With an interface very similar to Red Card, this is Midway’s attempt to make a sillier version of baseball. The core mechanics aren’t as solid as Red Card, though, as aiming the bat is much more difficult without a cursor – luckily, hitting is much more lenient as this tends to go for higher than usual scores, and full of some fancy over the top effects – well, as over the top as you can get while still keeping it close to baseball.
One thing I did notice while pitching was the bean button (appropriately mapped to one of the GameCube’s bean-shaped buttons). I know from blernsball what this means: throwing the ball at the batter directly. It’s amusing to do it the odd time, but just letting your opponents move forward a base, it’s not as advantageous as kicking someone in football.
Which makes Slugfest not much more than a novelty. It’s fun for a bit, but there’s not all that much to it. I think you’d have to twist baseball more to make a silly arcade version work better.