Take me out to the ball game; take me out to the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and a PSP because now America’s favorite pass-time can be played anywhere, even at the ballpark. 989 Sports has brought its successful baseball franchise MLB to the PSP. Traditionally, baseball titles for portable systems have suffered due to flat graphics and non-responsive gameplay, but this is a new season with a fresh start.

Features:

• Deep baseball gameplay. Quick play and Season modes use three different difficulty levels, as well as online/LAN multiplayer is an option as well.
  
• Accurate lineups and selected Triple-A players.
  
• Full commentary throughout all game modes.
  
• Accurate player models and stances. Detailed animations and nuances.

Gameplay:

No matter what baseball simulator you play, it’s still 90 feet to first. As long as the rules of baseball don’t change, neither will the style in which the gamer can play. As per the PSP the controls are very intuitive on defense, fielding, and batting.

Just like most other baseball titles there are a variety of difficulty settings. MLB offers three different levels of competition “Rookie”, “Veteran” and “All-Star”; as you raise the difficulty, the opposing batters are better and the opposing pitching is harder to hit. After a fielder catches a batted ball, your options to throw to a base are as follows: Circle to First base, Triangle to Second base, Square to Third base and X to Home plate. Now keep in mind, the buttons are pressure sensitive and if you press to hard to throw, the player might end up throwing the ball away. For pitching, the on screen menu will be your guide. The pitches are listed corresponding to the four buttons, and location is determined by the user with the joystick. This is where the player is confronted with several choices on delivery. In the options menu, you can chose from a meter style, which is more traditional to the MLB series and familiar to EA’s MVP titles. The other option is just to pitch the ball and pray that the opposing batter doesn’t hit your pitch out of the park. With the traditional meter style, after you locate the pitch, you can adjust how your pitcher will throw the ball. For example, if I am a right-handed pitcher throwing a change-up low and away against a right handed batter, and I know that the change-up sinks just a little and I still want the ball to go through the strike zone, I will not hit the “sweet-spot” making the pitch rise a little and catch the bottom outside corner.

Athletes across the world have commented that hitting a baseball successfully is one of the hardest athletic feats to accomplish. Now it’s your turn to step up to the pale, literally. Players can blindly swing away and pray that he or she makes contact, or players can play the game the way it was supposed to be, with patience. In all three difficulty modes, the batter can guess pitches and wait for that perfect pitch to drive out of the park. In “Rookie”, to see the pitch and its location, all one has to do is guess the pitch correctly; and in “Veteran” and “All-Star”, if the batter only guesses the correct pitch, the strike zone’s four corners will flash red, and if the batter guesses the correct location, the pitch will be seen and a red circle will appear at the corresponding location. To hit the ball, the batter can either swing away or bunt the ball by either pressing “X” or “Circle” respectively.

Getting tired of playing the computer? That isn't a problem as 989 has included a Cracker Jack box full of ways to play wirelessly. The biggie is the online mode. Yes, it is entirly possible to play a complete stranger from your PSP with MLB. As good as it sounds, it is almost too simple to get into. Not much elbow room in the options department but it lets those with little to no online experiance hop in and enjoy. That is until lag hampers the game and makes batting a more difficult task.