Major animation issues, player development's extremely flawed, more frustration than fun
The animation at first looks incredible, then you start to notice that the game kinda stalls when going between closeups or replays and the regular view. I've also found that I will swing at a pitch, miss it, and view the replay to see that the ball was hit, but it decided to go through the bat magically and reappear in the catcher's mitt.
The hitting gets repetitive, as you'll hit to the same spots and get robbed of hits that in real life the player wouldn't have caught. Although there is an option to argue a play, you can't argue any play you want. It will prompt you to argue or not, but it pops up once in a blue moon. And the computer never argues a call, which means you have no power to eject him, even though it says you can.
The fielding is frustrating at best, wondering why the player did this when i told him to do that. The computer team's fielding is ridiculously great, to the point where the player's ability or weight has no bearing in diving for a ball. Really, it's like they know where the ball is going before it's hit.
Plus, if you hit a home run, in the 7th inning the pregame announcer will replay it and say it was an inside-the-park home run, when it was clearly over the fence. There are just too many issues with gameplay to get over.
Franchise mode isn't much better. After 5 years, the league is filled with guys who hit like they're on roids but are slow as hell and can't catch a ball, and pitchers who have great pitches but never can seem to get an ERA under 4.5 and BAA under .350.
Plus, the rating system is totally screwed up. In the menus and on the player cards, they use an academic grading system, A to F, to measure ability. But in the game, they use numerical values, 0-100. So you can sign a player who has C+ contact and power, but a C+ can be anywhere from 65-78, so you never know just how good they are when you sign them.
Being the only baseball sim on the Xbox 360, I don't have much choice since 2K9 is even worse than 2K8, and The Bigs don't have as much in depth control of the roster or a season mode for it to compare in the gameplay. So if you have to get a baseball game for the 360 that's as close to real as you can get, this is what you want, but you'll have to live with the flaws that come with the great animation