Check out our review of the MLB 14: The Show game.

Baseball season is just around the corner. Spring Training is about to get underway, and pitchers have already begun to report to camps. It won’t be long now until newspaper sports sections and websites are filled with statistics dedicated to tracking the minutia of America’s pastime.

Unfortunately for fans of the sport, they still have a few months before the new season begins. For gamers, though, there is always MLB 14: The Show to help fill the gap.

This year’s version releases later this spring on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and the PS Vita. Of the three, the PS4 version is the most intriguing, as it’s the new kid on the block. There are no next-gen exclusive features, but there are other reasons to be excited for the PS4 version – specifically, the graphics.

Check out the visuals above and you should be able to get a sense of where the next-gen processing power is being spent. The most obvious example may be the beards. On the PS3 version, beards are just texture maps plastered to faces. By comparison, in the next-gen version, each beard has up to 40,000 individual hairs. The crowds are also vastly improved, and there are several character models that move in different ways. It isn’t just blocks of repeating fans, it is a stadium filled with digital individuals – or at least enough character models to fool the average gamer.

The grass is also made up of blades of grass rather than just a green colored floor with some added textures. The lighting has also been overhauled, which is evident in the way light now hits a player’s skin and how it casts shadows. Check out the screenshots and then watch the PS3 trailer for comparison.

MLB 14: The Show, will launch on the PS3 and PS Vita on April 1, 2014, the day after Major League Baseball’s opening day. PS4 fans will have to wait a little longer though. The Next-gen version will debut sometime in May.

Update: This article has been updated with the game’s release dates.