Josh Hader and Michael King — the two deliveries Game Update 13 quietly rewrote.

If you've grinded a single Ranked Seasons or Weekend Classic game in the last month, you already know the feeling. You're in the box against Michael King. You read the sinker out of the hand, you time it clean, your PCI is dead on the ball — and you roll over a weak tapper to second base. Good swing. Wrong result. Every time.

As of Game Update 13, that's supposed to be over. Buried in the July 1 patch notes, under the roster fixes and the cleat customization, is one line that a lot of competitive players have been screaming for since launch:

Changed pitching animations for Josh Hader and Michael King.

NOTE: This change will occur after the content update around noon PT on 7/2.

That's the whole note. No explanation, no apology, no acknowledgment of what it was actually fixing. So let's fill in the part SDS left out — because this wasn't a cosmetic tweak. It was a nerf to two of the most complained-about pitchers in the game.

What was actually broken

The complaint was never "these guys are hard to hit." Good pitchers are supposed to be hard to hit. The complaint was that squaring the ball up didn't matter.

The community's working theory — and it lined up with what everyone was seeing — is that Hader's two-seam fastball and King's sinker were registering as contact swings even when you took a full, normal swing. In The Show, a contact swing trades power for bat control. It's a choice you make with a button. Against these two pitches, hitters were getting the weak, low-exit-velocity outcome of a contact swing without ever asking for it.

Here's how one player on the official forums put it:

"His sinker is like Hader's 2 seam, it registers as a contact swing when you make contact." — beanball0571 (theshow.com forums)

And it wasn't just the result that felt off, it was the read. Another described King's sinker as one that "teleports insanely fast on the outside of the plate" — a delivery that hid the ball late enough that even a correct read gave you a fraction of the reaction window you'd get off any other righty.

Operation Sports laid out the mechanics plainly: even if your timing and PCI placement are as perfect as they can be, balls batted into the field of play can still have lower exit velocities than expected. Perfect-perfect swings turning into routine flyouts to center. That's the glitch. Not "unhittable" — unrewarding. The game was quietly punishing good hitting.

Why it broke online, specifically

Offline, against the CPU, you'd shrug this off. Online, in a mode where every plate appearance is a coin flip for your record, it was poison.

The abuse pattern was obvious to anyone climbing the ladder. During Weekend Classic runs, players reported facing Michael King over and over and over. And when an opponent finally started to figure King out and put a few good swings on him? They'd pivot — straight to Josh Hader, or to a submariner, and start the whole unhittable-delivery carousel again.

That's the part that made this a competitive-integrity problem and not just a balance gripe. Two premium cards were functionally a "you don't get to hit this inning" button in the exact modes where hitting is the entire game. You can out-strategize a good pitcher. You can't out-strategize an animation that eats your exit velocity.

And it had been going on for a while. This wasn't a day-one hot take that spiraled — as Operation Sports noted, "some players have been complaining about it since the game came out." It sat unpatched, with no workaround, through weeks of Ranked grinding.

The "is it a glitch or is it the meta?" fight

To be fair — and this blog is nothing if not about showing the whole board — not everyone agreed it was broken. The forums had a genuine split.

One camp said it was flat-out glitched: forced contact swings, stolen exit velocity, a bug. The other camp said King and Hader were simply the optimal meta, and that streamers were overstating the pain of facing a genuinely elite pitcher:

"He's pretty much my best starter — he just does everything that plays well in this game." — rubicante23 (theshow.com forums)

That's a real point. "Everything that plays well in this game" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it's the reason these debates never resolve cleanly. Where does "this card is really good" end and "this card is broken" begin?

Game Update 13 is SDS's answer to that question. You don't change a pitcher's animation as a balance lever unless something about how that animation resolves was off. Cosmetic deliveries don't get patched mid-season. Delivery timing that affects when the ball becomes visible — and, by extension, how the swing gets graded — does. The fix itself is the admission.

What the fix actually does

The patch note only says the animations changed — it doesn't spell out the mechanical effect. Based on what was wrong, the read is straightforward: adjusting the delivery animation resets the timing window and release-point visibility, which is the most likely explanation for the warped swing outcomes. A fair delivery gives you back your reaction time, and a clean swing should once again produce a clean result.

It's worth noting this shipped alongside a third pitcher-animation fix in the same update — Grant Taylor, where the patch notes cite "an issue preventing proper ball release in Grant Taylor's pitching animation." Three pitcher deliveries touched in one patch. Whatever's going on under the hood with animation-to-ball-release sync this year, SDS is clearly aware it's been off.

One timing detail matters if you're logging in on the 2nd: the Hader/King change doesn't go live with the 4 AM PT update. Per the note, it lands after the content update around noon PT on 7/2. So if you jump on in the morning and the sinker still feels cursed — wait for the afternoon.

The takeaway

This is a small win, but it's the right kind of win. The health of a competitive mode doesn't live in the flashy roster drops — it lives in whether a good swing gets rewarded. For a few weeks this season, against two specific cards, it wasn't. Now it should be.

We'll keep an eye on the post-patch numbers. If King's and Hader's usage rates crater in Ranked over the next couple of weeks, that tells you exactly how much of their value was the pitcher — and how much was the glitch.

Swing away. It should count again.

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Sources: MLB The Show 26 Game Update 13 patch notes · Operation Sports — Why players are calling King and Hader "glitched" · theshow.com community forums — "What is the deal with Michael King"