Electronic Arts, while legendary in the sports genre throughout the 1990s on account of perennial favorites like the Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL series, could never quite get baseball right. While it boasted the best in football, basketball and hockey, EA failed to hit the grand slam with a great baseball sim. EA’s first foray into the national pastime was Tony La Russa’s Baseball, a multiplatform series which, like its namesake, was competent but lacked personality. EA tried again with MLBPA Baseball in 1994, but the game proved unengaging in view of its cartoonish graphics, lack of major league teams, and blustery gameplay. Giving up on the MLBPA line, EA soon after launched Triple Play Baseball, a capable simulation with quality graphics and the immersive EA feel that had made the company's other sports titles stand out. However, the 16-Bit Triple Play offerings also lacked the MLB license, and were buggy. (If you had, for example, a runner on first who had rounded second before a fly ball had been caught, you could return to the bag by leaving the base-paths and running across the infield grass.) EA kept Triple Play around for the length of the N64/PlayStation era, but the games gradually declined in quality, becoming increasingly arcadey over the years. The last of the Triple Play offerings for PS, N64, and PS2 have not aged favorably.
Three strikes did not make an out for EA, however, and the company inaugurated its fourth attempt at a baseball franchise with MVP Baseball 2003. The game featured very good graphics and a meter-based pitching and fielding mechanic, adding an unprecedented level of depth to aspects of baseball that were typically underdeveloped in even the most thoroughgoing simulations to that point. MVP 2003 was still far from perfect, though: just listen for the excessively woody, wallopy bat-on-ball sound effect and you'll quickly understand why the game is best enjoyed with the volume muted.
The next year, though, EA finally delivered its long-awaited baseball masterpiece. MVP Baseball 2004 kept all the positive features of its predecessor while polishing the presentation. The result was one of the most beautiful representations of America's pastime in any artistic medium. The confines are comely, with lovingly rendered major league stadiums, chatter-friendly minor league parks and even some classic old-timey ball-yards. As for gameplay, MVP 2004 segues from pitcher-batter duels to making the putout to slow-motion replays with a silky smoothness, transforming this sport commonly criticized for its glacial pace into a delightfully breezy visual and tactile experience. Every time you go yard, you feel it in your forearms. And you'll go yard a lot, as the game is generous with the homeruns; that said, MVP Baseball 2004 never feels like anything other than a straight-laced simulation.
If you’re looking for a better baseball game than MVP 2004, you’re really only left with the following year's MVP 2005. Even with the more powerful systems that came along in subsequent years and decades, few baseball games since have even approached these two EA offerings in quality. While MVP 2005 is the superior version, your correspondent confesses a special partiality for MVP 2004. It is, after all, the last game in which you can play as his beloved Montreal Expos, the only means by which you can still sky a towering blast into the bone-white ceiling of that major league mausoleum Stade Olympique while decked in blue pinstripes. On those grounds alone, MVP Baseball 2004 will never, for your correspondent, get old. It’s the spring, summer and fall of 2004 forever.