[Syd Thrift]

Yeah… right now pitches can do nothing but help a player in some way. At worst, the game doesn’t use them (as when a player pitches in relief for instance). Ideally I’d like to see each pitch have something like the following:

Stuff - the current pitch rating, basically how good the pitch is at getting strikes.

Control - yeah, individually for each pitch, and to me this should go up or down a lot from one game to the next. Some days you can control your curve, some you can’t.

A left-right movement and an up-down movement rating that determines splits (the higher the left/right, the more the split) and the “up”/down determines how many flies vs grounders and also a rating of 0 is probably the worst HR allowed mark (to account for “rising” fastballs that induce pop ups but not necessarily more HRs.

You’d still want a pitcher to have a separate control and movement rating, or something like that, that measures how much a guy will try to nibble and so on.

All this would as you note require a pretty huge revamp of the way pitching works. A lot of players would just play differently.