Thanks for watching! I hope it was helpful.
Yes, it happens because of ratings to some degree, but ALL pitchers in the game are affected the same way. It just has less effect on a high BB/9 pitcher throwing a high control rated pitch - the pitch is much more likely to go where you're aiming to in that situation. But the lower the pitcher's ratings, the more that range of where you can miss to increases - and the more likely that a corner strike will turn into a meatball.
The reason I tend to aim completely outside of the strike zone when I'm ahead as a pitcher is because:
1. So I can minimize the chance of a pitch coming back over the middle when the batter's only looking to make contact
2. To increase the chance of that same pitch landing on or near the corner of the strike zone instead, resulting in a called third strike or weak contact/swing and miss from the batter.
There's an equal chance a perfectly-metered pitch can move inside or outside of your target (to varying degrees based on the pitcher's ratings), but the risk of having it move inside and back over the plate (especially on HOF) is so great that it's better for me to aim farther outside and risk throwing an easily-taken ball.
This is, to some degree, the same type of risk management classic pitching users have to deal with, since they have no meter input. It just doesn't REALLY start coming into play for the meter game until HOF.