Some friends and I were reminiscing about NBA Jam the other night. Two-on-two. Rim-rattling dunks. Three straight buckets and you’re on fire. It grossed more than $1 billion in its first year. So why did baseball never get one?
Midway tried. Twice. In the mid-’90s, the studio behind NBA Jam built Power-Up Baseball, put a handful of cabinets in Chicago arcades, and pulled them within a couple of weeks. The problem was length. “You can’t predict the gameplay time,” its designer said. Midway’s later MLB Slugfest had an on-fire mode, but it kept seven innings and the base paths.
Both kept the slowest parts of baseball.
The idea: MLB Slam. Three-on-three backyard Wiffle ball with real big-leaguers. No base running — just pitching and hitting.
Backyard rules. Ghost runners instead of base running. Over the fence is gone. Three innings, done before anyone calls you in for dinner.
Three hits in a row and you’re on fire. Flaming bat, bigger sweet spot, more pop. You stay hot until you make an out.
Every home run earns a bat flip. The higher and the more rotations, the bigger the style points. Baseball spent a century calling that bad manners. Then MLB’s own 2018 playoff ad had Ken Griffey Jr. telling everyone to let the kids play.
Don’t believe me? Play it. I used Claude to draft this post, and while I was tweaking the text, it just built this: Backyard Slam. Arcade graphics, a neighborhood crowd, flaming bats, and a bat-flip meter. It works on your phone.
A window-smashing homer, a 95-foot bat flip, and a pitcher on fire. (Play Backyard Slam)
The game was the easy part. The names on the lineup card are not.
Tater, Flapjack, and Puddlejump, standing in for real big leaguers.
The catch: Everything that makes it MLB Slam belongs to someone else.
Two locks, two keys. MLB controls the team names, logos, and uniforms. The players’ union controls every active player’s name, image, and likeness. Backyard Baseball needed both licenses to put 31 big-leaguers in a kids’ game.
Rights don’t last. When MLB Slugfest was remastered in 2025, Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas, and Ken Griffey Jr got swapped for generic stand-ins. Even NBA Jam never had Michael Jordan, who controlled his own likeness.
Labor is the wild card. The players’ contract expires at 11:59 p.m. on December 1, and owners are expected to lock them out the next day. The last time that happened, MLB scrubbed current players’ photos from its own website.
Even the ball is trademarked. “Wiffle” belongs to The Wiffle Ball, Inc. of Shelton, Connecticut.
The bottom line: In 1993, NBA Jam took a team of engineers and artists. Today, a playable demo shows up in the time it takes to draft a blog post. The code is cheap now. The rights never will be.
MLB Players Inc., please steal this idea. I’m not building the real thing. I just want to play it.
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