three main modes: Pick-Up Game, League Play and Batting Practice. A spectator mode exists which pits two randomly chosen computer-controlled teams together. The player can also view their trophies won, their records and view baseball cards of the characters.

Before playing a pick-up game or starting a season, the user can change the set difficulty, toggle tee-ball (in Pick-Up Play only), switch from 6- or 9-inning games, and toggle errors. In both modes, a player can create their own team by customizing their team's name and color and drafting nine players from a pool of thirty characters. During the game, there are many cartoonish power-ups that can be used either by the pitcher (earned by recording a strikeout) or by the batter (earned by getting a hit on a power-up pitch when playing offense).

Backyard Baseball was conceived by Nick Mirkovich, who took inspiration from various baseball-themed movies focusing on children such The Sandlot (1993). The project was later put into action during the 1995 American League Division Series. Backyard Baseball was first revealed at the 1997 E3 in June.

Backyard Baseball was released to moderate reviews: the game was praised for its diversity and Computer Gaming World cited the easy to learn difficulty.

Reviews of the 2024 remaster noted that it was functionally identical to the original release. GameSpot viewed this as a missed opportunity to implement some quality-of-life features. Sports Gamers Online praised the game's mobile version for its presentation and lack of advertisements, microtransactions, or internet requirement. The Otaku Authority stated that the game worked surprisingly well on consoles. In a more critical review, My Gamer felt that porting a 28-year-old video game to modern platforms was unnecessary.

The success of Backyard Baseball led to the release of more Backyard Sports titles, including updated versions of Backyard Baseball, starting with Backyard Baseball 2001, which would be the first Backyard Baseball game to include Major League teams and professional sports players, a tradition started in Backyard Football.

A remaster of Backyard Baseball entitled Backyard Baseball '97 was released for Microsoft Windows on October 10, 2024, via Steam, as part of the Backyard Sports franchise. The remaster was developed by Mega Cat Studios and published by Playground Productions. A hacked CD-ROM copy of the game was used as basis for the remaster, as the source code of the original game has been lost; as a result, the remaster only initially supported Windows. The remaster supports several Steam features not found in the original release, including leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saves. The remaster is Steam Deck-verified and supports the use of gamepads, which were not supported in the original release.