I have, all my life, been two things: a gamer, and a baseball fan. Most years, the two remain more or less separate. I pick up the year’s baseball effort from one company or another, find myself disenchanted with what it has to offer, and move on. Return, really, to what others would no doubt call “real” games.

Every once in a while, the two interests converge. 1990 brought me Tommy Lasorda Baseball, which was basically the first baseball game I ever owned that gave me anything approaching realistic graphics. 1992 introduced the concept of commentary with Sports Talk Baseball. It was very rudimentary at the time, but it set the stage for what was to come on later platforms. 1995 brought Triple Play ‘96, which was the first baseball game I ever played that allowed me to create myself and sign myself to the Dodgers. Ten years later, we have the sublime MVP Baseball 2005 for Xbox, an addiction which has been known to mysteriously suck me out of the “real world” (pshaw) for days, if not weeks, at a time.

All four of those games, however, share a common element: they were released for home game consoles. In the handheld realm, there has been remarkably little to capture my interest the way those four games did. Bases Loaded on the original Game Boy succumbed to the vagaries of grayscale graphics. World Series Baseball on the Game Gear made a valiant effort, but it lacked two things: player fatigue (which basically made half of the roster worthless for the most part), and dynamic stat tracking. The statistics displayed for the players were always the previous year’s stats, as the cartridges of the day just weren’t capable of storing 162 games worth of numbers.

The Game Boy Advance has never really had a baseball game worth writing home about, and the Nintendo DS just sort of stares blankly at me and mumbles something about WarioWare when I ask it where the baseball action is at.

So it’s with a sort of bewildered delight that I notice that the first two dozen PSP games to hit North American shores feature not one, but two separate baseball games. The game with the highest profile is, of course, EA Sports’ MVP Baseball, but I’m telling you right now, don’t make the mistake of overlooking 989 Sports’ MLB. As excellent as MVP was on the home consoles, they’re going to have to really work to deliver a PSP effort that’s as comparatively impressive, particularly in light of the work 989 put into their own game.

There are two different batter-pitcher interfaces available in MLB: on the pitcher’s side, you can use a pitch meter inspired by MVP’s own, or you can use analog pressure sensitivity to dictate the speed of any given pitch. As the hitter, you’re given the option of a timing-based batting system, where you simply time the pitch, or increasingly more difficult systems that require you to not only correctly guess the pitch type, but also location of the pitch. If you correctly manage both, the game will reveal, via a big red indicator, the location of the incoming pitch, allowing you to sit on it and try to jack it out. It’s sort of an interesting foil to the MVP format, which only shows you the pitch location if the pitcher completely misses his intended target – if the pitcher misses his spot in MLB, your only clue will be the trajectory of the ball, and your own recognition of the strike zone.

The fielding system is fairly unique, as well. A physics-based model rules the day, particularly in the outfield, where a player catching a fly ball needs to make sure he’s properly positioned if he wants to make a strong throw back into the infield with runners on base. This means setting up just behind the ball’s target zone to make the catch, and then firing the ball to whichever base the runner is presumably headed for.

To reflect that defensive talent is not created equal, fly balls initially yield a large potential landing zone before shrinking relative to the player’s ability to get a good read on the ball. Poor defensive players will have a larger zone in which to catch the ball, while excellent defenders will get a fairly precise indicator.

Advancing baserunners when the ball is in play is a fairly straightforward concept; you press the base icon to activate the target runner, followed by a D-pad press to indicate the target base. Stealing a base, on the other hand, is more complicated: you hold the left and right triggers and simultaneously press the base icon of the base you wish to steal. What this means is that you will be hard pressed to not only attempt a steal, but also guess the pitch for hit-and-run attempts, since there really isn’t that much time between pitches from the CPU.

On the whole, the gameplay is fairly solid, although I do have one major gripe: the middle infielders routinely have impressive range into the straightaway (and even deep) outfield while chasing down pop flies that should properly be the purview of the outfielders. This has the result of cutting down on the number of bloop singles and doubles you’d expect to see, meaning that most of your extra-base hits are going to come from either scorching liners, or homers.

Graphically, MLB is quite good. The stadiums are realistic representations of their real-life counterparts, and there are an impressive number of player animations in the field. I’m still seeing new double plays, for what that’s worth. The player models don’t quite have the same resemblance to their counterparts that you’d find on the PS2 or Xbox, but they’re nothing to sneeze at either. My only gripe here is that while it’s apparently possible to rob a homer, the camera angle is zoomed out a bit too far to make it practical. You can turn on CPU assistance, which also proves useful for snagging those scorching grounders that you might not be quick enough to get yourself.

As solid as the game has been up to this point, the audio is where 989 really seals the deal for me. The crowd chants aren’t quite as impressive and authentic as what you would find in MVP Baseball on the home consoles, but the commentary, performed by Matt Vasgerian and Dave Campbell, is absolutely worthy of anything you’d hear on any platform, let alone a fledgling handheld. It makes me sad that after all the years of wishing 989 Sports would make better use of Vin Scully’s talents, that their best play-by-play performance yet wouldn’t include him, but the presence of the commentary makes this clearly the most complete PSP sports game from the 989 Sports team this spring. One caveat: turning the commentary on will drain the battery more quickly than you might otherwise expect, because of the constant accessing of the UMD drive. This is very likely the reason the other sports games didn’t include significant commentary, but I do wish that 989 had followed their own lead here and given users the option. If I’m willing to accept the trade-off of reduced battery performance in order to get a more immersive experience, that should be a choice I make, rather than one made for me.

Finally, MLB sports a fairly impressive feature set for what is essentially a debut title. For solo players, you can play a quick matchup featuring any two teams in the majors (with the exception of two of the same team), or a full, 162-game season. There’s no franchise or owner mode yet, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see the latter in next year’s MLB, as extended career play is really the only significant feature absent from this year’s game.

You also have the option of playing multiplayer games, either via the Ad Hoc (head-to-head) WiFi connection, or, should you be fortunate enough to have broadband and a wireless network, via Infrastructure (online) play. Communication is naturally limited, but the ability to play against opponents all over the country from the word ‘go’ is an exciting feature, indeed, and an excellent way to promulgate the capabilities of the PlayStation Portable.

MLB may or may not be the best baseball game on the PSP this year. That’s a debate left for another day, when I’ve had a chance to fully explore both of this year’s baseball offerings. MLB is, however, unquestionably an excellent effort – perhaps the best I’ve ever seen out of 989 Sports – and a game that you can purchase without any reservations about the experience you’re in for. At $39.99, it’s $10 cheaper than the competition, as well. After the $249 you’ve plopped down for your sleek new gadget, every little bit helps, right?