What Does a 'True' Competitive Setting Look Like in MLB The Show?

I’m just a man hoping y’all will take the OS survey we posted weeks back. This one is more about sports cards, your reading habits, and fantasy sports. Again, it’s always in an effort to better serve you all in the long run and curate experiences you might care about. This is likely the last week the survey will remain active.

Off rip, let me be clear that anything I talk about in relation to a “competitive” mode is not me advocating for this being the default setting or anything like that in all modes of MLB The Show. That said, I do think in recent years we’ve gotten more of these attempts at different difficulty/gameplay settings in some sports games. Madden has the simulation/arcade/competitive settings, and The Show does have something similar. These settings turn the dials within the game to tweak certain settings to make it feel more like one of those gameplay styles. I would argue they’re only so effective in the first place at creating unique gameplay styles, and this is not really what I’m talking about with a “true” competitive setting.

Perfect-Perfect Swings Should Be Hits Every Time

Instead, I’m more talking about the idea of guaranteed outputs. There is this rage I sometimes see in more competitive circles when it comes to The Show. People lose their minds when they register outs after Perfect-Perfect swings. We have these discussions on the forums sometimes about these outcomes, and the usual refrain is “well, that’s just baseball.” And that’s 100 percent true!

However these Perfect-Perfect Piggies (I say that with love, to be clear) don’t really like that response. They’re my “piggies” because I don’t really subscribe to this level of competitiveness with The Show. I love playing it offline and online, but I’m never going to play on the “zoomed” camera view while hitting because I just think it’s ugly. No amount of competitive advantage is worth that in this game, even if it costs me some wins. In other words, I guess I’m not “built different” like some of the ultra-competitive folks out there.

Regardless, when you’re playing on Legend or GOAT difficulty and you finally square one up only to register an out, that is absolutely frustrating. Again, the counter would be that “well, so is baseball.” And that’s 100 percent true, too!

Still, these are video games. We play them for a variety of reasons, and one of them is for competition. Winning is more fun than losing (at least online), and it’s not fun to feel like the worse player won in a video game — assuming you’re not just delusional about your own skill. Part of the appeal of real sports is that the best teams don’t always win — in fact in some sports, you pretty much always take the field over the best team because it’s really hard to win a title no matter how good you are. There is a level of randomness to it that we can’t control — shit happens. My favorite scene in Moneyball is Bob Costas talking about that randomness during a montage sequence.

But even if sports are about proving who is better while accepting anything is possible, the uncontrollable is theoretically controllable in video games. Video games are a series of inputs that can have very specific outputs every time, and baseball video games are perhaps the most input-output specific sports games — at least among the major team sports.

So when these PPPers (i.e. the Perfect-Perfect Piggies) say every perfect-perfect should be a hit, I don’t just throw that out the window. I think it’s a valid point, assuming we’re not making that part of all modes. In an online H2H environment, I could accept this sort of outcome. In my offline 30-team franchise, I would not want that to be part of my experience.

I don’t think it means any “perfect” input has to be a home run — still factor in power and all that — but no more line outs to first base, no more warning track power. Instead, a “perfect” is a hit of some sort. I do think SDS has the ability to control that if they want to. When the ball hits the bat, while there are certainly physics involved, I think SDS knows where the ball is going to end up.

SDS has never done this sort of thing with “perfect” swings because they have the data (and they do share this data from time to time) that shows how rare it is for “perfect” hits to be registered as outs. And, again, in real life not every hard hit ball is going to be a hit. I’m also willing to bet more “perfects” in The Show result in hits than the equivalent does in real life. It is more realistic to do it the way they do it, but in a “competitive” environment, it’s not that hard to argue that the rules should be different.

I think the closest comparison to this sort of thing would be interceptions in Madden. We have talked to death on the forums about the idea of too many interceptions vs. too few interceptions, and really what that comes down to is how many passes do you expect the defense to drop on errant reads and throws? There is a lot of space for different viewpoints in there, but what if, outside of when a player was hit while catching the ball, there were not any drops on plays where defenders and receivers got two hands on the ball? Again, I wouldn’t want that in my franchise mode, but I’m open to that idea in a competitive online setting.

I think part of the reason EA and SDS developers may steer clear of this sort of thing is due to the concept of “parity” in a H2H game. I’ve seen plenty of 17-16 games in The Show between two absolute demons on the highest difficulties. Those scores probably go even higher with no perfect-perfect outs. I have seen some insane users in Madden who get to balls on defense while using a mediocre linebacker only to then drop the pick. While the “best of the best” usually win as is in these games, I think you’re essentially erasing the concept of “stealing” a win by going with the “competitive” setting. I don’t necessarily consider that a bad thing, but it could impact how helpless some users feel in these games.

There’s More Than Just Being Perfect To Consider

In this “competitive” setting, I don’t think it’s just about the “perfect” outcomes either. The imperfect can be even more frustrating for some of these folks. Making a good pitch, executing it with perfect inputs, and then giving up a bloop hit or infield single is a bummer. “That’s just baseball,” but man it can be infuriating. What do we do about these outcomes?

I do think you could remove them (turning infield dribblers into routine grounders to fielders), but I don’t think that would be fitting into the narrative in the same way. Defense should still matter, and reaction times, speed, and all that should still play into things. Instead, what I would do is tighten up the swing results even more. If your PCI is way off, if you’re swinging at an obvious ball, or simply don’t have various quirks that could make these results make a little more sense, we should just have more swings and misses. I actually don’t think strikeouts are that out of hand in The Show.

Low-level players struggle at times, but that comes down to not recognizing balls and strikes more than PCI placement in my experience going up against those sorts of players. The bigger issue to me is that too many balls in the dirt are fouled off — and too many balls where the PCI is nowhere near the ball result in foul balls as well. If we are going to reward “perfect” inputs with hits, we should also punish the “imperfect” and not allow such poor swings to live to see another pitch.

Pitching Is Actually Already Perfect?

What I like about this topic is that I think we’re mostly already at the “competitive” level with pitching. I would also say it kind of proves why I would not use this setting in my franchise mode. There was a time when perfect pitch inputs still led to some pretty irregular pitch locations, but I think the PAR system is mostly locked in and makes sense 95 percent of the time now.

Why this is actually bad in a franchise mode setting is that once you’re good at the game, it’s really hard to walk batters unless you’re intentionally trying to walk them. Some of us in the community were more interested in the GOAT setting for pitching for offline franchise mode because we hoped it would make pitching harder — with a byproduct being an uptick in walks.

However, there’s no “clean” way to force pitchers to walk hitters when good inputs lead to clear outputs. You can make us give up more hits, home runs, and so on, but forcing us to throw balls is not so easy. A lot of us do “house rules” to push those walk totals up, but the point is that it’s almost like we need a better “simulation” setting for pitching.

Wherever you land on this specific topic, to round this all out, I think of all of this as something in the same realm as player ratings. This specific discussion about player ratings is a longer topic and something I want to write about in a future newsletter so I don’t want to get too deep into it, but I would ask you: Is there a 40 or 50 point overall rating difference between the Giants and Eagles in real life? I would be on the side that says there is not that wide of a gap because there’s a world where the worst team beats the best team in the NFL during any given week. Madden seems to share those feelings as the best team in Madden 25 at the start of the year was the Chiefs (92 overall), and the worst team was the Giants (75 overall). We’ve got a 17 point difference there (I did that math without a calculator by the way, kaboom).

However, wouldn’t it ultimately be more fun if franchise rebuilds were harder in our video games? Isn’t there a world where it could be better if the Giants were a 35 overall and the Eagles were a 95 overall? If you beat the Eagles as the Giants, it would truly feel like a big deal, but at the same time, everything would feel like more of an uphill battle. During a rebuild you wouldn’t immediately feel you could win with a Daniel Jones or Aidan O’Connell in Year 1 because those guys would not have ratings in the 60s, they would be in the 30s or 40s as players.

All this is a way of me saying I think it’s food for thought, and I don’t think it should be considered selling out “sim” by considering what a world would look like where the refrain “that’s just baseball” simply didn’t exist as a counterpoint anymore.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase

Reach out to me with “mailbag” questions whenever you want. I grew up reading Bill Simmons during the rise of the internet, and so I give you the means to hit me up with comments, thoughts, musings, questions, or whatever else you got. Whether you want to tell me why a “true” competitive mode is a silly idea, explain why no one can ever top Bo Jackson in Super Tecmo Bowl, or talk about why Blue Chips is underrated as a movie, all are welcome. If I get enough responses, I’d love to feature them in future newsletters or in “mailbags” of our own.

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