Baseball Games

Baseball games focus mostly on batting: you wait for the pitch, swing at the right moment and try to send the ball as far as you can. There are around 45, all free and with nothing to download, and a few cricket games have slipped in among them.

Baseball basics

A game has nine innings. In each one, one team bats while the other plays defense, and the sides switch when the defense gets three outs. The batter tries to hit the ball the pitcher throws and run the four bases back to where he started; if he sends it out of the park, it's a home run and he scores right away. The games on the list rarely recreate all of that: they keep the flashiest part, the batting.

There are more rules the games almost never include. Three strikes and the batter is out, and four balls outside the strike zone give him a free walk to first base. That's why in real baseball you don't swing at everything, and in the more complete games, learning to let bad pitches go gives you an edge.

What you'll find

The home run games, like Homerun Rally, Homerun Mania, Homerun Baseball and Baseball Home Run Boy, are batting challenges: how many balls can you send far before the game ends. If you want more of a game feel, Baseball Pro Game, Baseball Classic, Baseball Championship, Ultimate Baseball, Super Baseball and Extreme Baseball lean that way.

In cricket, the batter defends a set of stumps, the wickets, and scores runs by running between them, so it's less like baseball than it might seem.

For humor and characters, there's Cat Baseball, Dinokids Baseball, Bateando Pingüinos, Candy Stand Baseball and SpongeBob Slammin Slagger. And the cricket ones, which also use a bat and ball but follow other rules: Cricket Live, Online Cricket 2011 and ICC T20 Worldcup.

To hit better

• Don't swing too early. It's better to be a little late than ahead of the pitch.
• Watch how the ball comes in, because the right moment to click changes with the speed of the pitch.
• If the game has different kinds of pitches, learn to tell them apart before raising the difficulty.
• To get started, Baseball or Homerun Mania give you a quick idea of the mechanics.