Accidental Aesop: Believe it or not, Pablo was more or less nearly intended to be this trope. This NPR interview states that he was originally designed to look like a character you wouldn't be likely to pick, due to being the shortest kid in the lineup, having his belly stick out from his shirt, and being Hispanic and not speaking any English so that he would look like a character who had little experience. Rather than making him a weak player, though, they decided to be ironic and make him the best player in the game (and we all know how that turned out). It essentially can be worked into the ultimate subtle "don't judge a book by its cover" moral.
Audience-Alienating Era: In terms of the voice casts, you won't find a whole lot of people who will claim the Audio Godz voices (those are the ones who worked on Sonic Adventure, by the way) note The games that feature these are Baseball 2003, Soccer 2004, and Football for the GameCube to be the best ones. It's bad enough that Lani Minella hogs the spotlight (she voices both of the announcers in two of the three games she was cast in!), it also doesn't help that she counts as a Replacement Scrappy for Vinnie the Gooch, who lost his very distinctive "you don't want to mess with me" tone that made him so memorable in the original Baseball games. There's also the fact that the voices make an excessive overuse of being really squeaky and too kiddy-sounding, which quickly becomes apparent and grating in the field chatter. It's telling that they were only used for a single year's worth of games before being dumped entirely, and most people didn't complain when they were.
In the original games, Pete Wheeler could master everything with his blazing speed. He eventually degraded into being the same as the other characters, thanks to the pros. He also Took a Level in Dumbass.
Pablo also got usurped by other players in a few of the games, temporarily taking him off the "best player" pedestal. An example would be the original Hockey where he got completely upstaged by Mike Modano, by no small margin either. He also is outshined by a few skaters in Skateboarding as well, although there it's less noticeable since it's not a competitive sport. The worst example is Hockey 2005, where he has the same number of stat points as Angela, and less stat points than Jorge, Kimmy, and even the Webbers, while Modano again upstages him through and through.
Broken Base: This series may have one of the single most divided fanbases in the history of gaming, which is impressive considering it's intended for kids.
First off, the most dividing point of the fanbase is the pro players. Do they add or do they take away from the game? Are they annoyingly overpowered? Some love them simply by being sports fanatics and loving the idea of being able to play with their favorite players and find it awesome just to see them being featured at all and being referred to by name, but other purists hate them because of their lame personalities and generic designs. Admittedly some games did it better than others, but the pros are the single most divisive element of the games.
Some players treat the games as Serious Business and put a ton of thought and effort in who they pick, deriding others who don't play exactly like them. Then there are others who of course say it's just a kid's game, and there's no need to take it so seriously.
Baseball 2003 and Soccer 2004 are divisive games as well, primarily because they made almost no changes aside from recasting the voices to the Audio Godz ones. On the one hand, because they're SCUMM-based titles they seem to have a competitive edge over all the games after (the SCUMM games are the most liked and fondly remembered, so the Nostalgia Filter is fully in play there), but the voice cast has some pretty mixed opinion, with a few saying that it was completely unnecessary and finding them vastly inferior to the old voices.
The Yaga games (Hockey, Football 2004, and Basketball 2004) introduced the redesigned characters and aesthetics, deprecated the old clubhouse menu scheme, and in general made a lot of changes that upset some long time fans but others found refreshing. Opinion on these tends to be the most mixed, since they're still 2D but made just enough changes that people can't agree whether they were worthy entries or not.
And finally, the 3D games, though Baseball 2005 seems to at least have an overall positive opinion. The rest, though, are in full-on mixed territory, especially Football 2006 (the last game officially made by the original Humongous Entertainment), due to its removal of a few characters and very weird gameplay mechanics that required you to use the mouse and the keyboard at the same time, with no simpler option offered.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The series is very well known for its unique and diverse cast of extremely memorable characters...and most of this doesn't even matter because for most players, once they figure out their lineup of choice, it can be really hard to not tempt yourself to take that lineup every time, especially because there's a good handful of characters that nearly everyone picks first (try finding anyone who doesn't start with Pablo). The first three games actually tried to avert this on single games by purposefully not having every character selectable (there will be some absent from the bleachers), but all this did was cause everyone to complain that they couldn't always pick their favorite character, so the mechanic was eradicated starting with Baseball 2001. And speaking of which, for the games that include the pros, this trope applies even more so because the pros have much higher stats than most of the Backyard Kids, making picking a team a near brainless process. The Basketball games are probably the worst offenders since your lineup consists of a mere five players, only three of which will be in play at a time — meaning you likely will never run out of good players to pick.
Achmed Khan is also popular, although to a much lesser extent, largely due to his amusing Metalhead personality. Being freakishly strong when batting in Baseball doesn't hurt either.
First Installment Wins: The original Baseball is by far the most iconic game in the series.
Fridge Brilliance: Pablo Sanchez only speaks simple Spanish sentences because English is his native tongue.
Half the pros. Many of them took steroids (Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa as examples), and many have their own specific reasons (Ricky Williams chose drugs over football).
One of the Backyard Kids' names is Dante Robinson — the same as one of the murderers (alongside his brother Justin) of 12-year-old Autumn Pasquale in October 2012.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Pablo Sanchez is considered to be one of the best, if not the best player in the game, especially when it comes to baseball. In the 2013 Little League World Series, there was a kid named Pablo Sanchez on the Puerto Rican team that represented the Caribbean region.
Low-Tier Letdown: A few of the Backyard Kids consistently rank very low among one's personal roster no matter the game; you'd be hard pressed to find people who will add characters like Marky Dubois, Kimmy Eckmannote Which one game even lampshades by having "To tell the truth, Kimmy is probably only allowed in the league because her backyard is such a great field" in her bio, or Billy Jean Blackwood, but the one character who takes it to almost Memetic Loser status would be Jorge Garcia. While he's supposed to be the Jack of All Stats, in actuality he ends up being good at almost nothing and only occasionally shows skill when he's having a good day. Him and the aforementioned characters are very popular choices for the "undefeated season with the worst players" Self-Imposed Challenge.
Memetic Badass: Pablo Sanchez, full stop. For just about every single player, he's the first pick. His incredibly high Game-Breaker level stats combined with being a Bilingual Bonus made him the single most popular character in the series and essentially the franchise mascot, and survived when the games went 3D.
Only the Creator Does It Right: There is extremely little agreement on when the series specifically went downhill, but the one thing people will agree on is that nothing that happened after Humongous closed their doors in 2006 (which means everything made after Backyard Football 2006) is even remotely worth talking about.
And they were baiting the fans of the old games back with Sandlot Sluggers.
The Problem with Licensed Games: The series has just become a cash cow for the sports leagues. The developers don't try in any other way.
Porting Disaster: Believe it or not, Backyard Baseball 2001 and Backyard Soccer MLS Edition received a two-in-one Plug 'n' Play Game port developed by Milton Bradley and Hasbro released in 2005 as simply Backyard Baseball & Soccer. It is a very dumbed-down version of both games on a green gamepad (that has only a D-pad, a pause button, the power switch, and ABXY buttons in a bizarre layout where A is on top, B is left, X is right, and Y is at the bottom) featuring only the Backyard Kids, just three fields for each game, very minimal and generic dialogue, bland background music in only the menus, pre-determined team colors for all the Backyard Sports teams, and just Single Game and Season Play modes with limited rule editing, no two-player modes, and no home run derbies or (standalone) penalty kick shootouts.
Replacement Scrappy: Abner Doubleplay was the original one for fans replacing Vinnie the Gooch in Baseball 2005. Besides the fact that his commentary in general is much more generic than Vinnie's, he also has an incredibly nasal voice that makes all of his commentary come off as obnoxious and unneeded. Then there was the voice narrator Jack Fouler starting with Baseball 2007 where Sunny Day was now not even in the games. It gets worse, with Sandlot Sluggers and Rookie Rush where the commentators are Ron and Wally, two annoying old Southern guys that don't seem to have any business being there with one of them having annoying commentary about his dog.
A lot of the newer characters get this as well. Infamously, Joey MacAdoo who appeared when the other kids started to disappear as the series went on, but Joey was kept on until the series went mobile.
The pros to a lot of fans as well to the fans of the originals.
Self-Imposed Challenge: A relatively popular one is picking all the worst players on the highest difficulty and trying to go undefeated in Season Mode. Doubly so in the games that include the pros.
Sequelitis: Backyard Baseball 2007 started this, with a complete design overhaul that put the characters into their teenage years. Several characters were removed, with new ones in their place. Around this point, the series was simply used as a cash cow for major sports licenses, with every single bit of not caring in full force. It peaked at the 2010 titles (released in 2009), until the series finally lost the major sports licenses and had to start using effort again. It wasn't enough though; see Win Back the Crowd below.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many cases; when the characters were redesigned, when the games went 3D, when the Leitmotifs were changed, when the characters began to get Put on a Bus, when they turned the characters into teenagers…
Tough Act to Follow: Except for Pablo keeping his classic theme (albeit as a remastered remix), the new character themes introduced in Baseball 2005 weren't necessarily bad by any means, and many could agree they fit the characters very well, in some cases better than the previous themes...but the original character themes were so iconic to all who had grown up on the series that a lot of players outright admitted they could never get used to the new ones. It doesn't help that many of them were arguably much less memorable (of course, they also had to match up to Rhett Mathis, who already had an extremely good track record of composing well-regarded music for Humongous games even outside of the Backyard Sports, having already done the insanely catchy penguin beats in Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo and the widely-liked soundtrack from Putt-Putt and Pep's Balloon-o-Rama).
Vindicated by History: The early Atari titles weren't well-received when they were initially released. After the 2007 games rolled around, though, most fans went back to those and realized that they were actually faithful to the original games in comparison.
Viewer Gender Confusion: You can make this happen yourself with the custom players in most games, if you give them the opposite voice of their physical appearance.
Certain installments of the series provide examples of:
Breather Boss: The Joustasaurus from Backyard Skateboarding. You can lose your juice meter by bumping into him and it only comes out of the gate for a limited time, but those are easily fixed: you don't need the juice meter because you can just jump over him each time.
Contested Sequel: Baseball 2001 and Soccer MLS Edition. People debate whether the addition of pros, who make up half the playable characters in the former, is good or bad.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Vinnie the Gooch is easily the most liked color commentator across all the games. He's not anywhere close the Memetic Badass status that Pablo has, but still retains quite a bit of it due to his very distinctive deep voice and Deadpan Snarker attitude ("What she means is...she won't stop yapping for the entire game!"). On top of that, his commentary is probably the funniest of all of the other color commentators, and it doesn't quite get as repetitive either. Is it any wonder Abner Dubbleplay was so hated when he took his place?
Depending on the game, one stat can really make or break things.
In the Football series, put someone with full stats on "Running" on the running back position. They will easily score most of the touchdowns unless their catching stat is really bad. In fact, even the AI seems to know this in Football 2002 because they almost always go for Pete Wheeler early on.
Similarly, quickness in the original Basketball. The fast players pretty much dominate the whole game unless every single one of their other stats is awful.
Kenny Kawaguchi completely breaks the whole pitching metagame in the original Baseball. Normally, you're expected to have one or two decent pitchers and a relief pitcher or two, but Kenny's pitching abilities include ridiculously good accuracy and stamina so resilient it may very well just be unlimited. And unlike Vicki (who is the only other character in the game to have full pitching stats), he doesn't completely sacrifice good batting for his efforts, so your batting lineup doesn't suffer much. Thanks to the fact his stamina is so good, that also means he'll usually rest up back to full power between innings. Unless you go a really long time in a half inning where you field, you generally will never have to worry about swapping him out. He was given a Nerf beginning with Baseball 2001...admittedly, with Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling filling the gap.
Backyard Skateboarding is absolutely full of these. Perhaps the best one is being able to jump infinitely, which makes it a whole lot easier to reach high areas, and is the only way to get the coins on top of the castle in Merry Olde Englandland if you don't know the cryptic proper way. There are many others aside from that though, like being able to phase through walls and clip through many obstacles.
In practice mode of the original Basketball, the out-of-bounds setting was turned off by default so you couldn't take the ball out of the court, and trying to do so would get you stopped by an invisible wall. However, the ball also automatically bounces right to the player every time it hits the ground, and if you stand right on the boundary and catch the ball, you can bypass the invisible wall and take the ball wherever you want. This also allows you to completely violate every law of the universe and do crazy things like run up walls, dribble on the Dobbs' or Kawaguchis' roof, walk across the ocean, and all sorts of other hilarity.
Michael Vick's in-game nickname is "Mr. Electric". Guess something he's done to dogs.
Backyard Football 2002 features then-New England Patriots starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe on the cover. The same year of the game's release (2001), Bledsoe had his near-fatal injury that led to Tom Brady taking over his position permanently, leading to the Patriots' winning dynasty, while Bledsoe was traded to the Buffalo Bills and his career never fully recovered.
Backyard Football: Rookie Rush's story mode revolves around the Backyard Kids competing in a football competition, whose grand prize is being on the cover of the next Backyard Sports game. Rookie Rush would end up being not only the final Backyard Sports game published by Atari before they declared bankruptcy, but the final Backyard Sports game in general to get any sort of physical release.
In Baseball, Stephanie Morgan, when pitching, says she models her pitches off Randy Johnson, who actually became playable in Baseball 2001.
Likewise, in Soccer, when you pick her for your team, she'll mention that she's been watching tapes of players such as Preki and Ronaldo, the former who becomes playable in Soccer MLS Edition.
Porting Disaster: Football on the GBA. Apart from being painfully slow, we also get very low difficulty and annoying controls.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Tin Can Alley, the most hated field from the Baseball series (see That One Level below), finds a lot more love in the Soccer games where the lack of home runs no longer matters and the raw pavement offers a more interesting dynamic from grass. Having a unique design from the other fields, especially with the big slab of wood representing one goal, also helps.
Running, for the outfielders in Baseball, although fielding can account for this as well. What makes it worse is running is tied into stamina which decreases if a player gets tired or spends a lot of time on the mound. Pitchers run a lot slower after throwing many pitches, which makes their fielding a liability if they haven't used a More Juice power-up.
AI fielders converging in Baseball to catch a flyball. It seems every time one fielder drops the ball in this fashion, a teammate standing close by catches it immediately thereafter for the out. While this is legal in real baseball, it makes for an aggravating experience as it tricks you into thinking you caught a huge break.
The Fire Ball pitch in Baseball. While it is one of the hardest pitches to judge whether or not to hit, it uses up the most of the pitcher's Juice. As such, it's best used only when the pitcher has a More Juice power-up to back it up. This may extend to the backyard kids; Angela Delvecchio gives an audible "Ow!" when catching this pitch.
The Zig Zag pitch in Baseball which has the most predictable movement out of all the special pitches. A good contact hitter will likely reach base off this pitch and obtain a special bat for the offense.
So Bad, It's Good: Backyard Skateboarding could probably qualify for being a watered-down version of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, but being enjoyable all on its own. The Good Bad Bugs listed above are probably what make it this, not to mention the physics that make no sense at all (you can grind at full speed when going up on power lines!).
Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Basketball on the PS2, as well as Basketball 2004 on the PC, gained the NBA license and ironed out a lot of the bugs the original had.
Tin Can Alley in the Baseball series is near-universally hated due to its lack of home runsnote Well, for the most part. It's not completely impossible to hit a home run, as the apartment building on the left half of the screen doesn't actually extend upwards infinitely, but you either need a ludicrously good power hit or use an aluminum power. Even the latter doesn't always work, especially if the batter is on the lower end of the batting ability.. Hitting the ball onto the truck is a ground rule double which means fast runners will retract even if they're on the verge of scoring.
Sandy Flats as well due to the slow running mechanic combined with the giant size of the field.
A purely cosmetic mechanic, but in the original Football, the TV behind the announcers always showed the scoreboard. In the follow-up game Football 2002, this was discarded and all it shows is the BFL logo, making one wonder why they didn't just use a regular sign instead...that is, up until the Cereal Bowl, where it's randomly used to display a fictional cereal brand. No, really, this is the only use that TV gets the entire game.
Online mode, broadly speaking. The idea of one was extremely ahead of its time when it was first implemented in 1999's Backyard Football...but it proceeded to be used a grand total of one more time in Baseball 2001 before completely disappearing from the series. It was perhaps a little too ahead of the curve, happening at a time when running servers required a lot more financial overhead even for small ones and also happening when dial-up was still the dominant form of connectivity. Some documentation implied it was also supposed to appear in Basketball and Football 2002, but the former didn't get it at all while the latter was downgraded to LAN play only.
Win Back the Crowd: Very clearly attempted with Sandlot Sluggers and Rookie Rush. It seemed like an attempt to get the series out of its Sequelitis that had plagued it starting with the 2007 games. Part of this seems to be the lack of a major sports license in both games, which meant a removal of the cash cow status and the ability to simply throw a game together and expecting to rake in money without trying. They actually put some level of playability into the games and added in an extra level of effort such as giving more life to the voice acting and adding unique power-ups, and giving a very cartoony look and feel as opposed to the realistic look the previous games adopted. There was also a whole lot more marketing for it, with a comic strip working as a prologue to the game and actually giving the games a plot for a change. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like they knew exactly what put the series into its downward trend to begin with — for one, the players are still teenagers, which rubbed a whole lot of longtime fans the wrong way. Even worse, they removed even more characters, with only eight of the original thirty characters as part of the cast, plus Joey. The series also didn't return to the easy-to-use mouse controls it was famous for in the beginning, not even in the PC version, which required practically every key on the keyboard to play. Considering the complete Broken Base nature of the fanbase in the first place, not to mention a whole lot of older fans completely turned the series off at this point, these were probably not good decisions to stick with. Indeed, it not only did nothing to save the series, but it only buried it further, and there's only been one game since (in 2015) that also didn't fix the longstanding problems.
states that he was originally designed to look like a character you wouldn't be likely to pick, due to being the shortest kid in the lineup, having his belly stick out from his shirt, and being Hispanic and not speaking any English so that he would look like a character who had little experience. Rather than making him a weak player, though, they decided to be ironic and make him the best player in the game (and we all know how that turned out). It essentially can be worked into the ultimate subtle "don't judge a book by its cover" moral.