This is a good article about the mod community surrounding EA's last baseball game, MVP 2005.
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/mvp-baseball-2005-mod-community-mlb-video-games/
I've got several of these old mods. Great game.
I need to check out these mods/hacks. I loved that game (and the High Heat series) on my PS2. What system are the hacks/mods played on. Just PC? Or has someone generated playable carts/discs? And while I'm asking questions can someone tell me if there's s difference between the terms mods and hacks? I've heard them used interchangeably but also uniquely (modding applied to hardware; hacking applied to software).
At its heart, there's not really a difference - hacks and mods are both just changes to a game (generally a PC game, since consoles are locked down pretty tight at both the hardware and software level) made by users. "Mod" is the more common and probably preferred term, just because "hack" has acquired so many negative connotations - if someone thinks you're cheating at Counter-Strike, you probably get accused of using a "hack".
The mods they're talking about are all PC. Like I mentioned before, modding/hacking on consoles is pretty difficult - in order to run any custom code, you have to install a "mod chip" (basically your own firmware that allows you to bypass the default operating system), then you have to dump the game data from the disc to some storage medium where you can edit it, then you have to figure out how to modify it. The PC basically skips you ahead to the last part, and their data files are sometimes in common-enough formats that they can be edited or at least reverse-engineered successfully. Console modding is mostly just used for piracy - you mod the console and throw in a gigantic hard drive so you can play games dumped from discs. There's some homebrew for simple games and stuff like custom OSes and media players, and emulators are popular, but piracy is the killer app for modded consoles (I knew folks who had a modded original Xbox with a 100GB HDD full of games; it was great).
Mods are one of the biggest reasons to pick PC gaming over consoles. Counter-Strike, one of the most popular online games in the world, started out as a mod for Half-Life. Tons of games, particularly first-person shooters are constantly getting new maps and character skins (I use to play Quake 3 as Gumby, with computer opponents including Johnny Five, Megatron, and Snoopy, in a level where we were all the size of mice in a college dorm room). People are still releasing updates for Doom, which came out more than 20 years ago. Also, most importantly, you can also replace all the dragons in Skyrim with Macho Man Randy Savage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFOQ89BuOCI
Thanks for the enlightening info!