MLB The Show 26 Guide: Know Your Hitter Tendencies

One of the most overlooked aspects to hitting in The Show involves something you don’t control: hitter tendencies.

Now, it makes sense people look past hitter tendencies because you don’t control it, and it’s hidden away in the menus so you might not even know it’s a thing. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

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How important hitter tendencies are depends on who you ask because SDS isn’t too forthcoming about it beyond what’s been in the game manual about it.

Here’s the broad summary of what the game manual has usually said about hitter tendencies in the past (with a couple of my notes mixed in):

• There are pull, extreme pull, whole field/balanced, opposite, and extreme opposite hitters.

  • Whole field is the most common tendency (by far), and extreme opposite is the least common (by far).

  • These tendencies do not change over time. They come into the league with the same tendency they will always have.

• Balanced/whole field is generally speaking the most common tendency.

  • Switch hitters seem to always be balanced/whole field against left-handed pitching.

• A right-handed pull hitter who hits a borderline CF timed swing as he connects with the ball (which would stay there if he was balanced tendency) will sometimes end up as a batted ball that ultimately becomes a borderline left field.

  • Use this same logic to translate how the other tendencies would function.

• What this essentially means is your swing timing windows are altered a bit based on hitter tendency.

  • A pull hitter gets slightly better “early” swing windows, and an opposite field hitter gets slightly better “late” swing windows.

  • Plus, always remember as a general rule that early swings give you more power and swinging late is more to increase your contact.

• At a glance, how a defense is shifting can give away a hitter’s inherent tendency a lot of the time.

With this general knowledge now in our pocket, I could talk a lot about what goes into a user saying someone has a “bad swing” or a “good swing” but that’s not really the point of this primer. However, I do think “bad swings” are most often tied to right-handed hitters who have balanced/whole field or opposite hitter tendencies and have mid to low contact ratings against right-handed pitching.

In essence, those are the most common types of hitters in the most common type of situation you will find yourself in with this game, and so it makes sense that those are the players who will most often be cited as having “bad” swings — sample sizes do matter when it comes to people writing about players with bad swings on the internet.

Regardless, there is no one thing that makes someone have a “good” or “bad” swing, so don’t take this “hitter tendency” spreadsheet as the determining factor for who you try to get on your team either because what goes into a swing result is actually quite complicated. I think it’s best not to dig too deep into that whole process unless you want to drive yourself mad or are deeply competitive, so just know hitter tendency is only one part of the puzzle — albeit I would say it’s a sizable part.

It fits into the puzzle along with contact, power, clutch, quirks, and thresholds for various ratings (and probably even the ratios of those ratings in conjunction with one another). All these things change your ratios for your outcomes of things like exit velocities, line drives, hard hit balls, grounders, homers, and fly outs.

All that being said, the point of this guide is to make life easier for you. It’s even more annoying than in the past to find a hitter’s tendency because now it only seems to surface in franchise mode (or in-game in the pause menu as always). You can’t just go into Roster Control in the main menu of the game and find this info — for whatever reason.

So I’m going to go through every team and list off hitter tendencies for a bunch of players and prospects. I will cover some of the Legends in the game as well. I will not do every player, so this will have a bias towards power hitters and players above a certain OVR threshold (and/or prospect status for non-MLB guys in each system).

This is useful for franchise mode and Diamond Dynasty — albeit I won’t get to a lot of the DD players who aren’t in the normal game. I may add an addendum to this newsletter where I do add some of the more DD-specific guys (you’d be able to find that update by going to the online version of this specific newsletter rather than just the one that ends up in your inbox).

But, for now, I haven’t gotten too into DD yet this year so my player pool of cards is weak, and the only way for me to check those players is by going into actual games with them, so it’s a longer process to check each player’s tendency.

Okay, let’s jump into this spreadsheet.

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