Casio BB-9 Baseball calculator

Casio made their first baseball calculator in 1982, just a year after their success with the boxing calculator series.

The BB-9 used the same case design as the BG-15 boxing calculator but the added complexity of the baseball game meant they had to dispense with the alarm functionality and use what would have been the alarm key to show the score (runs and inning) while playing the game.

Playing the game is best described by the BB-9 instruction manual:

Welcome to the Casio Ball Park !

When you put your baseball team up against this challenging instrument you will get the chance to play a ten-game series against the home team. Like the real thing, there are nine innings to each game and all the other scoring and ball rules apply.

As each home team you meet is more experienced than the last, you’ll need more and more skill to keep winning in the series. It needs a cool calculating hand to make it to the final rounds. No games are easy, but whether you win or lose, they’re all fun.

So press the game button, keep your eye on the ball … and have a great game!

You start as the batting side while the pitcher throws a combination of different speeds and curves. After three outs you switch and try pitching.

While you can just wing it, pressing the buttons when you think the timing is right, reading the manual reveals there is deeper strategy at play.

When batting, your 3rd, 4th and 5th batters have more hitting power. Pitching, you can choose the kind of pitch and course of the ball with a series of keystrokes.

As you can expect, playing a full 10-innings can take a long time although you can suspend the game when batting, and pick it up again at a later time.

Fun game and, once again, credit to the engineers who managed to squeeze all this into a small calculator screen, along with regular calculator functions and a clock too!

Like the boxing calculator, in time mode you just see the time in digital format. If, however, you press Time while in game mode, you get the time with the baseball animation to accompany it.