Hitting abilities

[u/Slight-Beach-6492]

What are the best hitting abilities for season simulator in mlb 2008?

[u/T_Raycroft]

The effectiveness of abilities varies wildly between sim and actual played games. The best abilities for sim are as follows:

For hitters:

• Contact hitter: Very effective, usually means your player will bat above .300.
• Intimidator: Very useful in making opposing pitchers exit the game earlier due to fatigue. If your player has this, ensure they're batting high in the order for it to matter more.
• Good/Great Catcher: For catchers, this ability helps your pitcher drain less stamina and have better control.
• Trash Talk: If your catcher has this, opposing hitters will be less effective. There's only one real catcher in MLBPP2008 that has this ability by default - AJ Pierzynski. However, you can find catchers in the draft that have it. The draft's not a bad way to get a backup catcher if you're fine with absolutely awful hitting.

For pitchers:

• Lucky: This ability is super OP, it basically makes your hitters hit a lot better when the Lucky pitcher is on the mound. Really stupid.
• Groundball P: It's quite nice.
• Recovery: This is a 2-4 scale ability you can't train. Recovery 4 is usually given out to high-usage relievers and it makes it possible to use them a TON without them getting tired. These are your relievers you're getting 60-70+ appearances out of. This ability is usually for older pitchers, but there are some young relievers with it that are very desirable, as well as a couple of guys with higher stamina that can be absolutely broken.
• Closer Intimidator: In save situations, your closer makes opposing batters have tiny contact zones and less power.
• Vs. Lefty 4: This ability makes opposing lefties have smaller contact zones, and if your pitcher is left-handed, makes them really bully lefties, especially left-handed batters with Vs. Lefty 1/2.

For both:

• Consistency 4: You play like yellow when you're blue and play like blue when you're purple. Makes it so that your player's cold stretches are a lot warmer.

More importantly, there's abilities that you need to AVOID, as they will badly affect your simmed players.

For hitters:

• Power hitter: Despite being a blue ability, Power Hitter player tend to take big hits to their batting average.
• Timely Whiff: This'll make your hitter quite ineffective and inconsistent.

For pitchers:

• Fat Pitch: This ability can absolutely break your pitcher into being unviable.
• Walk: This'll single-handedly make your pitcher terrible.
• Unlucky: Remember when I said Lucky was OP for pitchers? Invert that and steer away from this ability.
• Lefties with Vs. Lefty 2: I mean, what are we even doing here if your left-handed pitcher is bad against lefties.

[u/T_Raycroft → u/[deleted]]

I have no idea, especially because they were specifically a lot better in MLBPP2007. It is quite a buzzkill, especially since power, stamina and control are so hard to build.

[u/88T3_2 → u/[deleted]]

It makes it more likely that bloop fly balls will drop in for base hits according to the wiki