Sega’s new baseball game swings for the fences, but ultimately gets hauled down at the warning track.

With the summer fast approaching, it’s that time of year again — time for no less than five different publishers to release this year’s crop of baseball games to the market. With so many options, it is hard to know which one to buy. So, does “ESPN Major League Baseball” provide the best simulation of our strike-prone, steroid-ridden, national pastime where the World Series is for sale to the highest bidder?

No.

Although the game does do a nice job of accurately simulating the Yankees’ massive payroll-based advantage and the game is for the most part fun, annoying difficulty settings and poor graphics along with a few of the generic problems that plague most baseball games keep ESPN Baseball from greatness.

The first generic problem with all baseball games on the market is that there are simply way too many home runs hit. Particularly at “easy” difficulty, it would not be unlikely to hit 200 homers in a full 162-game season with almost any decent power hitter. There is a fine line between making the game realistic and making it so realistic it’s boring, but even with the juiced ball and growth hormones that allow Barry Bonds — who doesn’t appear in any baseball game this year — to smash the record books, this is unrealistic.

The game is far too easy on “rookie” difficulty and almost too difficult on the medium “pro” difficulty. Unlike EA’s “MVP Baseball 2004,” which lets you control every aspect of the difficulty using sliders for each gameplay aspect, “ESPN Baseball” takes the game from almost too easy to be enjoyable to so difficult it’s frustrating for newer players in the flick of one button.

In addition to this fairly steep jump in difficulty, the graphics are not very good. The player models all look sort of fat, and the faces do not really resemble their real-life counterparts, even for the better known players. The crowd is also entirely made up of two-dimensional standups and makes no noise, which becomes really annoying as the 10th home run of the game or so is launched into the flat crowd.

The game’s touted “first-person baseball” mode is one of the stupidest and most poorly executed ideas in a baseball game ever. It somehow manages to perfectly capture the feeling of jumping rapidly from one player’s body to another in jerky intervals while trying to avoid motion sickness.

The game does have good aspects, however. The “general manager” and “franchise” modes are outstanding, allowing even the Royals to be turned into a powerhouse through good management and personnel decisions.

The ESPN license is also put to good use through excellent commentary and cool “Sportscenter” in-game updates.

“ESPN Baseball” is not a bad game. However, in the ultra-competitive world of console baseball games, it doesn’t come out at the front of the pack. Although it would not be $50 totally wasted, the smart money is on the superior “MVP Baseball 2004.”