Five times?! What difficulty are you using? I found I could draw walks on Legend through a handful of games, but found that it was too hard overall. Went down to All Star, after a few weeks of franchise with well disciplined hitting I'm at 2 BBs per game, with a high of 3.
As for pitching, yeah if you lower your control, you start serving it up. I've got my CPU contact all the way at zero, with the hopes that it would result in more chased pitches. It didn't really, hence the bug/suggestion report, but it also helps tone down the CPU jumping on
every mistake.