[Syd Thrift]

I’m pretty positive that whenever a player dives, that’s a sign that they attempted a very hard or impossible play. There are different levels, and the game is even kind enough to expose individual player chances in them if you click through to the right page in their fielding tab. IME (well, this is an educated guess) the animation is good at consistently showing these, particularly in the infield. The play by play comes from quite a while before fielding was overhauled and so it doesn’t always kick in a “what a fantastic play” and so on.

I will say that the animation, too, is closer to MicroLeague than it is to MLB The Show. That is, the game creates the play results first and then tells the animation engine what to do. That means that the animation as well as the play by play are just “reporting” on what the game engine created rather than producing physics based results on their own. So by all means if you see errors or glitches, report them, but don’t necessarily expect animation to exactly recreate reality.