Pitching
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I’ve been looking much more closely at the game of late, attempting to understand why certain things happen, if certain things actually happen at all, or if it’s all in the mindset of the player and various other things. I made a thread looking at swing feedback in relation to batted ball outcomes already, but I thought I’d post a clip of a few hanging pitches on good and perfect input that I encountered while playing today, just in case anyone is still in denial about the terrible state of pitching this year.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AevaHeTa2FM
We have two from Greg Maddux, a famed control artist in his day. Then one from the juiced Finest Marco Gonzales who also features excellent control and BB/9. Is this acceptable pitch placement in relation to input? I’m not satisfied at all, frankly.
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Are you taking the pitch break into consideration? Those pitches were exactly where they were supposed to go IMHO. You need to take the break into consideration and not where the ball is supposed to land. If you aimed the cursor lower you would have gotten a better result of what you were looking for.
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@ThaGhettoBlasta said in Pitching:
Are you taking the pitch break into consideration? Those pitches were exactly where they were supposed to go IMHO. You need to take the break into consideration and not where the ball is supposed to land. If you aimed the cursor lower you would have gotten a better result of what you were looking for.
There’s a huge red line that illustrates the pitch trajectory including break. There’s a target showing the intended final pitch location. In order to achieve this, there’s a vertical plane and a horizontal plane to hit on the input side, both of which I hit, or came reasonably close to hitting with a pitcher who has excellent control and is not gassed or low on confidence. The ball did not end up in the target location.
What am I missing here?
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The second one was really bad. The first and last were close, but still not what you were aiming to do. Your input was pretty spot on. I always have assumed that when I hang them, it's because I am being lazy with my inputs, but maybe not. I do aim a bit lower that I want it to go though. So I would have aimed lower on all 3. That second one by Maddux was gross though. Lucky it wasn't destroyed lol
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@ComebackLogic said in Pitching:
@ThaGhettoBlasta said in Pitching:
Are you taking the pitch break into consideration? Those pitches were exactly where they were supposed to go IMHO. You need to take the break into consideration and not where the ball is supposed to land. If you aimed the cursor lower you would have gotten a better result of what you were looking for.
There’s a huge red line that illustrates the pitch trajectory including break. There’s a target showing the intended final pitch location. In order to achieve this, there’s a vertical plane and a horizontal plane to hit on the input side, both of which I hit, or came reasonably close to hitting with a pitcher who has excellent control and is not gassed or low on confidence. The ball did not end up in the target location.
What am I missing here?
Trust me I get what you're saying, but when online, you have to adjust when pitches start hanging like that. I would have aimed in the dirt on those pitches. Sometimes I can put that cursor all the way down in the dirt and even with good feed back it lands chest high. @sbevans142 was right when he said you were lucky that the second pitch from Maddux wasn't crushed. Sometimes it doesn't matter where you throw it, it's going to go where it wants. I don't think there is much SDS can really do about it and you can probably bet your bottom dollar the same issues from 20 will be there in 21. A new console isn't going to matter. More frames per second or not, it's about their on-line platform. Let's see if they spend the profit from this game on improving. I guess we'll see.
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@ThaGhettoBlasta said in Pitching:
@ComebackLogic said in Pitching:
@ThaGhettoBlasta said in Pitching:
Are you taking the pitch break into consideration? Those pitches were exactly where they were supposed to go IMHO. You need to take the break into consideration and not where the ball is supposed to land. If you aimed the cursor lower you would have gotten a better result of what you were looking for.
There’s a huge red line that illustrates the pitch trajectory including break. There’s a target showing the intended final pitch location. In order to achieve this, there’s a vertical plane and a horizontal plane to hit on the input side, both of which I hit, or came reasonably close to hitting with a pitcher who has excellent control and is not gassed or low on confidence. The ball did not end up in the target location.
What am I missing here?
Trust me I get what you're saying, but when online, you have to adjust when pitches start hanging like that. I would have aimed in the dirt on those pitches. Sometimes I can put that cursor all the way down in the dirt and even with good feed back it lands chest high. @sbevans142 was right when he said you were lucky that the second pitch from Maddux wasn't crushed. Sometimes it doesn't matter where you throw it, it's going to go where it wants. I don't think there is much SDS can really do about it and you can probably bet your bottom dollar the same issues from 20 will be there in 21. A new console isn't going to matter. More frames per second or not, it's about their on-line platform. Let's see if they spend the profit from this game on improving. I guess we'll see.
What you say is true, BUT it is a workaround or solution if you will to counter the broken pitching mechanics. What OP is saying is that you shouldn't have to find a workaround/solution if something works as intended. And that is you being able to pinpoint a pitch when you get good input.
Its similar to swinging early while hitting. We know that hitting the ball while swinging on the later side of good will nerf your exit velocity in a big way. So we adapt and we try to swing early, that's where you get the high exit velocities. But that's not how it should be, it's also a workaround or solution to a problem that the game mechanics put in place.
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I’ve personally had a hard time locating pitches with that Marco Gonzales card. In real life, Marco has pretty great control. I mean his velocity tops out at like 89-90 mph, so the control is vital to his effectiveness.
It is pretty disappointing to make good input and see your pitches not going where intended.
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Example 1 wasn’t too bad but 2 and 3 are this year in a nut shell. I’m 100% in favor of the mechanics meaning when a pitcher has poor control it’s just harder to get good input, not the randomness we see where input doesn’t matter
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Here’s the thing, the clips in OP are just a small part of what I’ve been looking at recently. I’ve been examining everything closely, reading the handbook and strategy guide, replaying clips, slowing things down. Not to pick faults, or to provide support for my complaints about the game this year, but to see if a lot of the things we all complain about really happen, or if it’s largely psychological. Using the information provided by SDS to try and understand the game.
In that handbook, there is section that deals with swing timing and PCI location. It clearly states that swinging early will cause the bat plane to elevate. This is understood by players, as @raesONE mentioned. There is no section that deals with pitches finishing significantly higher in the zone on any kind of input, let alone good/perfect. Therefore, it seems not to be an intended mechanic designed to illustrate the break of a pitch by leaving it eight inches higher than intended. Even if it were - That’s nonsense.
The frequency with which pitches hang is also incredibly high. That’s a matter of opinion, but I’m sure I could come up with a solid number if I wanted to generate a significant sample size and see exactly how many pitches do not locate on good input. I’d estimate that number to be as high as 30%. That means a third of your pitches won’t go where you aimed them every single game. Oh well, you might think. It’s not like a pitcher hits his spot every time in real life anyway. No, but your opponents PCI will move accurately to wherever he places it every time.
When you really start to break things down in online play, watch and rewatch these events unfold, it begins to become apparent that a lot of the things people complain about are well justified. I was actually hoping to discover that a lot of the issues with gameplay are down to user error, a lot of players not understanding how the game is intended to work and confirmation bias, with the occasional bizarre or nonsensical event being amplified in the mind of the user due to them focusing on the occasional bad while not allowing for the many times the game worked perfectly well.
That hasn’t been the case so far. I’ve seen nonsensical batted ball outcomes, I’ve seen nonsensical swing feedback outcomes, I’ve seen nonsensical pitch locations on good input, I’ve seen the computer repeatedly select nonsensical and incorrect animations for the situation at hand causing base runners who should have been out to be safe and I’ve seen these things occur at a pretty high rate, with multiple instances of each of these things in a single nine inning game. I’m pretty dissatisfied with the product this year.
Now just don’t take my word for it. Don’t take my video of three pitches hanging as cast iron evidence and assume I didn’t spend many hours playing the game in order to come up with three hanging pitches from a sample of hundreds thrown. Go out there and pay attention when you play. If something feels off with the game, as it so often does for us all, hit the replay button, save the clip to watch later, view your batter analysis and so on. Then question SDS and ask why. I really feel like this is the only way to have any accountability and just maybe, improvement in the future. People complain, people come on here and say no, no, that’s not actually happening. Well, if everyone can see exactly what’s happening, there’s really no argument to be had is there? In this day and age of digital media, it’s so easy to illustrate exactly what your complaint is via the medium of video or photographic evidence, there’s really no reason to be engaging in these debates. It either is or it isn’t.
In this case, the game IS hanging pitches on good input in H2H play and quite often.
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My biggest complaint is how hard it is to bury pitches in the dirt or low....that shouldn’t be the case, as you have to think if a pitcher wants one in the dirt , it will be in the dirt, not a foot higher at bottom of strike zone.....
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@OreoRockstar said in Pitching:
My biggest complaint is how hard it is to bury pitches in the dirt or low....that shouldn’t be the case, as you have to think if a pitcher wants one in the dirt , it will be in the dirt, not a foot higher at bottom of strike zone.....
The thing is, it’s easy to lay off a pitch like a sinking change up or curveball if it’s really low into the dirt. The really deceptive pitches look like they’re in the zone until they drop off the table at the last second. That means aiming six to ten inches below the zone to give that appearance of being a strike until it’s not. If I’m aiming six inches below the zone and it’s ending up six inches in the zone, I’m missing my spot by a foot on good or perfect input. I shouldn’t have to aim ten to twelve inches away from my intended target to succeed in hitting that spot with a control artist like Maddux. I’ve tried to find any sense in it and I can’t. I’m using the pitch trail which shows the flight of the ball allowing for the break of the pitch and I’m hitting the meter perfectly. There’s really no excuse.
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