Long-suffering Xbox 360 baseball fans finally have reason to hope. Like the real-life Los Angeles Angels, new ownership (developer Visual Concepts) has gutted the MLB 2K franchise, leaving all of the old ways behind and laying the foundation for a bright future. And though 2K9 isn’t quite ready to win now, the pieces are in place for an extended run in the coming years.

Every line of code from the last three cellar-dwelling seasons has been retired, and both the presentation and core mechanics — pitching, fielding, and batting — are easy to learn and fun to use. Pitching retains the big idea introduced last year, simplified with an enjoyable two-step right-stick motion aping the grip and release of a pitch. It’s fun and balanced without gimmicks. Fielding, meanwhile, finally steals the throwing meters perfected in MVP 2005, and unobtrusively uses the X button for dives and wall climbs.

Finally, batting again builds off of 2K8’s back-forward right-stick motion, simplifying it without dumbing it down. It’s easy to see and hit pitches (sometimes too easy), and you’re intuitively able to influence the direction of your hit with the left stick. Weirdly, though, it’s ludicrously simple to hit homers — but at least this can be rectified by cranking the Batting Power slider setting down to 40 or less (it defaults to 80!).

Now the bad news: As a first-year effort by Visual Concepts, 2K9 is ravaged by little problems. Puzzlingly, there’s no option to fade out the pitch-aiming cursor in multiplayer games. Instead, you can only press RT to lock in your location selection and then continue to move the icon around to try to fool your opponent. This only serves to waste time, however, as you dance around the strike zone, hoping your pal doesn’t hear you click RT.

Also, while you can save your game anytime and return to it later, you can’t sim to the end if it’s a blowout. Infielders can be slow to make throws, and despite stellar play-by-play from series newcomer Gary Thorne, the announcing is repetitive. We were also miffed by the lack of hit variety: we saw far too many lineouts to infielders and almost no choppers, seeing-eye singles, or balls down the lines. However, camera angles (a problem in previous years) are excellent. Finally, we repeatedly saw a bizarre bug where bunting often got a batter called safe at first, even when the throw clearly beat him.

Ultimately, 2K9 is more worthy than its score indicates because it nails the key infrastructure of a quality baseball videogame, which leaves us optimistic that it could make a run at the pennant soon. And that’s something we haven’t been able to say in the Xbox 360 era.

On Xbox 360

+ Core elements are solid and lay the foundation for next year.

+ Much-improved presentation.

- Laundry list of annoying little problems is too substantial.

? Will next year finally be the year we get exactly what we've been waiting for?

6.5