Welcome to TJ's Time Machine, a new regular feature here at Operation Sports. Join TJ Cutini as he takes you back for a look at classic sports titles spanning the last three decades of gaming history.

TJ's Time Machine

As I sat and watched so many historic milestones being reached this week in baseball, I got a bit nostalgic. I suppose every baseball fan does a little bit of reminiscing whenever a record falls. But my nostalgia wasn’t so much about the baseball I was watching on my television. It was about the baseball I could control on my television so many years ago. I’m talking about one of the greatest baseball games to ever grace any console. I’m talking Baseball Stars.

And so this week, we set the time machine back to 1989. The Nintendo Entertainment System was king. Kevin Mitchell was in the midst of a powerful 49 home run season, and my buddy Taylor and I were staying up all night to try to get our “Steele Creek All-Stars” to eclipse the “Lovely Ladies” in the area of prestige.

Baseball Stars was a game with a feature set that would soon become the norm in sports gaming. You could create your own team. You could name your own players. You could build your team’s attributes through money you earned in each win. It was truly an RPG in the guise of a baseball game.

You can play Baseball Stars in any number of ways. You could use an already existing team just for kicks. The “American Dreams” (no relation to Dusty Rhodes) were a team made up of the greatest players ever to grace the diamond – with obviously changed names to avoid the need for pesky licensing contracts. Instead of Babe Ruth, you simply have “Babe”. Instead of Hank Aaron, it’s just “Hank”. You get the picture.

I prefer though, to play Baseball Stars the way it was meant to be played. To me, this game is all about creating your own team.

We’ll start off by creating the O.S. Sluggers. I can hear the “Lovely Ladies” shaking in their skirts already. Team creation is fairly simple. You pick a city name and a team name. Then, it’s on to the logo selection screen. There aren’t a whole lot of choices available. Whoever decided on the logos must have had a bird fetish because there is not one, not two, but three bird logos to choose from. You can also pick a polar bear (because who in Antarctica doesn’t play baseball?), a cat, a baseball with eyes, and a few selected letters. O is not an option here, so we’ll go with the baseball with eyes. As I think back, this is probably the one I picked most often as a kid.

Now that we have our name and logo, it’s time for the real fun to begin – to name our players. Back in my childhood, we weren’t so much worried about having accurate authentic rosters. We had much more fun putting our friends’ name in the game. So that’s what we’ll do here.

As I type in each of my player’s name, I’m reminded of how tedious this whole process is. Instead of having a virtual keyboard which has become the norm in sports games, I am forced to scroll through a linear representation of the alphabet to name each guy.

Fret not though, as this is presumably the only time you’ll ever need to meander through this part of the game. Once your player’s are all named, you’ll never have to worry about that again.

Now that we have our team, our logo, and all of our players named, it’s time to move on to the real meat of this game – League Play.

Once you set your league up, you’ll play through your schedule. Unheard of in it’s time, this game tracks stats such as batting average, home runs, and ERA for pitchers. It’ll keep track of all those stats for you as you progress through the league.

The idea here is to earn as much money as possible so you can upgrade and improve your players. The smart way to get started is to do a two team league with ten games, with your team and the Lovely Ladies as the two participants. The reason behind this is that the Lovely Ladies are high on a rating called “prestige”, and the prestige rating carries the biggest payout when it’s time to collect your cash at the end of a game. The more money, the better your team becomes.

As you improve your team, you’ll have the opportunity to actually purchase new players, another concept not yet seen in baseball video games. Of course, the better the player, the higher their contract will cost.

League play is just one way to play Baseball Stars. There is the standard versus mode as well, which is best spent showing off your custom team, especially after you’ve gotten it to the point where you’re competing with the American Dreams on a regular basis.

Baseball Stars was truly a game ahead of it’s time. Ask just about any late 20’s or 30 something about his favorite NES baseball game, and chances are that Baseball Stars will be on the top of their list. From the custom team creation, to the ability to rename all of your players, and the RPG aspects of it, it’s a title that’s screaming to be released on either the Wii’s Virtual Console or the Xbox 360 Live Arcade. Maybe then, a whole new generation could find out just how sweet it is to beat the skirts off the Lovely Ladies.