It’s with these hits that suddenly, gameplay falls apart again. Switching up your pitches is now more important than ever, as batters will hone in on what you’ve thrown and make you pay for it with a base hit. Pitching now comes with a caveat: throw the same pitch over and over, despite your catcher’s suggestions, and the hitters get wise and start anticipating what you’ll throw. However, when it gets down to gameplay we finally see some improvements, but to be fair, they are minor.

The menu presentation, however, will make you wonder if you’d accidentally purchased last year’s game. Animations still have some stagger and hiccup, but nothing I hadn’t seen in previous years. That said, while the majority of the framework remains the same, graphically there have been better touches throughout making character models more realistic (though somehow more dead-eyed than usual), and everything seems brighter and more vibrant. With the exceptions of a few coats of polish, updated rosters, and some other minor tweaks here and there, it’s the same ballgame from before. Let me get this out of the way right now: if you’ve played last year’s iteration of the game (or even 2K10), this year’s MLB 2K remains virtually unchanged from previous versions. While it does often retain the fun and excitement of being at the ballpark, it can also unintentionally include the tedium as well. Never is this more clear than in playing simulated baseball in a videogame.

George Carlin said baseball was known as America’s national pastime because “it takes so damn long to play a game.” He was right.

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