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

[ajblithe20]

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

Has it ever been mentioned if the base running has gotten better. The last couple of years scoring from second has been almost impossible. Runners would slow to a crawl rounding third and get thrown out trying to score from second. I use auto base running and that makes it impossible to score from second. So technically you weren't in scoring position unless you were on third.

As far as I know, last year base running was good. I scored from second plenty of times and went 1st to 3rd. Mlb 13 had some problems with rounding 3rd though.
One cool thing they added this year is that on fast ground balls the batter will casually run to first bc he knows he'll be out (as most guys do in real life). This helps us see a bunch more fielding and throwing animations on ground balls. Pretty xool


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[bluclws22]

There is a stream at 8pm eastern tonight but it won't be the stadium stream. That one has been moved to Tuesday.

Doesn't matter what they show. Just pumped for any stream of this game and the sox game tonight lol.

[Pared]

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

This is what's bothering me about the CPU not making challenges. Woodweaver himself said the AI gets the right call. But the user doesn't? How is this fair? The CPU always gets the right call, but the user has to know when the umpire gets the call wrong to use their challenges? And if we choose not to challenge a play and the call was wrong, we as the user are stuck with the wrong call, but the CPU never is? This doesn't seem fair at all. And, in year's past, the developers always said the game cannot differentiate between which team is the user and which team is the CPU. This doesn't seem true this year based on this challenge logic?

You're making the assumption the wrong call is not in your favor. I'm sure it works both ways for the user.

[Bobhead]

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

Do we know if they fixed that issue where high pitches are 2-4 mph faster than low ones?

[kehlis]

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

Do we know if they fixed that issue where high pitches are 2-4 mph faster than low ones?

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

[Bobhead]

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

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

That is the issue. It shouldn't happen. It wouldn't be any different from the ball catching on fire as it arrives to the plate. It has no basis in reality, or science. A high pitch travels at exactly the same speed as a low one. If you really want to be technical, the lower pitch should be faster (for overhand or 3/4's deliveries) because you have a later release and thus a higher exit velocity .

Source:

http://pitchingprofessor.com/article_keep_the_pitch_low.html

I'll find more sources in a few, but there's also a mathematical basis to it. You can imagine a triangle, where the base is perpendicular to home plate, and the opposite corner is the pitcher. The trajectory of a high fastball would be the adjacent side, while the low fastball, the hypotenuse.

The high fastball seems like it's faster, in actuality, only because a high pitch has a shorter trajectory to home plate. The lower pitch, the hypotenuse, has a longer path to travel, thus giving the batter more time to react. Both pitches travel at the same speed, though.

[kehlis]

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

That is the issue. It shouldn't happen.

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.

[seanjeezy]

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

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]

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

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]

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

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]

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

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]

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

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]

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

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]

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

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).

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]

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

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.