Backyards aren’t just for baseball anymore. Playground Productions, a media company focused on children and families, is adapting video game Backyard Baseball into an animated series titled Backyard Sports.
Backyard Sports: The Animated Series will star (in voice form) Tiffany Haddish as Kiesha Phillips, Donald Faison as Dante Robinson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Dmitri Petrovich, Arturo Castro as star player Pablo Sanchez, Utkarsh Ambudkar as Achmed Khan, Deborah Baker Jr. as Kimmy Eckman, Michael Vlamis as Tony Delvecchio, Ashleigh Crystal Hairston as Sunny Day, Will Neff as Mr. Clanky, Vincent Tong as Kenny Kawaguchi, Joey Rudman as Marky Dubois and Lindsay Barnett as Vinnie.
There are more than 30 original “Backyard Kids” from the game(s), which first launched in 1997. Later iterations added kid versions of Major League Baseball superstars like Derek Jeter and Randy Johnson.
The news came in concert with the “Backyard Sports Returns” panel at San Diego Comic-Con, which took place a few weeks after the July 9 release of the new-gen Backyard Baseball.
Backyard Sports: The Animated Series is executive produced by Playground CEO Lindsay Barnett. Chris Waters is showrunner; Adam Aseraf and Sarah Nevada Smith serve as head writers and are co-executive producers. Backyard Sports: The Animated Series consists of 20 episodes at about 11 minutes each. The Backyard Baseball update and the accompanying animated series are a part of what Playground calls its growing “Backyardiverse.” Hopefully they stop calling it that soon.
“I am beyond thrilled to announce our series today,” said Lindsay Barnett, CEO of Playground Productions. “The Backyard Sports characters have inspired imaginations for generations, and their stories have always felt bigger than the game itself. As Backyard Baseball expands with the new game on Steam and soon consoles, bringing these characters into new forms of storytelling feels like a natural extension of the Backyard universe.”
Watch the Backyard Sports: The Animated Series trailer below.
