Greetings everyone,
I played through success mode once and was very sad to see my very good player get dismissed
at the end of the season without even a shot at playing in AAA. I thought I knew a lot after being
successful in 07'
After this humiliating defeat, I logged onto the forums and checked out some general strategies
for how to get better as well as developing a few techniques of my own.
Now this strategy will not be the most fun or interesting but it did manage to get my player
saved on my second try ever. If you just want to save a character, some of this info might come in handy.
Starting Character info- I just went with the first character I was given he was a rather mediocre player
with no special abilities (no good sense etc.) but no negatives either.
I selected CF and mainly focused on hitting abilities.
This is basically what I did...
First strategy- HOT DOGS!!! It's rather corny (you could almost call them corn dogs

) but the most reliable food and most efficient food seemed to be the 3rd hot dog, the bottom one. This always gives
50 vitality for 4$! The hot dog place seems to have several events, at first I think you get a free hot dog.
There's another event where they ask you to work there and you don't gain any vitality and can't buy food so you might want to get that out of the way early so that it doesn't disrupt your plans later. After that, in my game I could come in and buy the bottom menu hot dog and not have to work or anything. Sometimes they'll have a special and you get it for 3$ instead of 4$ but it's rather pointless. Also another event gives you more than 50 vitality from the same purchase.
Second strategy- Purchases. After getting burned in my first game due to not enough eval, I went ahead and bought the prince necklace as soon as possible and a gambler's ticket in one store visit. I never bothered with this in 07 but it made a big difference, especially if you buy it early. After that,
several months later I bought a psychic goggles. They aren't totally necessary but are useful, there are some mean pitchers in AAA. After that I bought some more gamblers tickets and didn't buy any bats, gloves etc. till the end of the game.
Third strategy- game flow. For making a pure hitter, I mostly focused on weight lifting and some batting practice to get better contact. I didn't bother with the girlfriend stuff, I never went to the park, etc. but I would do the random events if people asked me to. I also found that winning your games, especially in the first year isn't as important as getting on base a lot and getting some RBIs etc. If you do a good job, I think the game discounts your crummy team's performance a bit.
Basic strategy- It goes without saying but I would save after a really good practice (4 or 5 good cards) and reload after an injury. Also if you gamble on something you should realistically win, I always reload that too but I tried not to get carried away with the save/load thing on my first guy. Also if you totally stink up a game with 1-4 on base 0 RBI or something, I would suggest reloading. The most critical part of the eval seemed to be doing well personally. Most of the time, I had my team's only RBIs...
AAA strategies
I think the most critical thing to AAA is getting to be a starter early. Therefore, you should focus all your energy on impressing the coach right away. If he is at a crummy training location on the 4th month, go there anyway. Also during a random event, I was awarded the perfume. This is critical. If you don't get some perfume in an event, buy some!!!!!
Early Perfume strategy- Once the AAA season has started, I'm not sure if it's possible to play in the very first game. However, I know for a fact that you can battle the galaxysharks in their first game because I did it. Basically I ate when the coach wasn't on the practice field and got my vitality up to near 100%. Then on the 3rd week, I used the perfume. I also had 2 actions on the 3rd week... So I used both where the coach was which was batting practice, gained a ton of coach eval. Then on the 4th week (supertraining week) I think the perfume effect was still active and I did one more practice and right after that I was a starter.
After that, eval was easy to get and I had impressed the scout enough by midsummer.
In fact, our team did rather poorly and even lost the final game against the sharks but I got a contract.
Sure it's not the most interesting, story driven, or impressive way to complete a player but I was thrilled to
get him through and he ended up with pretty good stats (almost all hitting, crummy fielding since fielding didn't seem to do much in success mode)
Hope this helps some folks, I was very frustrated when my nice first character didn't even get to play in AAA the whole season. At least I figured out why
my guy's final stats:
Power 199, Con 7, run spd 6, arm str 3, fld 3, trj 4, e res 3 .. (yea not very balanced and a defensive liability) power hitter, tough out, hot hitter.
Not spectacular by any means but enough to clear the mode.