Review by: Pete Hines
Published: April 24, 1999

April usually marks two important events for me: 1) The arrival of plenty of computer baseball games; 2) The Orioles blowing ungodly amounts of money by having another horrific year as cellar-dwellers in the American League East. I only actually look forward to one of these things, take a wild guess which one it is. The first baseball game to arrive on my doorstep was Triple Play 2000 (TP2K) from EA Sports, complete with Sammy Sosa’s giant mug on the box cover. Without insulting your intelligence too much, let me tell you about some of the basic elements and then we’ll look at how the game stacks up against the competition.

You have several modes of play to choose from in TP2K, including single game, season, and playoffs, as well as a home run derby competition. The single game allows you to jump into a quick contest between any two clubs in Major League Baseball plus two all-star teams. You can play one, three, five, seven, or nine inning games, choose weather and wind effects, day or night setting and so forth. Regardless of which mode you use to play, all of these options are available, as are a number of difficulty settings. You can set the overall game difficulty to rookie, pro, all-star, or you can customize it yourself. Each of these settings changes the default settings for other things, like whether or not the computer helps with fielding, throwing, baserunning and so on. You can also choose to control pitches while they’re on the way to the plate (makes things too easy really) and adjust the skill level of your’s and the computer’s players.

While TP2K is much more of an action title than it is a simulation, you can still view stats for all players and choose to hold drafts as part of a season. You can also trade players, sign free agents, or simply create a new player of your own design. Of course TP2K features all 30 MLB teams and all of the players too, with almost everyone placed on the appropriate teams with the exception of a few, late roster changes that couldn’t possibly have been included. When you go through a draft you can determine the order in which teams will pick and decide whether or not you want to use the points cap, which is the equivalent of a salary cap and limits the number of top-quality players you can have on a given team. When you’re ready to play, you move through a schedule of games and you can choose to play a single game, all of the games, or none of the games. At any point during the season you can check stats, trade, sign free agents, and so on.

You can play a season as short as 15 games or as long as 162 and can decide to have single elimination playoffs or five and seven-game series each step of the way. The games you don’t actually want to play yourself you can have the computer simulate and generate results. The playoff mode allows you to focus on the post season and offers the same basic setup in the way of scheduling length of games and series. If you’d rather just take a couple swings at the fences, try the newly revamped home run derby. Unlike the modern version where each player gets a certain number of chances all at once, the derby in TP2K is a throwback to the earlier days of baseball with each player having a certain number of outs in a series of innings. All the big hitters are included and I promise that you won’t have a problem with pitching like McGwire did at the All-Star game last year.