MVP Baseball 2003 was released in 2003 as the successor to EA's Triple Play games, though it bore little more than a graphical similarity to its predecessors, which had been heavily maligned by critics in the series' final years. Randy Johnson and Miguel Tejada were the cover players.
Introducing an innovative pitch meter and zone-based hitting system, MVP 2003 was well-received by critics, most of whom considered the game's overhaul to be a major improvement over Triple Play′s last entry.
Upon its release in 2003, one of the game's most inventive aspects was its pitch/throw meter. Until then, most baseball games' pitching schemes required players simply to press the button corresponding to the pitch they wanted to throw, and hold the button down for a certain length of time to determine how hard the pitch was thrown. In MVP Baseball, the player first holds down the pitch button (or throw button) to judge the power; once the desired power level is attained, the player must release the button and attempt to tap the same button within a target area. The closer the player gets to the target area, the more accurate the pitch or throw will be. While innovative within the field of baseball games, EA in fact adapted this feature from golf games, which often feature a moving meter to determine the power and accuracy of shots (ironically, golf games largely abandoned shot meters around the time that MVP Baseball introduced it).
The game also incorporated a strike zone divided into nine areas of the plate designed as "hot and cold zones". The feature uses color coding with the colors red, white, and blue to represent the player's ability to hit pitches in the given area; red, white, and blue indicate whether the player hits well, neutrally, or poorly, respectively, in the given segment of the strike zone.
Source: Wikipedia, "MVP Baseball 2003", available under the CC-BY-SA License.