It is absolutely a Mario sports game. It's fun to learn how the game works, but kinda frustrating until you get there. The cast is alright, but I remember it being expanded pretty well in the sequel. If playing this game did anything, it made me interested in playing the sequel again. The story mode is short and sweet, although scouting is a little meh in this game due to mostly being RNG on if you'll even get the opportunity. At least the games are short so you aren't wasting a ton of time if you happen to not get Yoshi when you wanted to.

Definitely one of the best baseball games I've ever played, I would have gotten so much mileage out of some kind of Season mode like traditional baseball games have

EDIT: Played this game competitively for about a year and it made my outlook on this game much worse unfortunately lmao. I won't lower my rating though, but holy shit playing this game competitively is a nightmare. When you're remotely close in skill with your opponent every game literally just comes down to hit trajectory RNG. Will your perfect hit be a grand slam or inning ending double play? RNG will decide! Sounds competitively viable to me! Star hits like Birdo egg and Mario fireball are also pretty much entirely RNG, but you can turn star skills off, so that is less on the game and more on the competitive community making star skills part of the ruleset when they blatantly should not be. Pitching meta is also miserable, the meta is to just throw outside balls/bait outside balls into last second strikes 90% of the time and it just becomes 50/50 simulator. Playing this game competitively is fun for a bit when you're new but when you actually start improving and realize that all your games against similarly skilled opponents are being decided by luck and nothing else you will stop enjoying it very quickly.