Review by Clare Warmke at SheLikesDVDs.com :

With so many kids in danger of developing obesity-related disorders, major children’s programmers like the folks behind Sesame Street and Barney have adopted themes of healthy eating and activity. Instead of doing the "Broccoli Dance" with Grover or Olympic-level hugging with every parent’s favorite purple dinosaur, kids have a new option in a series of DVDs from Tiny Tot Sports—learning about the friendships, fun and invigorating activity that come from being a member of an athletic team.

Baby Baseball is a 30-minute introduction to baseball, featuring children from newborn to 6 years old, but most suited for viewers aged 2 to 4. In a dizzying and delightful array of music and colors, this disk offers children a fast-paced, engaging view of some of the fundamentals of baseball, while not actually providing instruction into how the game is played. The focus is more on interaction than rules, like how to treat your friends while you play, why you shouldn’t get frustrated if you make a mistake, and so on—exactly the right message for preschoolers learning to love being active.

The "hosts" of the fun are characters pasted together from baseballs, googly eyes, and yarn hair, all with names like Billy Baseball and Sally Softball. It is a backyard, low-budget affair, employing not only craft-store characters, but rudimentary camera tricks like what you’d see in a commercial for a local car dealership (the hat falls off—wow! it zooms back on; the hat falls off—wow! it zooms back on). The major weakness of the production is the lack of professional voice actors to both narrate and portray the characters. One man does all the voice acting, switching from poor Fat Albert impersonations to featureless accents.

The part of the show that your child will undoubtedly find most interesting, however, isn’t the characters or the camera tricks, but the opportunity to watch other children, well, having a ball. Though the children in the program lack diversity (almost all are light-skinned, athletically fit little boys, with a token girl and dark-skinned boy thrown in), they don’t lack enthusiasm, and your child will be eager to join their game.

Extras :

The disk not only has no extras, but no menu screen. It starts automatically when you put the DVD in the machine, and simply plays on repeat until you remove it.

Picture & Sound :

Because of its low budget, parents will expect the picture and sound quality to be poor in spots, but that’s one area where this disk shines. It’s not the cinematic quality of a big Hollywood production, but care was certainly taken. Colors remain bright and true, with only insignificant fluctuations of light during some of the more obvious camera tricks, and the whimsical, carnival-like soundtrack is clear and well edited. Be aware that the volume is off-standard calibration, and the volume control will need to be turned down to avoid blasting.

Final Thoughts :

For every 30 minutes that my 2-year-old daughter spends watching this disk, she exercises for an additional 90 minutes, inspired to toss her ball, run the bases and whack at anything and everything with her baseball bat. She’s too young for a team, but she’ll feel confident and ready to play when that time comes. This disk is low budget and has some flaws, and it’s significant that almost all the children featured are little boys, rather than a more equal representation of boys and girls. But preschoolers (and older children who are facing ridicule in gym class) will benefit from this confidence- and activity-boosting program.

-- Clare Warmke at SheLikesDVDs.com