In the 1976 cult classic "Bad News Bears," Miguel Aguilar played minimally for the team that was defeated in the championship game. Not only did the second baseman/outfielder not speak English, but he was short and chubby, so he was largely written off as a potential star for the team.
Little did Bill Lancaster, the writer of the original film, know that he was setting in place a series of events that would lead to the greatest video game slugger of all time - Pablo Sanchez - being created.
"A big inspiration was the Bad News Bears movie," said Richard Moe, who was a project lead at Humongous Entertainment - the creator of the video game 'Backyard Baseball' - from 1993-2000. "In the Bad News Bears, one of the Hispanic little boys never really played. And we thought 'What if all along, he was the best kid on the entire team and just never really got to play because of stereotypes?' And so we thought, 'Let's make the smallest kid possible - and he doesn't speak English - let's make him the best player, just to completely throw in the face all the stereotypes.'"
And so, Sanchez was born on Aug. 18, the year unknown. Given that the first edition of Humongous Entertainment's wildly popular "Backyard Baseball" series came out in 1997, one would assume he was born in the early 1990s. The man affectionately referred to as "The Secret Weapon" was short and had a pot belly, like Aguilar, and went on to define power hitting for a generation, while using a batting stance that was inspired by Seattle Mariners' Hall of Fame DH Edgar Martinez.
Sanchez was such a great player in the game that he's become something of a pop culture figure. When Kanye West dropped his album "The Life of Pablo" in February of 2016, there was a rush of people attempting to photoshop Sanchez onto the cover. The Lansing Lugnuts - the Single-A affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays - held a bobble-head night for Sanchez in 2018. The wildly-popular Twitter account @CespedesFamilyBBQ will occasionally commentate sims of "Backyard Baseball" on their Twitch channel, and as you can imagine, they're that much more enjoyable when Sanchez is in one of the two lineups.
Like many players in the game, Sanchez was designed to help prove that looks can be deceiving and not to discount anyone that has a different background or is a different height or weight. After all, this was a game for children. Clearly, Mark Peyser, who drew the initial sketch of Pablo's character, succeeded in that. But did those working on the game know that Pablo specifically would have this type of shelf life?
"We didn't know that the game would still be talked about this many years later obviously, but we had a feeling that people will find out that Pablo is amazing," said Nick Mirkovich, an animator at Humongous Entertainment that wrote the initial pitch for the game.
Like all players in the game, Pablo came with his own baseball card. Though there was some disagreement internally about whether to include baseball cards that showed bios, birthdays, nicknames and attributes - as opposed to letting kids find out themselves about Pablo - the cards ultimately were included. It only took one look at Pablo's card to know that he was the type of hitter that could carry your team to the postseason, whether you played at the hitter-friendly Steele Stadium or Tin Can Alley, where it was nearly impossible to hit a home run:
Here's a look at Pablo Sanchez's baseball card in Backyard Baseball 2001.Humongous Entertainment
In the 2003 edition of the game, you could click on Pablo's character in the trading cards section of the game, and if you also hit shift at the same time, he spoke in English and acknowledged that he only actually learned Spanish in a class at his elementary school.
That was a funny development to those that worked on the original version of "Backyard Baseball" in 1997. Andres Mendez, whose first programming job was on the original version of the game, was asked to listen to the original one-liners that Sanchez had in the game. Mendez, who was born in Colombia, couldn't refrain from laughing the first time that he heard the initial installment of Pablo speak, suggesting that he sounded like an English speaker attempting to sound Spanish. Well, that's because that's exactly what Pablo was initially. Mendez worked closer with a variety of voice actors in future installments of the Backyard Sports games to assure that Pablo sounded more genuine.
Mendez takes great pride in his involvement in the development of Sanchez and the games. He was one of a few Latino programmers in the industry at the time, and he helped to create an iconic character that is still referenced today.
"It's amazing, almost every day I get people referencing Backyard Baseball and how they played it," said Mendez. "I have people that work for me that say 'Oh, you worked on Backyard Baseball? Oh, I played that a lot.' I think for the time that it came in, at the age range, it just made an impact and people took that with them. And people really related to it, because nobody was left behind and everyone was included.
"And the fact that Pablo was a Latino kid, I obviously had a lot emotionally involved in it."
The initial edition of the game featured just a set of neighborhood kids, such as Sanchez, Pete Wheeler, Stephanie Morgan, Mark Dubois, Kimmy Eckman, Mikey Thomas and Keisha Phillips. Again, there was some hesitancy to mess with that formula and enter into the realm of being a true competitor of EA Sports. However, Humongous Entertainment struck the perfect balance in their 2001 edition of the game, the most popular one in the history of the franchise.
In 2001, one pro from every team was introduced to the game with a child-like replica of each MLB star. But while kids were lured into asking Santa Claus for a game that included child-like versions of Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, they found that one slugger stood the test of time (and the test of leaked reports on performance-enhancing drug use in baseball) - Pablo.
"We thought, 'Well everyone is just going to pick the pros,'" Mirkovich said of addition of pro players to the game in 2001. "So we had to make sure that there would be reasons to pick the other kids too."
Certainly, you could build a championship roster in "Backyard Baseball" with Nomar Garciaparra, Vladimir Guerrero Sr., Jose Canseco and Kenny Lofton. The brilliance of Sanchez, though, was he could combine the best attributes of all the pros in the game into one player. The game described him as being able to "steal bases like Lou Brock, catch fly balls like Willie Mays and hit homers like Reggie Jackson." If you didn't have that type of player on your team, you likely had a one-way ticket to second place.
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