19 was better.
Now hear me out on this. 20 has the potential to be better, but where it stands right now it is absolutely not(it’s not at 18 level yet). The hitting for the first week or so was amazing in 20. When you squared balls up, you were rewarded. It may have been a little bit over the top, but it felt like a couple of small adjustments (especially to pitching) could make the game great. However, the next patch ruined the game in my opinion. Now, even when you square the ball up you get a lot of good okays and only some good goods or good squares. You essentially need to get perfect perfects to score and the game seems to just hand those at random. Somehow SDS ruined the timing window with this patch and now hitting on HOF is brutal. It feels like legend last year and that was not a good experience. Every game seems to 2-1 or 1-0 because everyone and their mother uses Kluber or Newhouser and they are ridiculous on HOF. You have to sit dead red even with a monitor with a good response time to hit the fastball and adjusting to the off speed is just not an option. Pitching on the other hand is an issue and not an issue at the same time. It is an issue because it feels exceptionally hard to locate on the corners of the plate, but it’s not an issue because well look at what I said about hitting, even when you square one up it’s not going to reward you. Lastly, the fielding is an absolute issue. I like the edition of the faster throw meter and the perfect throw line, but the glitches and straight up misses from good fielders is ridiculous. I understand not everyone is Willie Mays, but goddamn almost all MLB players can field at a decent enough level.
In 19, hitting was obviously better than 18, but there were issues. Obviously, the check swings and the foul balls were major issues that never got solved. There was also the infuriating bloop hits that happened quite a bit and of course the line outs. The line outs last year were pretty brutal. Some games you just knew it wasn’t your game when you’d hit everything hard, but get nothing to land and your opponent would string together a couple of bloops and you lose by one. However, for the most part the game acknowledged when a ball was squared up and you were rewardedish for it. I personally loved the pitch speeds last year. All star was a [censored] show, but once you made it to HOF it felt perfect. On legend, it was a bit difficult, but I didn’t play too many games on legend because I’m not a god like the mcgunski’s of the world. The pitching last year felt very good. I know high sinkers were spammed, which still happens, but you could locate pitches. I was never an amazing pitcher, but there were certain pitches that I knew I could always go to and they wouldn’t be hung. The fielding in 19 was pretty solid for the most part. Urgency was still an issue, but that hasn’t been fixed (for the fourth year in a row). The animations were relatively clean besides Griffey. (Also can they bring back the black strike zone and not the stupid white one from this year)
Overall, 19 played a lot cleaner than 20 does rn and unless it changes I don’t know if I will stick with this game the whole year like I did last year.
CAP