Who determines what pitch the pitcher throws??

[Commander H]

So a pitcher has 6 pitches--rated at say 98, 77,69, 60,48,24 (Maddox in perfect team 21).

In the real world the pitcher and catcher go over strategy before the game and during the game depending on the batters strengths (fastball say) or weaknesses (curveball say) the catcher will tell the pitcher to throw that pitch (the pitcher can override of course) BUT in the simulation in OOTPB does a catchers rating determine what pitch is thrown or what determines the sequence of pitches that is thrown to a batter?????

In the Maddox example above would he ever thrown the pitches rated 48 ot 24?

[Syd Thrift]

The game doesn't actually sim on a pitch-by-pitch scale, and their Stuff is amalgamated off of the ratings of all of the pitches a pitcher throws (additionally, each pitch also has a secondary effect on something in the game, from platoon splits for the curve to GB% for the 2-seam fastball, which I think is built in at a rate commensurate to each pitch ability, so that a guy with a 100 curve will have more pronounced splits than someone with a 50 curve). The outcome of the at-bat is determined from that amalgamated rating rather than the outcome of each pitch. That also means that a guy who throws 4 pitches with one of them not very good will usually have better stuff (well, at least as a starter) than a guy who throws only 3 pitches. This to me is pretty realistic: even a guy with a "show me" slider is adding something to his pitching game compared to a guy who doesn't throw a slider at all, and the possibility of that slider makes all of his pitches (slightly) harder to hit.

As for which pitch gets thrown, even though that widget is all cosmetic, the answer is... I'm not sure, actually.

[EZB]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

The game doesn't actually sim on a pitch-by-pitch scale, and their Stuff is amalgamated off of the ratings of all of the pitches a pitcher throws (additionally, each pitch also has a secondary effect on something in the game, from platoon splits for the curve to GB% for the 2-seam fastball, which I think is built in at a rate commensurate to each pitch ability, so that a guy with a 100 curve will have more pronounced splits than someone with a 50 curve). The outcome of the at-bat is determined from that amalgamated rating rather than the outcome of each pitch. That also means that a guy who throws 4 pitches with one of them not very good will usually have better stuff (well, at least as a starter) than a guy who throws only 3 pitches. This to me is pretty realistic: even a guy with a "show me" slider is adding something to his pitching game compared to a guy who doesn't throw a slider at all, and the possibility of that slider makes all of his pitches (slightly) harder to hit.

As for which pitch gets thrown, even though that widget is all cosmetic, the answer is... I'm not sure, actually.

That's pretty sad if it is not doing pitch-by-pitch sim.

[RchW]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

The game doesn't actually sim on a pitch-by-pitch scale, and their Stuff is amalgamated off of the ratings of all of the pitches a pitcher throws (additionally, each pitch also has a secondary effect on something in the game, from platoon splits for the curve to GB% for the 2-seam fastball, which I think is built in at a rate commensurate to each pitch ability, so that a guy with a 100 curve will have more pronounced splits than someone with a 50 curve). The outcome of the at-bat is determined from that amalgamated rating rather than the outcome of each pitch. That also means that a guy who throws 4 pitches with one of them not very good will usually have better stuff (well, at least as a starter) than a guy who throws only 3 pitches. This to me is pretty realistic: even a guy with a "show me" slider is adding something to his pitching game compared to a guy who doesn't throw a slider at all, and the possibility of that slider makes all of his pitches (slightly) harder to hit.

As for which pitch gets thrown, even though that widget is all cosmetic, the answer is... I'm not sure, actually.

I'm missing something. The developers tell us there is no difference between simming and playing out games. Since games can be played out pitch by pitch doesn't that have to be true in simming?

[Rain King]

The game is simulated pitch-by-pitch, but the pitch choices do not matter (i.e. pitch sequence, etc.).

[RchW]

Originally Posted by Rain King

The game is simulated pitch-by-pitch, but the pitch choices do not matter (i.e. pitch sequence, etc.).

That's what I thought. Maybe I didn't read Syd's post carefully enough.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Rain King

The game is simulated pitch-by-pitch, but the pitch choices do not matter (i.e. pitch sequence, etc.).

Yeah, just to be clear: it is *not* simulated pitch by pitch. It's simulated plate appearance by plate appearance, although calling stuff like steals or sacrifice bunts can influence that a *little* (that being said, I'm almost positive that someone looked at attempting steals until batters got to 2 strikes and found little to no difference in BA/other rates when they did so). The fast sim "engine" is basically just the regular in-game engine only without graphics/PBP turned on.

I realize this takes a little bit of wrapping one's head around, but one way to think about this is that OOTP transitioned into allowing a one-pitch "mode" several years ago, and they did so without overhauling the entire engine. Would it maybe be better if the game simmed things on a pitch by pitch basis? Perhaps but honestly the ratings are all plate appearance based. "Eye" is how often a player draws walks, not how often a player takes pitches outside of the strike zone, and "Avoid Ks" is, likewise, avoiding strikeouts, not some combination of being able to foul off pitches, recognize borderline strikes, and so on. The advantage of this is that for historical seasons you can figure these out algorthmically with the stats that we have available. If you were to break these down into things that work on a pitch-by-pitch basis, we only have per-pitch data going back, what is it, 15 years now, if that? We will of course never have this kind of data prior to, say, the 1960s because there's simply not enough footage of games out there to figure that out, and so there'd have to be lots and lots of assumptions made. And the more assumptions you have to make, the less accurate older seasons will be.

To actually move to a pitch-by-pitch engine would very probably require the game to be overhauled so that individual attributes all come into play more. There's some wisdom in doing this but the game also has, like 20+ years of working pretty well one a per-PA basis and one can understand the desire to not take an entire year or more overhauling the game to do something that will very likely result in less accurate (if more realistic) results than what it currently has.

[RchW]

So for those playing P by P the extra effort (putting plays on) within a PA is meaningless. The result of each PA is the same vs 1-pitch mode vs daily weekly. season sims?

I'm still struggling with this. I'll let you confirm or not the above, then comment after that.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by RchW

So for those playing P by P the extra effort (putting plays on) within a PA is meaningless. The result of each PA is the same vs 1-pitch mode vs daily weekly. season sims?

I'm still struggling with this. I'll let you confirm or not the above, then comment after that.

ISTR that you can "cheese" the system to some degree by using "take" in particular - regardless of what the game engine "wants" to do with an at-bat, if you get 4 balls, you get a free ticket to first base. And if you try to bunt with 2 strikes and that bunt goes foul, then that will still be a strikeout. I'm sure that if you kept throwing pitchouts or giving a (slow) runner at first the green light, eventually you'll wind up with 4 balls or 3 strikes regardless of what the engine winds up determining. And of course, if you pitch out when a runner tries to steal, the chances are much increased that they're thrown out (and perhaps, if you sim out pitch by pitch, the AI will steal more often on hitter's counts). I know that if you have your batter take until the count goes to 2-2, you're not going to see the count go backwards or anything. Maybe there's even something like "okay, the count is now 1-2 and batters hit 100 points lower in these situations" (although again, I don't believe there is something like that in the game, and I believe other people have looked at this).

But the game absolutely does *not* simulate on a pitch by pitch basis. Numerous playtesters have documented this and I believe the devs have even said as much in recent years (and if they moved to a "pure" pitch by pitch mode, we'd have seen all kinds of different things going on with the engine).