Tony La Russa Baseball is a baseball computer and video game console sports game series (1991-1997), designed by Don Daglow, Michael Breen, Mark Buchignani, David Bunnett and Hudson Piehl and developed by Stormfront Studios. The game appeared on Commodore 64, PC, and Sega Genesis, and different versions were published by Electronic Arts, SSI and Stormfront Studios. The artificial intelligence for the computer manager was provided by Tony La Russa, then manager of the Oakland Athletics and later the St. Louis Cardinals. The game was one of the best-selling baseball franchises of the 1990s. The game was based on the baseball simulation methods Daglow evolved through the Baseball mainframe computer game (1971) (the first computer baseball game ever written), Intellivision World Series Baseball (1983) and Earl Weaver Baseball (1987). TLB refined many of the simulation elements of Earl Weaver Baseball, including a few "firsts" of its own: The first version of La Russa, Tony La Russa's Ultimate Baseball, was released almost exactly twenty years after the first playable version of Baseball went live at Pomona College in 1971.

Games

Reception

Computer Gaming World in 1993 stated that Tony La Russa Baseball 2 was especially strong in league play. Although citing several bugs and stating that the action game "is not as clean as it should be", the magazine concluded "this is quite simply the best baseball game on the market". A reviewer for Electronic Gaming Monthly gave La Russa Baseball '95 a 70%, commenting that "The controls for the pitcher and the batter need some work. Animations of players are neat, but they slow down a bit. An okay revision from last year." In 1996, Computer Gaming World declared Tony La Russa Baseball 3 the 128th-best computer game ever released.