Watch these two pitches from Yu Darvish, a cutter and a two-seamer.
Both of these pitches come in at 90 MPH, so it takes about four tenths of a second for the pitch to travel from Darvish’s hand to home plate. And for half of that time, the two pitches look identical. Then one ends up on the outer half of the plate and the other scoots backwards, inside off the plate.
Then, of course, Darvish has other pitches too, like this terrifying slider:
I cannot stop watching that slider video. If I were batting lefty, I would read the pitch as a high fastball, then the pitch would end up hitting me in the belt.
Let us now accept the premise that hitting in the major leagues must be difficult. Hitters need the patience and mechanical precision of a golfer, and the vision and reaction times of a fighter pilot.
Thankfully, we have video games, the medium of the power fantasy. Hitting in real life may be a vast, impossible mountain to climb, full of mental and physical roadblocks, that requires hours and hours of practice, coaches, and occasionally consulting a shaman to ward away bad luck. But what is it like to hit in the most popular baseball game franchise for more than ten years running?
Hitting the Wall
Feel free to search Twitter for “hitting in MLB The Show” like I did. Once you filter out the tweets from the official The Show account, basically every tweet is saying the same thing:
I am such a dope. I will swing at anything in this stupid game.
Twitter users, on hitting in MLB The Show
Notably, no one blames the game. They blame themselves. They silently acknowledge that the video game is only delivering on its promise of making a baseball simulation. It’s the fault of the player if they can’t distinguish a fastball from a changeup, or show enough patience to wait for a good pitch to hit.
On the other hand, I have seen game-blamers frustrated about one thing that is quite literally beyond the player’s control: Perfect/Perfect outs.
In recent editions of MLB The Show, the game will provide visual feedback on your swing timing and placement (in the Zone hitting interface). For instance, after you pull a groundball foul, the game may indicate that you had perfect PCI placement (the PCI is your cursor in the strike zone, controlled by your left analog stick) but early swing timing (when you press the swing button).
Unfortunately, it is possible, and even somewhat common, to make a Perfect/Perfect swing, which lights the corner of the screen up in a friendly, endorphin-releasing blue (Yay! I did it!), that results in an out. It could be a sharp grounder right at somebody, or a line drive right at somebody, or, worst of all, a routine fly ball just short of the warning track.
I think this is a bad game design decision. Even if your hitter is Jeff Mathis up against Gerrit Cole, even if the pitch is a low and away power slider, even if the wind is blowing in at Wrigley today, you shouldn’t show players that they did the best they possibly could and it wasn’t good enough. Even D&D lets you make miracles happen if you roll a 20.
Doesn’t have to be a home run! But even if real baseball has perfect swings that result in lazy flyouts, we can’t bow to that in a video game, in my opinion. If someone developed a perfect hitting AI that took every ball and put a Perfect/Perfect swing on any strike, it should never make an out.
In older games in the series, we didn’t have the swing timing/placement feedback. Even if you thought you put a perfect swing on the ball, recorded a video, and sued San Diego Studio, no court would take your case. Now we have the feedback. Now we have proof the game’s math is screwing with us. Power to the players.
But for all other cases, the players blame themselves. And they try to improve, by doing what nerds do best: Homework.
Hitting the Books
MLB The Show is a black box in a lot of ways. There is no Prima strategy guide (at least, not a real paper one, and not recently even in digital form). The in-game tutorials only teach you the controls.
There are a lot of questions that need answers, like, what do hitter attributes like Vision and Discipline actually do? Do they have any effect at all when you are controlling a hitter, or only when simulating games, or only when pitching to CPU hitters? I heard Discipline made check swings happen more often in previous games, but not anymore. If you want to read a nine-page forum thread of people arguing about what they think these attributes do, here you go.
The Directional hitting interface is even more mysterious. Instead of moving a PCI cursor around the zone, in Directional mode only your timing matters (and pitch selection, since pitches down the middle are still easier to hit than strikes on the corners).
The controls say you can also hold a direction on the analog stick to “influence” the hit to go that way in Directional mode. But it seems like there is a lot more to it behind the scenes.
When I used to play in Directional mode, I never held the analog stick in any direction. Who cares where the ball goes, so long as it’s hit hard and falls in?
After reading a Reddit guide that theorizes there are other, hidden effects depending on which direction you hold, I started trying to pull basically everything. I hit a lot better all of a sudden. If the effects in that Reddit guide are correct, these are really important effects left totally unsaid to the player!
It’s incredible how often fan-made hitting guides for MLB The Show sound like real advice a hitting coach might give. Some guides might suggest to always look fastball, then adjust for offspeed. Guides will stress the need to stay zen, and focus on process over results. Sometimes, the pitcher will just have you beat, and you have to move onto the next game. Virtually every guide stresses waiting for your pitch instead of swinging at any strike. Easier said than done.
Side note: Many people theorize the game punishes swinging at the first pitch. It seems like results are better in hitter’s counts than in pitcher’s counts, and even 0-0 is basically treated as a pitcher’s count. If this is true, I don’t agree with this as a game design decision. Hitter’s counts should be easier because you know the pitcher has to throw a strike, and is more likely to throw a fastball, not because when you make perfect contact, the ball magically flies further.
There is another option besides studying guides and practicing: Finding the right product. For instance:
KontrolFreek is a controller accessories company, focused more on first-person shooters than baseball games. The green precision ring is a cushion that goes around your analog stick, adding some resistance to allegedly make it easier to aim the analog stick precisely.
I have not tried using KontrolFreek and don’t plan to. But it does feel like the measly analog stick is not a precise enough tool for the job. A pitch down the middle but slightly up and in is hard to aim for. I can’t make such a subtle thumb movement that quickly. In practice, the easiest pitches to hit perfectly are perfectly down the middle, at the top of the zone, or at the bottom of the zone. Because you can quickly flick your thumb all the way up or down, but it’s harder to move just halfway.
Some people suggest holding your stick all the way up and in to help with this: That way your bat is already positioned where you need the quickest reflexes, and any reactive movements will generally go in the same direction instead of either up or down. But nothing in the game would ever suggest such an offbeat strategy. And after some trying, I’m not convinced it really helps.
A Sacrifice Hit
If hitting is so frustrating and so difficult, how does anyone ever win a game in MLB The Show? With lights-out pitching. Pitching is a calm, meditative experience in The Show. You can throw bullets in the zone all day long without having to worry about too much traffic on the bases.
I don’t know why the severe difference in difficulty between the two major halves of the game. Maybe, pitching had to be balanced to be easy because the hitting is so hard. A worthy sacrifice for the good of the gamers’ psyches.
There are three main pitching control styles: Meter, the classic golf game-style timing mechanism that determines the pitch quality and command; Pinpoint, a new method in MLB The Show 21 with Skate-style analog stick movements that are surprisingly easy to follow after a little practice; and Pulse, a more rapid and stressful timing mechanism that reminds me of “Megaton Punch” from Kirby Super Star (which is fun, but I wouldn’t want to do it 150 times per nine innings). Feels more random and punishing than the more popular Meter and Pinpoint. We’ll ignore Pulse.
Pitching is easy online because another human has to do the hitting. And even more than a CPU pitcher, you can take advantage of the fact that low and away sliders and low changeups will always look like tasty fastballs to a non-expert MLB The Show player. Until you get to the higher ranks online, you should hardly ever throw a strike.
Typical Diamond Dynasty online games are meant to be three innings, but in my experience, often go to four or five innings as the game stays tied at 0 or 1 for a long time.
Against the CPU, it’s not clear why pitching is balanced to be so easy, if not to compensate for hitting difficulties. The CPU will swing too early on fastballs strangely often, and it feels like mistake pitches aren’t punished as heavily as they should be.
In a typical 9-inning game against the CPU, I tend to give up about four hits and one home run. Spoil my no-hitter, spoil my shutout, but leave plenty of room for me to scratch across a few runs for the win.
It has to be hard to try and balance a game like MLB The Show. The game has to be so many things for so many people: A casual local two-player game, a rewarding “Road to the Show” single-player experience, and a competitive online multiplayer game and aspiring eSport, just for starters.
And as a baseball simulation, the game is beholden to the real and well-known statistics and ratios of real-life baseball. If you could easily hit .400 with 80 home runs as a rookie in “Road to the Show,” the game’s reputation as a simulation would questioned.
The hitting mechanics in MLB The Show are unique among baseball games for showing us how hard it can be to hit in the majors. And though it may seem frustrating and impossibly difficult, the games have been very popular for a long time now.
If you’ve read this far and you’re frustrated with how hitting works and don’t know where to turn, I have a suggestion that beats every other hitting guide on the internet: Import yourself a copy of Pro Yakyuu Spirits. Hitting in that game feels realistic and challenging, but rewarding. It’s fun!