Pitcher meter / Energy

[ThatwasaStrike.]

I’ve wondered for years, never been able to find an answer.

If you use the old school pitching meter, and you throw with the meter going into the yellow rather than red, (not max effort) taking some off the pitch, does it use less energy than when you go all the way into the red and throw as hard as your pitcher can?

[Caulfield]

Re: Pitcher meter / Energy

I’ve wondered for years, never been able to find an answer.

If you use the old school pitching meter, and you throw with the meter going into the yellow rather than red, (not max effort) taking some off the pitch, does it use less energy than when you go all the way into the red and throw as hard as your pitcher can?

I dunno either. always assumed that was the case. sure hope someone else can hop in and confirm/deny.




off-topic, sorta/maybe not: personally the way I always pitch is let fastballs go almost as far as they can. curves slurves and sliders and such other breaking ball types I let go halfway full. changeups I let go as soon as it touches the meter. result is I don't throw as many fastballs as I should. way less than 50%




I don't mean to derail the thread before it even begins, hope someone will chime in on the original question

[bcruise]

Re: Pitcher meter / Energy

I’ve wondered for years, never been able to find an answer.

If you use the old school pitching meter, and you throw with the meter going into the yellow rather than red, (not max effort) taking some off the pitch, does it use less energy than when you go all the way into the red and throw as hard as your pitcher can?

Yeah, this doesn't really get explored much because it's difficult to accurately assess exactly what causes energy to drop. I've done tests on this before and you can get pretty different amounts of energy usage with the same pitcher same effort level and the same number of pitches within a game, without changing any settings at all. I think either confidence level or pitching from the stretch might play a role in it in addition to effort (though those two are usually linked together - low confidence means you're letting a bunch of runners on base). But since the results can vary so much even on the same pitch count it's hard to say what is truly causing it. Even pickoffs take a small amount of pitcher energy to do (this is pretty obvious if you IBB the first batter of a game and repeatedly throw over). There's just too many things that could be happening to figure out what one single part of it does.

I do believe there is benefit to using higher effort in important situations because I feel like I get more swings and misses from the CPU on those pitches though (that's not scientific either and there's really no way to test it, it's just a "feel" thing for me).

[Mackrel829]

Re: Pitcher meter / Energy

Kind of related:

What impact does stopping the meter before it's full have on pitches?

My assumption would be that you sacrifice some Velocity bug gain some control. My experience has been that it's easier to get a perfect accuracy, but there doesn't seem that be any impact on pitch speed.