What Does MLB 13 The Show Need to do Next Year to Satisfy Your Baseball Gaming Needs?

I'll be honest it really is tough to find faults with hitting, you either have to nitpick or you have to temper your expectations on what should be realistic or what should be fully up to the user.

Every year since MLB 09 The ShowI believe, hitting has been more about the players ratings rather than the users input, which in turn leads to slumps and hot streaks along with a much more realistic game. However, this also leads to players becoming frustrated with the "perfect timing, superb contact" resulting in anything other than a line-drive or a home run. Now that happens in baseball, but to appease to these type of players who want their input to mean more when it comes to hitting, perhaps making the difficulties under Rookie and Veteran rely more on user input than it already is, then starting from All-Star and above more so to ratings.

Also, I would hope more user foul-offs would be out of play or at least less pop-ups.

I strictly play under the classic meter pitching. First and foremost, I'll put it out there that I'm a huge supporter for the pitcher confidence and individual pitch confidence meter in this game and I absolutely love the new confidence meter for this game. The game itself is much more forgiving with your individual pitches, especially the good old number 1 (which in past iterations you literally had to throw it about 80% of the time, nearly all for strikes or it'll be a mediocre offering).

However, against the AI I would like to see less discipline from hitters with average or worse discipline (so more aggressive cuts out of the zone on pitches that don't need to be set up) and more swing-through cuts (on both sides actually, for the user and the AI). I find that on my own personal experience with this game, that the amount of foul-offs by both sides is just about right (except I feel like because of user input the user him/herself ends up getting into more foul outs because of pop-ups foul).

Every year I keep hoping for an overhaul and while it's good, there are just some things limiting it from being great. First off, I'm aware that SCEA tests the rosters for transactions and to check if things end up as unexpected, such as the free agency problem in years past and the amount trades involving top prospects. However, each year we see top prospects traded at an absurd amount and that's moreso because of the number of A-potential prospects in the custom rosters in comparison to the significantly lower number of A-potential prospects in the default rosters. I hope it's possible for the team or for the community guys to test out next year's game for trades with about 35 or so A potential prospects on the roster and see how many are traded, as that's possibly the amount of A-potential prospects that may be in next year's OSFM, give or take a few.

Now for the draft, it's gotten better, but we still see players being drafted in the first round with F-potential and a really high overall. This needs to change and I would hope teams would make it a priority to draft on a combination of potential and overall rather than just overall for the amateur draft.

We've seen some minor additions to how you can customize and create-a-player in this year with the addition of compression sleeves, more sunglasses, different hat styles, different batting gloves, different shoes, etc. The textures on the player also has improved over the years.

A few additions I'm hoping for in next year's game is more hairstyles (a longer hair style, like Yu Darvish's hair), different hair colors (dirty blond, dark brown, etc.), and hopefully loose 3/4 sleeves kind of like the one Khalil Greene had.

Progression and potential may be tied to this, but I'm hoping for different types of player tendencies, related to the player's toolset. For example:

Position Player:
Power
Hitting
Speed
Fielding
Arm

You could get 5-Tool, All-Around (4 of the tools), Offensive (Power and Hitting), Power, Contact, Speedster, and Defensive (Fielding and Arm). A 5-Tooler tendency would progress in all ratings but speed. Offensive would progress more on offensive ratings, Defensive would progress more on defensive ratings, speedster would progress in contact, bunting, baserunning, and defensive ratings, and so on.

Pitchers is where it gets a little tricky. I'd like to see a system where young pitchers start off with a decent to great primary offering, and then if their secondary offering develops or not (i.e. control and movement for pitches 2-5), it determines whether the pitcher is a starter or reliever. Then if the pitcher can improve their Stamina and /9 ratings, that will determine what role they have, ranging from long reliever to ace for starting pitchers and fringe reliever to closer for relievers. So if you have to A potential starters, their careers could progress differently in that Starter A's secondary pitches improve and he stays in the rotation, and Starter B's /9 ratings improve but his secondary offerings don't improve, leading him to be more of a relief pitcher.