Spring means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To some, it marks the melting of the snow and the return of clement weather. For others, it's a time to clean house, file taxes, and get ready for an endless stream of summer barbecues. If you're a young'un, spring means that there are only a few months of school remaining before summer vacation.

To most of you reading this feature, spring represents one thing above all else--the return of baseball season. For six months, you can hear the crack of the bat and the sounds of the vendors in the stands, and you can track your team's rise and fall in the standings each day in the local newspaper. You can watch players like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds continue their quests to reach historic milestones: Clemens is closing in on 300 career wins, and Bonds is a season or two away from reaching the 700-home-run mark.

"The one constant through all the years has been baseball," remarked Terrence Mann, the character James Earl Jones played in the motion picture Field of Dreams. "History has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: It's a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again."

During baseball season, every win makes you wish you were a player on a Major League team, and every loss reinforces your belief that you'd make an excellent manager or GM. Unless you root for the Yankees, you're probably cussing at the television every time your favorite team gives up a run or whenever one of your favorite players blows a play.

Video games offer the opportunity to experience the ballpark atmosphere from the comfort of your own home. They give you the chance to change history, to participate in milestones, and to enact the kind of what-if situations that you've fantasized about since you were a wee child. If you're a fan of the Red Sox, Cubs, or Mariners, video games are the best shot you have at accompanying your favorite team to the World Series.

No matter which game system you own--PlayStation 2, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, Xbox, or PC--you can find a baseball game that suits your tastes. For the most part, the current crop of baseball games are high in quality and offer plenty of features to keep you occupied for the entire season. They all carry the official license of Major League Baseball, so you'll have access to the same teams, players, and stadiums you've become familiar with over the years.

The purpose of this feature is to give you an idea of which baseball games are available for the system(s) you own and to run down some of the traits that are unique to each game. If you need more information, you'll find hyperlinks to reviews, screenshots, and movie clips located on every page. And at the very end of each section, we weigh in with our opinion on which game we think will give you the most bang for your buck.