The game's full formal title (due to licensing requirements) was Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball.

The screen was either a stable field on which characters moved or a top-down (sometimes angled) display that scrolled horizontally, vertically or both ways across a larger virtual image.

While watching a baseball game on TV in the spring of 1982, Daglow realized that the Intellivision could mimic the same camera angles shown in the broadcast.

Since Intellivision World Series Baseball would require far better animations than past video games for its TV-style display, Dombrower was considered to be a perfect fit for the job.

Baum and Daglow showed the prototype to Mattel's marketing department, which was locked in a TV advertising war with arch-rival Atari for the position of top video game console.

To make matters worse, while the game could be played without the use of the Intellivoice voice synthesizer (which was already being phased out due to poorer-than-expected sales and declining user interest), it did require the then-new Intellivision Entertainment Computer System (ECS) keyboard component.

Unfortunately, by the time the ECS was released, an internal shake-up at the top levels of management had shifted the company's focus away from hardware add-ons and almost exclusively towards software.