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Analog Mode: Pitching

I'm not sure if I can go exactly by the guidebook's way of asking me to do it, but I wanted to give insight on how I would improve the analog pitching.

Ratings aside, there isn't really anything on the visual front which differentiates pitchers' strong or weak points. In other words, there might be some pitchers who live on the outside and are efficiently good at it, whereas there are other pitchers who have trouble biting corners, but can work well off the plate when necessary; then there are some pitchers who are simply strike throwing machines, whether they hit their spots for not, etc.


What you'll see in this new meter are three variable additions: 1) preset tilt, 2) plate width, 3) corner paint.

Let's take Cliff Lee, for example. He is a dominant pitcher who has good command of all of his pitches, and knows how to work both corners. Let's do a few things with him:

1) For the sake of example, let's say he's pretty good at "living on the outside of the plate." We will redesign the analog pitching interface so that flicking the R-stick straight upward will not invariably hit the center of the plate, but rather it will lean a little more towards the outer part of the plate. This is where you will see "tilt" in the interface.

2) A pitcher who throws more strikes with accuracy should get a good bump in his "plate width." This is the area between those two hash lines on the interface. If it is smaller, it leaves a larger room for error when trying to throw it over the plate. If it is larger, he will have an easier time to throw a ball for a strike. The caveat here, of course, is that people might complain he will throw too many pitches over the heart of the plate. This is where the third tactic comes in...

3) There are some pitchers who are simply good at living on the black. Sometimes they are good at doing it just on the plate, sometimes they are good at doing it just off the plate, and sometimes they can do both. Much like the sliders in this game for Control and Consistency (control says how well pitchers can live on the black for strikes, and consistency says how well pitchers can live on the black for balls), this visual will fall in line with the same thing in mind.

After reading that, I want to present to you two images. The first image will be the pitching meter that we all know, and the second one will be a revision for Cliff Lee specifically:









I would honestly like to make more changes involving the actual width of the meter itself (or the plate width, as this is far more than generous for Mr. Lee, but this is an example without a comparison the other way), though this is just a rough prototypical example of what I'm suggesting here.

So, you see the following things: You see that Lee's plate has been "tilted" a little bit toward the right, making it slightly easier for him to work on the outside portion of the zone with more precision. The next thing that you see is that the plate width was slightly enlarged. I don't want to change it that much in this example with the tilt, because as you can see, he can pretty easily nail strikes all day.

The third portion is to help prevent throwing these strikes over the plate all day, and this is the corner paint aspect. You can see a fading blend on both sides of the plate, and his are quite large. Anything on the inside of the hash is an indicator of the ball somehow hitting the black in some fashion. In other words, if you aim for the outside corner, and hit your cursor into the faded region on the right side of the hash, then his pitch would invariably be over the outside portion of the plate, with the outermost part of the ball hitting the black (meaning it's still an obvious strike, but is nice work on the outside area). If you hit the hash while being right in the middle of the blend, then you'd be painting that black that is nice, precise pitching. Other pitchers will have smaller blend fades than this, and they might be shifted left or right of the hash a little bit. For example, maybe a pitcher has better consistency but worse control. So there will be less blend on the inside part of the zone, but there will be more on the outside part of the zone. And vice versa.

Here might, for example, be the look of another pitcher's meter (in this case, Ryan Madson):





He is ever so slightly offset to the inside, his overall strike zone "plate width" hashes are condensed, and he boasts a little bit of consistency, but not much control. In other words, he doesn't bite the corners for strikes much (he kind of goes after the hitters, and can sometimes get away with missing over the plate with the nasty stuff that he has), but when he goes off the plate, it's not like he's always missing by a foot or so. That's where the little fade comes in, and you can see there is more fade outside of the hash marks than there are inside of the hash marks.

The next thing I'd like to see changed is a variable yellow line, depending on where you set the height of your target. Since the yellow line is supposed to represent your release point on your pitch, it would be nice if it was more accurate to when you literally are releasing the pitch. In other words, the yellow line should be closer to the top of the meter for a higher pitch (since it's an earlier release), and it should be further from the top for a lower pitch.

Here are some visual example of that:








Piggybacking off that idea, it would also be nice to see a top and bottom of the strike zone lined off for us, much like the edges of the strike zone. This could at least make some sort of logical sense to help people understand exactly how their ball moves, etc. Of course, this would all only come together if there was that variable yellow line. Without it, those top and bottom hashes become obsolete.

So anyway, the biggest obstacle with pitching is being able to work with a given pitcher's uniqueness, and dominate the way that he might dominate on the mound. I think that these visual and under-the-hood programming cues would be an excellent improvement for the pitching meter system. Again, I will provide more examples on things that can be worked on here, but this is just a frontal look of it in a nutshell.


On another note entirely…

Still involving analog pitching, I wanted to go over what could be done to help hide the ball cursor with this feature. I kind of posed the question to Ramone and Chris earlier this year, but there wasn’t really an easy remedy to work with when the Ball Cursor option is set to Off or Fade. I think I’ve come up with something that would kind of work, though:

1) Don’t let us see the analog pitching meter until we actually start our pitching motion.
2) Let us see the analog pitching meter upon selection of our pitch, but hide the location of the ball (and, if there is a variable yellow line, hide that as well) until we actually start our pitching motion.

The issue with this was always, “How can we find a way to still make you aim the right stick somewhere while hiding the ball cursor at the same time?” This is probably the best way to do it.