Editor's Note: Operation Sports' partner FanDuel is hosting a one-night fantasy baseball league tonight. It's $5 to enter and first place wins $10,000 cash. Click here to join!

 

It happened when my 35-52 Philadelphia Phillies were shut out for their third game in a row. It’s a rebuilding year and no one is expecting the playoffs, of course, but three shutouts in a row? At this point in the season, Hamels, Lee, Ruiz, Harang, Williams and Revere are no longer Phillies - so why I’m still playing every game and acting like it's the World Series is beyond me.

But then it hit me: this game is so fluid and realistic that losing doesn’t matter. It feels just and it is just. Every strikeout is earned (with the exception of a few horrid calls on the part of The Show’s umpiring crew), every bomb that my pitching staff gives up is a result of poor skill, and every little bit of success feels like a paycheck after a hard days work. I was willing to lose another fifteen games in a row if it meant that I got to keep playing MLB: The Show 15. This year’s title is like a sturdy statue that has been chiseled to near-perfection. There are flaws, as there are with any work of art, but the game’s elegance and refinement make them so easy to overlook. It’s time to realize MLB: The Show 15 for what it really is: SCEA’s magnum opus.

Franchise mode is still a bit of a mess, but everything is tight and easy to understand, and the realistic gameplay lends credence to every move that’s made off the field. It is so easy to spend several hours roaming the trade screens as you weigh the pros and cons of dumping your ace in order for a better future. Are a couple of top prospects really worth Chad Billingsley being the new No. 1 in your rotation? There is certainly an attachment that stems from the immersive gameplay - most players have an individual look and feel to them, and if they don’t, you usually end up creating it by yourself. For instance, there are guys in this game that I absolutely cannot hit with, especially players that are well known hackers in real-life. Young prospect Maikel Franco is already has a reputation in my franchise for wearing the “golden sombrero” far too often. Conversely, patient hitters like Chase Utley are no problem. The great thing about this is every player feels different, which is something I’ve always struggled with in past years of The Show.

 

 

The game is so good because of its security that the likely thing to happen isn’t always the thing that is going to happen. Despite it’s lack of important advanced statistics in the game, SCEA has a perfect understanding of how variance plays a role in baseball. After my three shutouts in a row, I dropped twenty runs on Mike Leake and the Cincinnati Reds. Aaron Harang has a sub-3 ERA while Strasburg is pulling a 4+. These weird bits of variance make every game feel new and provide a unique sense of hope after every failure. MLB: The Show 15 is the best at keeping these moments contained, rather than just having things feel like random chance. “Good” players won’t always succeed and “bad” players aren’t always going to fail. The fickleness of it all is perfectly measured and makes every waking moment of The Show feel unique.

The core gameplay is perfect. That shouldn’t be something thrown around lightly and it isn’t. Everything that is good about MLB: The Show 15 is rooted in the fact that every little thing that you do is going to boil down to this fantastic game of cat and mouse between the pitcher and the hitter. There is no other game where playing against the CPU feels more lifelike than it does here, as pitchers continuously attack hitter’s weak spots and throw off-speed at all of the right times. Mistakes are hard to come by, but when they do, hitters make the best of it. There is a tiny margin for error in MLB: The Show and depending on who you’re putting up to the plate or on the mound, the margin grows and shrinks respectively. The game is precise and it doesn’t bother hiding that from its users.

This year’s game is the apex of the series, and perhaps of the entire sports gaming genre. It all circles back to SCEA’s willingness to give its consumers a choice in how they play the game. Multiple difficulties (all of which are usable, by the way), sliders that perform properly, and an abundance of control and gameplay options - all of which can be shifted around until you’ve found your perfect experience. This isn’t a game that’s meant to be played any one way, it’s a game that feels so comfortable in its own skin that it lets you make the important decisions. This game is the statue that SCEA has built, but thankfully, they have given us the tools to whittle it down in any way that we would like. For that, MLB: The Show 15 is a true work of art.