MLB 15 The Show Livestream - Live Gameplay with Senior A.I. Programmer

[seanjeezy]

Quote: Originally Posted by kehlis

I'm certain I'm missing something but what's the issue?

The issue is that you should be able to throw the ball at any speed regardless of height. What happens instead is that a pitcher who averages 95 mph will be 92-93 down in the zone, 96-97 up.

[Bobhead]

Quote: Originally Posted by kehlis

I'm asking because I don't know what you mean and again I could be missing something. Are you saying that the high end range of a fastball shouldn't be 2-4 mph faster than the low end range of a pitchers fastball? I can't say I agree with that.

Ohhh sorry. I mean high as in actual height. Not a "hard" fastball. Also see my last post which I edited.

[kehlis]

Quote: Originally Posted by seanjeezy

The issue is that you should be able to throw the ball at any speed regardless of height. What happens instead is that a pitcher who averages 95 mph will be 92-93 down in the zone, 96-97 up.

Gotcha. Sorry, completely misunderstood.


After scouting pitchers for college for quite a few years that terminology has a quite different meaning (high versus low).


Didn't even know that what you guys are talking about was an issue.

[WaitTilNextYear]

Quote: Originally Posted by seanjeezy

The issue is that you should be able to throw the ball at any speed regardless of height. What happens instead is that a pitcher who averages 95 mph will be 92-93 down in the zone, 96-97 up.

This discrepancy is due to the radar gun assuming that high and low pitches travel the same distance. However, a high fastball appears faster and is clocked faster (not because it is actually going faster), but because it has a more direct path to the plate than a low pitch that spends some time sinking and travels a farther distance in the air and takes longer to get into the mitt.

[ryanmc564]

Quote: Originally Posted by seanjeezy

The issue is that you should be able to throw the ball at any speed regardless of height. What happens instead is that a pitcher who averages 95 mph will be 92-93 down in the zone, 96-97 up.

This is something I actually didn't mind a high inside fastball was always my payoff pitch. So having a little more edge on that pitch is nice. But I do understand how it is a issue. Would be nice to have velocity on the down part of the plate. Actually the MLB channel just recently talk about the speed of a pitch and how fast it appears to the hitter depending on what side of the plate it's on, and it actually is similar to what the show has going for it, when it comes to inside and outside pitch speed differences.

[Bobhead]

Quote: Originally Posted by WaitTilNextYear

This discrepancy is due to the radar gun assuming that high and low pitches travel the same distance. However, a high fastball appears faster and is clocked faster (not because it is actually going faster), but because it has a more direct path to the plate than a low pitch that spends some time sinking and travels a farther distance in the air and takes longer to get into the mitt.

It shouldn't even be clocked faster, though. We're talking about at most a .5 mph difference due to the y-dimensional velocity offsetting the radar gun.

In The Show you get differences as high as 4 or 5 mph sometimes.

Not only that, but the phenomenon you describe should be offset, if not reversed, by the other phenomenon of lower pitches being 1-3 mph faster.

And I'm not just watching the gun, I feel it visually too. The high pitches are just coming in way too fast compared to the low ones*

*It's probably more accurate to say that the low ones are coming in way too slow... since the high pitches are usually closer to the pitcher's actual max velocity, while the low ones are several mph below... for example, Aroldis Chapman only seems to touch 100 in The Show if he aims high.

[seanjeezy]

Quote: Originally Posted by WaitTilNextYear

This discrepancy is due to the radar gun assuming that high and low pitches travel the same distance. However, a high fastball appears faster and is clocked faster (not because it is actually going faster), but because it has a more direct path to the plate than a low pitch that spends some time sinking and travels a farther distance in the air and takes longer to get into the mitt.

Gun readings track initial velocity though, so distance is irrelevant since the reading is always taken at 50 ft (the front of the mound).

Quote: Originally Posted by ryanmc564

This is something I actually didn't mind a high inside fastball was always my payoff pitch. So having a little more edge on that pitch is nice. But I do understand how it is a issue. Would be nice to have velocity on the down part of the plate. Actually the MLB channel just recently talk about the speed of a pitch and how fast it appears to the hitter depending on what side of the plate it's on, and it actually is similar to what the show has going for it, when it comes to inside and outside pitch speed differences.

MLB guys are talking about perceived velocity which is highest up and in, lowest down and away.

Here is a terrible example because I do not see any way to filter zone profiles by mph

Almost all of Felix's pitches have some kind of downward movement, and I want to say he was number one in baseball in pitches thrown below the zone last year (some article I read on Fangraphs or Grantland, can't remember). The link above is a plot of just his offspeed pitches (since those are the ones most likely to be thrown below the zone), comparing mph between pitches thrown in and out of the strikezone.

In MLB The Show, those columns are reversed. Poor example, but it gets the point across.

[Bobhead]

Here's math to disprove the radar gun discrepancy suggested above (by WaitTilNextYear) as the sole cause of this issue.

Let's say hypothetically that a high fastball is completely flat with no vertical movement (0 inches).

The average strike zone is about 3 feet tall, so a low pitch would of course have 3 feet of vertical movement between release and crossing home plate (the threshold I'll use here).

I'll use 59 feet as the distance traveled from the pitcher to home plate, after you account for the pitcher stepping forward before releasing the pitch, and his wingspan.

Pythagorean theorem: A^2 + B^2 = C^2.
(59*59) + (3*3) = ???
If a high pitch travels 59 feet, the low one will travel 59.076 feet.

The theory proposed above is that two pitches traveling at the same speed show different radar gun numbers because of this difference in distance. A radar gun works by counting the amount of time it takes for a ball to travel a pre-defined distance.

Let's use a 95 mph (in actual speed) fastball, which converts to 139.33 feet per second. 139.33 feet/second over 59 feet is .423 seconds of time.

139.33 feet/second over 59.076 feet is .424 seconds of time.

The radar gun "thinks" both distances are the same, so it returns both speeds based on the distance of 59 feet (not accounting for vertical movement). Unfortunately, when you do the math, that only results in a differential of:

59 / .423 = 139.4799 feet per second, or 95.09999 mph

59 / .424 = 139.1509 feet per second, or 94.8756 mph.

So the radar gun issue only accounts for a differential of about .2

Meanwhile, the differences in The Show are documented at anywhere between 2 mph and 5 mph for high vs low pitches.

Sorry for the long post, but I can't stress it enough. There's absolutely no factual, scientific, or mathematical basis for the exaggerated velocity differences we currently see in The Show. They do not belong in the game.