If you’re even remotely into baseball video games, chances are you’ve spent countless hours with MLB The Show. It’s the crown jewel of digital baseball. The graphics are lifelike, the commentary is smooth, the ballparks look like exact replicas of their real-world counterparts, and the gameplay manages to straddle that sweet spot between simulation and fun. On paper, it’s nearly perfect. In practice, it’s still the best baseball game ever made, bar none. (although PERSONALLY, RBI Baseball 3 for NES is still my all-time Favorite)
And yet, there’s one thing — one massive, frustrating, controller-throwing issue — that keeps nagging at almost every longtime player: the foul balls.
Yes, MLB The Show has a foul ball problem. Not just a little problem, but a glaring one. It’s the kind of thing that turns an otherwise immersive, fluid baseball game into a slog where you sometimes feel like you’re watching a batting cage session instead of playing nine innings.
The Great Foul Ball Epidemic
Here’s the scenario. You’re cruising through a game. You’re pitching well, hitting decent, the timing feels right. Then you face a batter, get ahead in the count, maybe 0-2 or 1-2, and you’re ready to put him away. You dot a fastball high and inside, and—ping—foul ball. You throw a slider down and away, ping, foul ball. You go changeup in the dirt, ping, foul ball. Suddenly you’re 10 pitches deep into an at-bat, the hitter has fouled off half a dozen pitches, and your “easy out” has turned into a drawn-out, hair-pulling grind.
And this isn’t just an occasional thing. It happens constantly. If you play a full nine-inning game in The Show, you can pretty much expect at least five minutes of that game to be nothing but foul balls. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize a game is only 20 to 25 minutes long. That’s one-fifth of your playtime dedicated to foul after foul after foul.
It breaks the pace. Baseball is already a slow sport compared to, say, basketball or hockey. The Show does a great job of streamlining the experience so it feels engaging and exciting. But then the foul ball issue drags it all down, stretching out at-bats to absurd lengths and killing any momentum you had going.
The Death of Flow
Games like The Show live and die on rhythm. When you’re in that groove, pitching and hitting flow together like a real baseball game. Strikeouts feel earned, homers feel magical, and pitching duels can actually be fun instead of boring.
But foul balls ruin that rhythm. You’ll be in a close game, throwing perfect pitches, and instead of rewarding your skill, the game punishes you with endless foul tips. Sometimes you’ll face a batter who rattles off eight, nine, even ten fouls in a row, and it feels less like “working the count” and more like the game just refusing to let the at-bat end.
It’s demoralizing, especially when you’re pitching. You know you executed perfectly. The pitch had movement, it was in the right spot, and it should have been either a swing-and-miss or weak contact. Instead, the batter barely gets a piece, and you’re forced to try again. By the third or fourth foul in a row, you’re not thinking strategically anymore — you’re just irritated and desperate to get the out.
The Realism Argument
Defenders of the game might argue, “Well, foul balls happen in real baseball too.” And yes, of course they do. Anyone who’s ever watched a 12-pitch at-bat in the majors knows it can be both thrilling and frustrating. A guy like Juan Soto or Paul Goldschmidt can spoil pitches with the best of them.
But here’s the thing: in MLB The Show, foul balls happen way more often than they do in real life. It’s not even close. In real baseball, most at-bats don’t stretch into double-digit pitch counts. In the game, though? It feels like every other hitter is fouling off multiple pitches, no matter how good or bad they are. Even light-hitting utility guys suddenly morph into Tony Gwynn when you’re trying to strike them out.
It’s not realism. It’s exaggeration. And worse, it’s exaggeration in a way that makes the game less fun to play.
The Ripple Effect
The foul ball problem doesn’t just make at-bats annoying — it affects the whole game.
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Pitch counts skyrocket. You can be throwing great, efficient innings, and still end up with your starter hitting 80 pitches by the fifth inning. Not because you’re wild, but because every batter drags things out with fouls. It forces you to burn through your bullpen way faster than you should have to.
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Game time inflates. Like I said earlier, a nine-inning game should be a quick 20–25 minutes. But with all those fouls, games creep closer to the half-hour mark, and not in a fun way. That extra time isn’t filled with dramatic moments or highlights — it’s filled with useless, boring foul tips.
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Frustration builds. Video games are supposed to be challenging, sure, but they’re also supposed to be entertaining. Few things are less entertaining than throwing your best pitch and watching it get tapped foul again and again and again.
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Immersion suffers. When every single hitter turns into a foul-ball machine, the illusion of playing “real baseball” goes right out the window. It stops feeling like a simulation and starts feeling like a glitch.
The Worst Offenders: Seven, Eight, Nine in a Row
Nothing makes you want to put down the controller faster than those at-bats where the hitter fouls off seven, eight, or nine pitches in a row. You can feel your patience draining with each swing. By the sixth or seventh foul, you’re no longer invested in the game. You’re just begging for the at-bat to end, one way or another.
Sometimes you get lucky and finally induce weak contact. Other times the batter eventually ropes a hit after you’ve worn your pitcher down. And that’s the ultimate insult — you did everything right, made great pitches, had multiple opportunities to get the strikeout, and instead you’re punished with a bloop single because the game decided that foul balls were more important than fair outcomes.
That’s the kind of nonsense that makes players lose interest.
Why It Matters
It’s worth emphasizing again: MLB The Show is still the best baseball game out there. Nothing else even comes close. The graphics, the realism, the modes, the depth — it’s the gold standard. But that’s what makes the foul ball problem so infuriating. The game gets so much right that this one glaring issue sticks out like a sore thumb.
It’s like buying a luxury car that drives beautifully, but every time you hit the brakes, they squeak loud enough to wake the neighbors. It doesn’t ruin the car, but it’s annoying enough to make you resent it.
The foul ball problem is that squeaky brake.
How It Could Be Fixed
Here’s the thing: the fix doesn’t seem impossible. It feels like a tuning issue more than a fundamental flaw. If San Diego Studio (the developers of The Show) tweaked the contact windows, adjusted foul tip frequency, or just toned down the ability of weaker hitters to spoil elite pitches, it would go a long way toward solving the problem.
Imagine if the ninth hitter in a lineup didn’t suddenly foul off nine pitches like he was peak Ichiro. Imagine if your perfectly located slider actually induced swings and misses instead of endless foul tips. Imagine if you could trust that good pitching would lead to quicker outs.
The game would be so much smoother. So much more enjoyable. And the best part is, it wouldn’t sacrifice realism — it would actually make the game feel more realistic, since foul ball counts would better reflect real-life baseball.
Love and Hate
It’s important to point out that the frustration comes from a place of love. If MLB The Show wasn’t so good in every other way, the foul ball issue wouldn’t sting as much. We’d shrug and move on. But because it’s the premier baseball experience, because it does so much right, the constant fouls feel like the one blemish on an otherwise perfect picture.
We keep playing because it’s the best baseball game ever made. But we also keep grumbling because the foul balls make it harder to enjoy what should be a streamlined, addictive experience.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, MLB The Show is still king. If you’re a baseball fan, it’s a must-play. But it’s not without its flaws, and the foul ball epidemic is easily the most glaring. It doesn’t ruin the game, but it drags it down just enough to test your patience and kill your rhythm.
A nine-inning game that should take 20 minutes balloons to half an hour, not because of tense extra innings or dramatic comebacks, but because the CPU just won’t stop fouling off pitches. And when you find yourself stuck in a nine-pitch battle with a weak hitter who has no business spoiling your best stuff, it’s hard not to roll your eyes and wonder why this hasn’t been fixed yet.
So we keep playing. We keep grinding through the foul ball marathons, because nothing else scratches the baseball itch like The Show. But here’s hoping the developers finally listen to the community, tweak the sliders, and put an end to the foul ball frenzy once and for all.
Because when a game is this good, you want to love every second of it. Not just the 20 minutes minus five minutes of annoying foul tips.
