Let’s just get one thing out of the way: the menus in MLB 14 The Show’s franchise definitely went in the right direction from where things were previously.

I honestly just wanted to sound positive before this next paragraph which will sound less than positive.

The menus in MLB 14 The Show’s franchise mode menus are still some of the most poorly organized user interfaces you can find. Want to know how many years you have left with your all-star pitcher? That’s about 3-4 button pushes away on average from the main home screen in franchise mode. Want to know who is leading your team in batting average? That’s really not as easy to find out as it should be.

Granted, I’m also a student of Out of the Park Baseball, perhaps you’ve heard of it?

My standards for virtually manning a baseball GM seat are quite high, but that's the problem when you play in the same market with such a good game at what it does.

Good menu systems and managing a franchise are two things which I just come to expect, so I do have high expectations for what a console game can achieve. I do expect a franchise mode to convey the very most important things to running my franchise right in front of me as well as giving me enough information about the world I exist in digitally to suck me into it.

Here is the problem with the menus in MLB 14 The Show: They have too many layers of depth and there simply isn’t enough information given to you readily on the screens which matters most.

On the lineup screen, all you get is an overall rating for each player. You don’t get their key stats, you don’t get stats on how they hit against a certain handedness of pitching, you simply get an overall rating which tells you nothing about the players power, contact hitting, or speed — three key things you’d like to know at the very least while building a lineup.

The franchise menus are like this across the board, conveying something incredibly simple for the least common denominator and hiding the stuff which really matters in player card menus which are several layers deep.

The problem with The Show's menus, at the very heart of it, is comparing your two shortstops is almost impossible without a notepad to record everything about them. You should be able to compare every player in your organization right in front of you, so everything is visually accessible and digestible.

In the future, how hard would it truly be to keep the menus as simple as they are on the face of it, but also to offer a mere button push to show the second layer of stats right in front of you, perhaps with the ability to toggle through stats on the menu you are in so you can actively compare players within your organization?

For financial planning of a franchises’ future, there also needs to be a financial future/planning screen somewhere. You need to see which players are coming up to be free agents and which are not — especially when doing such crazy things like drafting, trading, signing free agents, scouting prospects, and everything else you do as a baseball franchise.

It’s not that I hate the approach to simplify and streamline the menus, better to be simple and readable than a convoluted mess where getting the information you want is impossible because everything is so cluttered. This series’ menus in franchise mode have taken some very positive steps the past few years — but it’s time to start catering to every baseball fan in the menus and not make the guys like myself go hunting for data which should be pretty easy to find to effectively run a franchise.

There are things which Out of the Park Baseball does which MLB The Show could take a few direct cues from — and there are several key pieces of info which any bustling virtual GM does need which simply aren’t terribly accessible.

It is my hope the franchise menus in MLB The Show continue to improve. There are only a couple of tweaks to this game mode's menus needed, and then it'll truly be time for its promotion to the majors.