How to Yield a Realistic Number of Walks in MLB The Show 25

There are just some things sports video games can’t seem to get right about the sports they try to realistically recreate. For instance, NBA 2K makes it nearly impossible to produce the kind of sloppy play and mental errors to generate the number of turnovers that you see in a typical NBA game. The NHL series can’t provide an AI opponent that doesn’t connect on an abnormally high percentage of its passes. Madden isn’t able to have its players display even a baseline level of awareness to pick up pass rushers right in front of them or play reliable zone defense at times. It’s these kind of annoying finer details and statistical anomalies that drive offline players nuts when they’re trying to have their games emulate the real thing as much as possible.

MLB The Show 25 plays largely true-to-life in almost every aspect, but it’s not immune from having one bugaboo that breaks immersion and causes your stats over the course of a season to be out of whack. As with earlier entries in the series, the latest edition once again makes it difficult to generate a realistic number of walks. That’s not to say that you won’t be able to work a healthy number of walks if you’re patient enough at the plate. It’s on the mound where the issues persist, as a variety of factors are liable to see your pitches find the strike zone far too often to issue all that many free passes to first base. It certainly doesn’t help that a CPU batter will habitually chase pitches out of the zone, yielding strikeouts that could instead be walks if only they had a slightly better eye.

But that doesn’t mean that all is lost in having the CPU earn an average amount of bases on balls. You simply need to be willing to embrace altering some settings and perhaps even your mindset in order to achieve your goal. There are ways you can have pitchers, especially those with lower control and BB/9 ratings, struggling to find the strike zone on a consistent basis.

Here are five tips for those looking to have the walk numbers of your pitchers lining up with the rest of your league within franchise mode.

Classic Pitching

The single most impactful thing that you can do to produce more walks from your pitchers is to switch to the classic pitching interface that sees you only push a single button to deliver the ball to the plate. The reason for this is pretty simple: all of the other pitching interfaces rely too much on user input. As you get accustomed to these interfaces, you will inevitably become too proficient at them to ever have your pitchers lose all that much control on a consistent basis. That makes them better suited for use in online modes, where you can rely on those skills to dominate user hitters by painting the edges of the strike zone, rather than in an offline franchise where realism is the priority. The classic interface, on the other hand, sees the pitcher’s control and BB/9 attributes often influence where a pitch goes instead.

If you’re like me, you might have a slight internal struggle about moving to an interface that ultimately puts the outcome of every pitch less in your own hands. But after using the classic interface for quite a while now and becoming accustomed to its nuances, it’s less RNG than you might initially believe. By keeping attuned to the pitch feedback after each pitch, you can learn an awful lot about just how long you need to hold the button for a pitch and how precise you have to be to avoid slightly early or slightly late releases. If you’re not careful, you can even be very early or very late in your releases and that’s when you really start to see those walks (and meatballs) happen more frequently.

Don’t Give In To Hitters

The truth about walks both in real life and in MLB The Show 25 is that they will often come from pitchers trying to work the corners of the strike zone and missing a little too often. There are weaker hitters that you’d be smart to attack with fastballs in the zone to get ahead in the count, but the more dangerous hitters require a little bit more finesse.

If you get behind in the count on hitters who are liable to do some significant damage against you, there’s no shame in missing with a breaking ball and issuing a free pass. It’s certainly a better option than cruising a fastball over the plate and having the slugger smash a 400+ foot home run against you, especially with runners on base.

Raise Your Difficulty

A surefire way to guarantee that you will have less command while on the bump is to raise your pitching difficulty from the settings menu. As you might expect, it’s always going to be easier to throw strikes to both sides of the plate on Veteran difficulty than Legend. On higher difficulties, the margin for error naturally decreases on whatever interface you happen to be using, so perfect releases become increasingly rare achievements. Once those releases are happening early or late at a decent rate, the pitches begin to end up in locations that you weren’t intending and those will habitually be outside the strike zone.

Of course, the trouble is that as you raise the pitching difficulty, you’ll also be facing smarter hitters that are better equipped to take advantage of your mistakes and rack up the runs before you know it. You’ll probably want to experiment with different difficulties to find a sweet spot that works best for you where the CPU is capable on any given day of both being shutout or putting up a double digit run total.

Sliders

When you’ve settled on an ideal difficulty, you can further une the walk rate by manipulating a couple of key sliders. The ones that you’ll want to pay particular attention to are Human Pitcher Control and Human Pitcher Consistency. By lowering the former, you’ll throw more balls in general while decreasing the latter will lead to an uptick in wild pitches and hit batsmen.

Start slow and take down the sliders one notch at a time, though you might need to go as far as a few notches to see noticeable results in some cases. These sliders are especially vital if you want to continue to use a pitching interface other than classic. While you may have already mastered an interface like pinpoint or meter, they will suddenly become a greater challenge once you’ve adjusted the sliders to minimize your control.

Quick Counts

I’d only really recommend this as a last resort or if you happen to be tight on time, but using quick counts can be effective at producing more walks for obvious reasons. Because you’re bound to start an at-bat from time to time with three balls already in the count, it only takes one errant pitch to send a satisfied hitter trotting down to first base without ever taking the bat off his shoulder. The downside, of course, is that you could be left with a hollow feeling because you really weren’t all that involved in each at-bat. That makes this more of a quick-fix band-aid for the overarching problem rather than the comprehensive remedy you might be seeking, so only rely on quick counts if you’re at the point of frustration where you’re ready for some sort of compromise.