You’ve probably noticed that the umpires in MLB The Show seem like robots in disguise, nailing almost every call perfectly. You score that corner of the strike zone with a fastball, and boom, bullseye, they make the right call. It feels great, I mean, finally a video game where the umpire isn’t out to ruin your game.
Yeah, it can be refreshing for a bit, but as you keep playing, it becomes obvious that they rarely miss. What’s interesting is that even after turning off “Perfect Calls”, these umpires still have higher accuracy than their real-life counterparts.
Seriously, where are the bad calls that make you smash your controller? Real umpires? They blow calls all the time; sometimes it’s infuriating, sometimes it’s hilarious. In The Show, though, it’s like they’ve forgotten that umpires are humans, not cyborgs with laser precision.
Real Umpires Miss More Than You Think
Have you ever scrolled through X (previously Twitter) and seen yet another umpire get flamed for blowing a call? Yeah, it turns out that these guys make bad calls more often than you might think. Thanks to Statcast and trackers like Umpire Scorecards, every pitch across MLB is graded.
In a season, most umpires deliver around 92-94 percent accuracy on average, which sounds pretty solid until you realize that’s still a ton of missed calls every night. The best ones? They’ll nudge up to 95 percent on a good day.
Oh, but the rough ones? They’ll dip down to 88, 89 percent. Surprising, right? However, these human screw-ups live in the game’s DNA. One borderline pitch can mess up an inning, maybe even flip the whole game.
Whether you love it or hate it, such unpredictable events in baseball make it oddly addictive. Sometimes it’s frustrating, sometimes it’s pure drama, but this human element lives in the heart of baseball.
How MLB The Show Handles Umpires
If we compare the two, umpires in MLB The Show basically treat the strike zone like a 3D cube. Ball touches the box? Strike. Misses the Box? It’s a ball, there’s no hesitation; that’s the end of the story.
Now, if you switch to “Perfect Calls”, the umpires become laser-precise, with essentially hawk-like accuracy. Yeah, you can switch to “Variable calls,” in which the game introduces occasional misses just to keep things spicy.
However, from a player’s view, most of the experience seems manufactured. I mean, sometimes even an obvious strike is called a ball, which feels scripted rather than natural. What you really don’t get in The Show are those barely-off-the-back calls that fuel debates and replay clips.
Even with Umpire Accuracy switched to “Variable Calls”, the umpires in MLB The Show act almost robot-like, rarely missing a call. They were supposed to be realistic, no?
While there’s no official data to cite an exact percentage, there’s no denying that the in-game umpires call balls and strikes far more accurately than real-life umpires.
So, the question arises: are the umpires in The Show too realistic? Or rather, unrealistic to begin with in the first place?
Why Does It Matter?
The way The Show handles the strike zone is almost “too” good to be considered a realistic depiction of real-world umpires. In real baseball, from pitchers to hitters, nobody’s certain about what’s going on at corners.
That’s the whole fun, asking yourself, will the umpire squeeze the zone, or will the pitcher get that borderline call? There’s always this little pulse of anxiety and suspense adding to the experience. Talk about The Show? Every pitch is judged by some digital hawk with laser vision.
Sure, it’s fair and all, but it takes away all that drama from the game; the randomness, the little injustices, the yelling at your screen. It’s just not there anymore, not with these robotic umpires.
I mean, it’s understandable, the developers at San Diego Studio probably sat at a roundtable and decided, “Look, if some blown strike three decided a ranked match, players would probably start uninstalling”.
And I don’t blame them either, after all, competitive players want their skills to be the deciding factor, not some RNG digital umpire. However, by making everything so accurate to the dot, they essentially stripped baseball of that messy and intense chaos that makes the game so entertaining.
In a nutshell, The Show is fair at some cost of realism, which is the exact realism that makes baseball what it is.
How Can Umpires Be Balanced?
Talking about balancing between that sweet spot of being fair and realistic, there are plenty of options to experiment with.
I mean, why not let a catcher’s defense and framing skills influence those calls properly? Or better yet, just offer players an extensive slider for umpire accuracy, as the current options don’t really create a noticeable difference.
Want robots who never screw up? Cool, max it out. Prefer that “realistic” baseball with all its randomness? Slide it the other way around. The slider should have game-changing umpire accuracy differences.
The best part about it is that hardcore players can still get their fair and competitive playing field, while pure fans of the game can soak up all the weird and messy things baseball’s loved for. A win-win for everybody; might as well boost sales along the way.
To sum it up, we can only hope that such features are implemented in future patch updates, and the developers listen to the players who care about immersion.
