It's a basically good and fun game, at its core. But the core is surrounded by glitches, kinks, and annoyances.
The Negatives:
It's not a game with controls that are easy to pick-up on. It might be, perhaps, if the controls worked better. But you read in the booklet that you run by pressing the corresponding direction on the control pad. So you do. Soon your runners are gunning for home when you clearly told them to stop at second. You'll think you're doing something wrong, but eventually you'll realize the game is just crap.
And even if it had the easiest controls in the world, MLB 2K9 is still an awful game. Bad running controls are the least of your worries--you still have to deal with your fielders inexplicably dropping fly balls, your infielders somehow throwing to the wrong base, players running into each other as they try to catch a pop-up, opposing outfielders making 10 foot leaps to rob what should be record-breaking home runs (leaps your own fielders never seem able to replicate). I could go on forever--outfielders randomly diving, etc--but all these glitches only apply to fielding.
Pitching and hitting are easier, with glitches few and far between--but mind you, there are still glitches. Sometimes your batter will swing when you keep your Wiimote absolutely still. Occasionally, your pitchers will through pitches that take huge chunks of their stamina away. This isn't even a bad baseball game, because this is nothing like baseball.
So, the game is full of glitches in all aspects of play. It boasts some of the worst controls ever seen. But it doesn't even end there.
If you draft your own team in Season mode, you'll probably be disappointed with one or two of your players within the first 8 games. Naturally, you'll want to trade. But save yourself--the trading controls are confusing and obnoxious. I've had the game for almost a whole year, and still haven't completely figured it out. I've come close to pulling off a trade, but I've always been foiled by the irrational and impossible stubbornness of the other manager: "Oh, okay, I completely understand why you won't trade one of your relief pitchers for Albert Pujouls and Felix Hernandez."
It gets worse. Free agency is difficult, and mostly pointless. 99% of free agents during the season are fictional players with no skill created by the 2K Games. That number doesn't seem so bad--it IS during the regular season after all--but realize this. 80% of free agents during the offseason are also these imaginary rookies.
Sending down a player to the minors or calling one up to the majors is a process that would try the patience of a saint. It seems (relatively) easy at first, but there's a catch: you can't send down someone to the minors without calling someone up to the majors, and vice versa. I don't know why this is--perhaps the game is programmed to only accept teams with, say, 40 players. But it is frustrating, particularly when you want to send someone down. Why? Because--yay!--you got rid of the shortstop hitting .199 and making an error every other play. But don't get happy yet--you now have to bring up some guy from the minors. And guess who you get to pick from--more imaginary players created by 2K Games. This is soooo unhelpful, because when you try to learn about these players so you can at least pick a GOOD imaginary player, you find that 2K Games was too lazy to assign most of them statistics. About 1 in 20 will have stats, but all the others are the same. BA: .000; OBP: 0%; OPS: 0%.
And I'll wrap up the negative with something on the verge of decent. The graphics.
The graphics are subpar. The stadiums are recreated pretty well--right down to advertisements and banners. However, the crowd is a bunch of lifeless things that look like cutouts. The players are all the same--guys of medium height, with considerable muscle, average weight, same size arms, same size legs. You have two skin colors in MLB 2K9: Gray and Dark Black. If the player is Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, or even an African American with light skin, the MLB 2K9 rendition of the player has gray skin. If the player is an African American with a medium dark to dark black skin, then the rendition has a charcoal black skin color. I don't know if this reflects racism or laziness up at 2K Games, but based on the rest of the game, I'd say that 2K Games is too lazy to be racist.
Also, bodies are lumpy. Unless you employ a squint and use quite a lot of imagination, you'll swear to yourself that those aren't muscles--that must be some kind of skin condition that causes the skin to bulge awkwardly. Either that or every single player is wearing 20 t-shirts underneath their uniforms.
That concludes the negatives. And now, for a much shorter section...
The Positives:
The game is basically fun. Once you spend a few months getting familiar with the glitches and not minding them as much (assuming this happens with you), you'll find that the game is reasonably entertaining, and you get a thrill when you win and are pained when you lose. You could conceivably spend a few days playing this, if you didn't get sick of all the kinks along the way.
Probably the most entertaining things about the game are Season Mode and playing as a team made up of Hall-of-Famers. There's nothing quite like playing as Ted Williams, even as glitches cause him to run in circles as a line drive bounces of the wall and its hitter is rounding second. And Season Mode is the salvation of MLB 2K9. Without it, you'd be playing glitchy exhibition games the entire time you play the game. But in this mode, you can play glitchy regular season games. It works like this: you can pick your team, and draft All-Stars and prospects and veterans and rookies, and manage your own team. I don't know, maybe you've actually figured out how to trade, and relish making a good swap. Maybe you're a fan of imaginary players with no background and no stats. Maybe you're in to glitchy games with below average graphics and roughly two redeeming qualities.
But most of us aren't, and thus if 2K Games wants to stay alive in the video game business, it needs to step it up.
Check the bargain bin (or the trashcan) at your local store. There's a fair chance it will be in there, and if you're looking for a game you can waste a few hours on, you've found one. However, if you're looking for a game that can try your patience and frustrate you for every single minute you play it, you've also found one.