Wax nostalgic with a sports gamer of a certain age and it's not long before he will mention, like a venerated religious text, the Three-Ring Binder. It was the original franchise mode.

I'm 37, and I've yet to meet a guy from my generation who didn't keep his own stats in a sports video game and doesn't still take…

Sitting there with my DualShock in my lap, I struggled to recall the last time a video game blindsided me this hard, much less at a point this early in playing it. I'd ranked up at a respectable rate, gained a fast understanding of my abilities and the situations in which they were useful. I was fearless and, I…

I've seen the big leagues, son. I've squinted at the lights at Fenway as the sun makes a cotton candy sky behind the Citgo sign in left. But I ain't there right now. I'm down here chewing on grass, pitching in my third game in as many days, deep in the well of the low minor leagues, where the uniforms are washed every…

>It didn't take long after MLB 11 The Show's release for everyone to notice its microtransactions menu and give it a good public flogging. While I don't claim that these things are in anyone's interest other than the publisher's, gamers do a fantastic job of making this out to be a more odious threat than it really is.
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MLB 11 The Show arrived on Tuesday, bringing with it a set of controls and options designed to include disabled gamers. The association for these gamers, begun by a 25-year-old college student, also launched on Tuesday and gets a plug from the PS3 game.

MLB 11 The Show's third-wheel analyst, Eric Karros, completely telegraphs this burn of Roy Halladay, who graces the cover of Major League Baseball 2K11.

Some ESPN personalities are known, and chided, for making product endorsements. Steve Berthiaume isn't in that crowd. Writing a 2,500-word guide on how to create, in MLB The Show, painstakingly accurate journeymen players from the 1970s is not being a lip-service pitchman. That is a bona fide roster editor.

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Kotaku may have kicked off a fad last year, with our post on how to make your video game baseball presentation conform to real life broadcasting angles. MLB 2K11 directly cited the work as an inspiration behind its new broadcast presentation. MLB 11 The Show was assuredly thinking the same thing when it introduced…

Trying very hard to make "Well played, Mauer" into a meme, or at least a theme, here's fake honcho Kevin Butler getting worked at clutch time by the Minnesota Twins' all-star catcher in a spot going up now for MLB 11 The Show.

Baseball fans will fetishize any detail. This year, MLB 2K11 will make the real-life broadcast camera angles of all 30 major league parks the default view in its game. MLB 11 The Show will, too, and add even more customization.

He'd given up six runs in three innings of work when MLB 10 The Show sent the manager out to remove him from the game. Even in a video game, the bad losses stick with you. They stick with Hans Smith a little more.

MLB 11 The Show will get PlayStation Move support but I wouldn't put high hopes on it. The only supported feature will be a Home Run Derby mode, shown here, and that weird floating bat just strikes me wrong.

To go with its new analog controls, MLB 11 The Show is going on a new controller - this baseball-themed DualShock, timed to release with the game on March 8.

In a control switch that's likely to be controversial to some, MLB 11 The Show's default pitching, throwing and hitting controls will move to the right analog stick, though it will include the old face-button commands for the lifers.

Earlier today 2K Sports, on its Facebook page, confirmed March 8 as the release date for MLB 2K11.