The hitter-pitcher confrontation does, however, need better balance than what comes out of the box. Using default game settings, AI pitchers will throw around five or six strikes for every ball, which means you’ll see a lot of one, two and three pitch at-bats, and you’ll have to swing at just about everything. That’s bad just by virtue of the fact that it’s not baseball, but it also means that AI pitchers can hang around in games a lot longer than your own pitchers, who can and will throw a lot of balls if they don’t want to get peppered by AI hitters. Fortunately, a few slider tweaks can address this issue and balance out this part of the game.

Let's talk franchise mode. The franchise mode in MLB 2k7 was a significant, yet still very flawed, improvement over that of MLB 2k6. This year franchise mode has once again improved significantly. Player development over time remains reasonable this year, which is a relief. The big improvement however is in the area of AI roster management. Very rarely will you see a top notch free agent go unsigned, nor will you see regular MLB-level players languish in the minor leagues after coming off the disabled list. The game also boasts a fully licensed set of minor league teams (across three levels of minor leagues) and a host of licensed minor league players. You can even play your franchise's minor league games, if you so choose. Indeed, the only serious hurdle to enjoying the franchise mode is the user interface, which -like that of most console baseball games- remains a chore to deal with. There are simply too many tabs, menus and button presses to make playing in franchise mode anything but an exercise in tedium. If anything, this mode needs more simplicity and fewer features. Managing rosters in this game's UI is hard enough without having to worry about scouting players for the draft and figuring out where to set the team's ticket prices so that the team owner doesn't fire you for not bringing in enough dough.

Finally, we come to the frilly stuff. It seems mandatory in sports games these days to throw in a feature that has nothing whatsoever to do with playing the sport or running a team. For MLB 2k8--it's baseball cards. Achieve certain goals with a player or team on the field and you unlock that player or team's card. In the case of teams it might, for example, allow you to play with historic uniforms. For the players, you can collect a bunch of the cards, trade them online with other players, and assemble a custom team that can then be taken on the field in online matchups. This might, surprisingly, turn out to be a pretty neat feature, but it first requires a patch from 2k Sports that fixes the frame rate issues in online play.

When playing MLB 2k8 I’m reminded of the story of the frog prince. There’s this pervasive feeling when playing it that if you could but summon a maiden to offer it a firm kiss on the cheek that it would suddenly turn into the King of Diamonds that lurks just beneath its pot-marked surface. But, barring one heck of a patch from 2k Sports, there’s no magic pill to cure all that ails this game. The legacy of developer 2k Los Angeles (formerly Kush Games) continues to be the delivery of high-potential but brutally flawed games that lack considerable polish.