Fielding should be more important
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I don't know if there's ever been a baseball game that makes fielding truly important. SDS has added lots of details - like giving fielders different reaction times for different directions - but it still feels like the game is 80 percent batting, 19 percent pitching, and 1 percent fielding. This isn't true in real baseball - fielding and defensive play is super important.
Now sure, I've won a few games (and lost a few) because my center fielder is speedy or not speedy. But, fielding still feels pretty trivial - like, it's not difficult at all to hit the blue "perfect throw" section and almost every good player finds fielding to be free in the game.
It seems like there are more errors this year. I think that's a good thing. A bunch of people are gonna complain about it, because "rawr RNG made me lose!"....but if this game is supposed to convincingly simulate real baseball, errors need to happen more. Like, it shouldn't just be a blue window where you have a perfect throw - there should be a percentage - like you were "95 percent perfect" so you're chance of error is reduced.
Most of the time, every player in this game is a vacuum cleaner with an arm cannon. That's not how real baseball works - even on very normal plays, bad things happen in real ball. Throws miss by a little, bobbles happen...other than on routine fly balls, fielders make lots of mistakes. This has never been reflected in a game.
Lastly, two issues we can all agree on - when balls get by the catcher, they should almost never springboard off the backstop and right back to the catcher. It seems like this is a little improved this year - but foul territory is still too small, and it's way too hard to advance runners on balls that get away. It's also too hard to get doubles and triples - especially triples. Again, the issue is that it's too easy for a decent player to perfect throw to anywhere. Ain't no escaping those outfield hoses.
