Is to put the controller down. Seriously, just don't touch it. Play Conquest (if you're playing Diamond Dynasty; if not, just take your players' stats less seriously in Franchise) and never, ever swing until you have two strikes. Queue up Defector or the Washington Post or OKP or whatever and read some articles. If you've got nothing to read, just watch the pitches closely. Just like real life, you really just have to get familiar with what pitches look like, and ESPECIALLY when playing the CPU you have to get used to the fact that this game is really going to simulate how bad some of these pitchers are. You're going to see a lot of shitty pitches, even shitty pitches that accidentally become good pitches. You just gotta take, take, take until you start getting comfortable. It happens faster than you'd think, too - the only reason it took me like four years to get more than decent at this game was I refused to stop swinging at everything.


Another great example of how bad pitching can be is to go into Diamond Dynasty and do a Moment challenge that doesn't require anything more specific than "get on base X number of times". Don't touch the controller at ALL and there's a more than 50% chance you'll complete the challenge on your first try since the difficulty is on Veteran. Part of the paradox of batting you have to get used to is that a walk is a successful AB, and so the easier the batting difficulty is not only are your hits more likely to hit the dirt but the pitcher is more likely to be wild and put you on base for you. In some ways, Rookie and Veteran are actually HARDER than All-Star for me now because the pitchers are so, so shitty.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
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