Slugger Derby

About the game

You stand at home plate in a baseball stadium seen from above. The pitcher throws, and you have a single button: swing. Everything is in the timing. Swing too early or too late and you miss; swing at the right instant and the ball leaves the bat for the stands.

The game keeps a count of pitches, balls, strikes, hits, perfect hits and home runs, and it remembers the longest ball you have hit. The physics is real: the ball is simulated with a physics engine, so a good contact flies far and a weak one dies in the infield.

Playing it here

Click Play, watch the pitcher and press Space (or click) just as the ball reaches you. Press Enter when you want the next pitch.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Wait for it. Most misses come from swinging early. Let the ball come to you.

Go for perfect hits. A swing in the sweet spot carries much farther than a good one.

Do not give up after a strike. Each pitch starts fresh.

Credits and licence

Slugger Derby is one of the games in LittleJS Arcade, a collection by Frank Force built on his open-source LittleJS engine and released under the MIT licence. The pictures are drawn in code and the sounds are synthesised, so the game has no image or audio files. The author's repository includes AI-assistant guidance files, so the collection was written with the help of AI tools. The licence text is linked from this page and the source code is on GitHub.