Baseball Fever

I have been a long time football fan, watching baseball on Tv as far as I am concerned it is as fun as watching the grass grow on my front lawn, but I have to say, the PSP version of MLB The Show impressed me and bite me with the baseball video game bug, I have never really tried a baseball video game. I soon realized it really is the perfect sport for video gaming, its pauses naturally, requires some strategy and it provides great one on one competition online, with the pitcher versus the batter scenario.
After playing The Show on the PSP I wanted some big screen baseball action so I rented 2k's MLB 07 yesterday while a friend of mine was over... The game was alot of fun, it did not have the overall polish that Sony's game has, but the graphics and animations were good enough. The pitching was system worked very well. It was pretty straight forward and had a metered system similar to the show. Batting was more difficult... The most difficult thing about the batting was not really the controls, but getting the timing down. The pitches are coming at you with various speeds I found my self swinging to early and way late at times. For the life of me I do not know why they do not have batting cages in a baseball game ?????? There are no dedicated practice modes for pitching or batting. If as a batter you have weakness with a certain type of pitch, you would like to set up a practice where that particular pitch is thrown to you over and over again to improve your batting. There are literally dozens of minigames that could have been created just around pitching and batting, besides homerun derby. The closest thing that they have for practice is setting up situations in a live game and homerun derby. I have not tried this mode, but I believe if your at bat it will still call strikes and outs, so you can not stay at bat just to practice.. My friend enjoyed the game so much that he is really now thinking of finally moving on from the xbox to the xbox360 to play over xbox live.