So I’m playing MLB The Show 11 (best baseball game ever) right now and it FINALLY has a very good training mode, which I desperately needed. One of the tasks in one challenge is “only hit high and outside fast balls. Lay off anything else including breakers, change-ups and curves”.
I’m doing pretty good but for the life of me I can’t tell a change up from a fastball on this game. The thing is pristine visually and I’m sure it’s some subtlety I’m not seeing and not something lacking int he graphics.
So what does a change-up look like from the batters perspective?
Also, while I’m at it, how can I tell if a slider is inbound BEFORE it gets to me?
In real life? It depends on the pitcher, but sometimes he’ll use a different arm angle or his arm speed might be subtly slower than a fastball.
But if you mean how do you tell the difference in the game at the point of the pitcher’s release, I have to say, I’m not sure there’s a way. Granted, I have '10 and not '11, but my second biggest complaint is that the changeups are almost unhittable, because the delta is so wide (like 95 vs. 75) but the arm speed/angle look to be identical on every pitch.
My #1 complaint is the fictional pitchers that can throw 60 MPH knuckleballs and 97 MPH fastballs with identical arm action, but I digress.
I don’t know if the game is this detailed, but a tipoff is the way the ball is positioned in the pitchers hand. A changeup is held in the palm of the hand while a fastball is held with only the fingers. Many pitchers use a technique where the thumb and forefinger are touching in the style of the “OK” hand sign, and the ball is held with the remaining three fingers.
Again, I don’t know if the game is that detailed, but in real life, against a pitcher with a good changeup, batters will look for this.
If the pitcher is successful, the arm angle and throwing motion will be the same; otherwise, the batter can tell what’s coming. As Lamar says, the best way is to try and see the hand position (which is damn tough from 60 feet 6 inches away) because a pitcher with good arm mechanics on the change gets the velocity reduction by holding the ball in a much less efficient grip.
If you can’t see hand position, the other tip off is that the seams will spin more slowly.
But the point of a change is that it is hard to spot. If it wasn’t, it would be an incredibly easy pitch to hit because it’s slow, it doesn’t break, and it doesn’t have a fastball’s movement. The reason the pitch can be a success is because by the time the hitter has to commit to a possible fastball, he can’t yet tell if the ball’s going to come in at 95 or 80-something.
A slider looks like a fastball until very late in flight when it reveals a small, flat break. The difficulty comes in that you don’t see the break until your swing is underway. It’s also slightly slower than a fastball.
The spin of a slider causes the laces to form a small red dot on the ball as it approaches. Again, this may not be in the game. A fastball rotates on a different plane and the dot does not appear.
The spinning seams on a slider make a pink circle on the front of the ball as it approaches the batter. A hitter with good eyesight can look for this to determine whether the pitch is a slider.
This is a simulpost, sort of. Did I really take that long to compose this?
Being able to regularly read and react to pitches is what gets folks the big bucks for hitting, and they still usually don’t do it with anywhere near perfection. At professional speeds, it’s mainly a guessing game and muscle memory reflexes.
That said, in high school we were taught some basics of how to read pitches and worked on it in simplified drills. The main things to watch were the pitcher’s fingers’ positions as the ball is coming over his shoulder. At the HS level there’s only 3 pitches really, and all have different finger positions. For a breaking pitch the fingers will be on the side of the ball, and for a change-up there will be fingers all around the ball, whereas a fastball will generally only have 2 fingers visible near the top. There also was the spin of the ball, but you don’t have quite as much time to react to that.
If baseball video games these days are including that sort of information, I’d be quite amazed.