[NoOne]

i don't play out games much anymore, but i have definitely seen more than 6 pitches thrown in an AB.

think of an ab as a long possible string of various multiplication of % probabilities of various things occuring given all contextual inputs.. each player has different ranges of a 'successful' roll (rand seed). the better the player the wider range of values equate to success.

so, nothing will specifically happen at 4pitches or 6pitches etc. i do believe they 'roll' the player's random seed 1 time per ab, however. so if it gets a crappy roll to start, they are basically snake-bit that AB.

e.g. let's say it's a 1-100 integer value. the player steps up, and a "1" is generated. that "1" is used in each successive choice for that AB, or it is heavily influenced by it.

you can see this if you repeat an Ab by killing the process. it doesn't generate new random seeds when you load up a saved game -- whether on purpose or not, it's what the code obviously does through observation.

that doesn't mean it's hardcoded... it's just not resolved down beyond an AB much. other results are possible but it becomes a 1/100 chance, and errors are seemingly a mutually exclusive applied force. so, there's some other layer of randomness that allows for slightly different resutls, but if you roll a "1" you have an out or an error nearly every time, regardless of # of pitches thrown.

this is also why "take a pitch" strategy works, so well. in the big picture, it doesn't matter if it's 3-0 or 0-2 count when you decide to swing. the % success/failur is roughly the same at any point of the AB. this strategy wouldn't work well, otherwise. they have tried to combat this in recent years, but even so, it still works exceptionally well.

just speculating: there must be some reason it's simplified... maybe it just doesn't work well re-generated for each pitch?