Yea lmao I can hit mid 80’s irl as well but just started playing the show this year and I can’t hit veteran difficulty very well, much less all star. Dam do I suck
@@dalemoses2443fox showed the plate speed way back in around 2009 and its way slower. A pitch released at 95 gets to the plate in the mid to low 80s if i remember it correctly. The 375ms is not accurate at all and this whole analysis is flawed.
It did bother me he didn’t account for the slowing down, not only that but a ball that curves would have a longer travel, and the ball also goes up first and down as it gets to the plate. Even just taking the average speed would be fine tho
I was at the batting cage a couple weeks ago hitting "65 mph" pitches, but I could barely hit it fair. So looked on Google Maps and saw that the distance from the pitching machine to home plate was only 40 feet. A 65 mph-pitch at 40 feet is equivalent to a 99 mph fastball.
@@karsonmapes no duh but what batting cage do you know is actual mlb mound length? And especially if it’s a pitching machine that is able to move then if it IS mlb mound length why wouldn’t he just move it? When you set a pitching machine to a speed it’s always based on the velocity coming out. The rest is on you, aka the length.
@@vuhzz The batting cages I've been to the pitching machines are fixed in position. Which would make the posted MPH a bit misleading. Which is the point being made.
Very cool video. The reason MLB the show can't actually do 100mph is because not a single person, even an MLB player would be able to hit it. Click delay, latency and all that jazz doesn't exist in real life, theoretically. You still need to swing at what you think will be a strike.
There are far more factors in the game like you said that would make realistic speeds genuinely impossible latency being the biggest, but the other thing that the game has that makes it hard is the zone hitting it’s much easier naturally when batting irl to see the ball and naturally move your arms towards it then it is do with just your thumb moving the zone to the ball, which is what makes people struggle so much, if people used directional hitting or something timing would be honestly piss easy cause your only pressing a button but it’s straight ass to use but adding the fact you’re using both thumbs to do different tasks makes it’s so difficult on what is a very much hit table speed irl. you’re right thumb is trying to time while your left thumb is tryna track the ball, it is still way easier than hitting an irl baseball in every way but the multitasking and less reps is what makes it so much harder for casuals to pick up and do pros have played baseball all their life, millions upon millions of reps and it’s why they’re so good at it people wouldn’t do even a quarter of that on a damn video game and those who do are the guys who hit like .800
In real life, there is only lag between deciding to swing and actually swinging. In the game, there is lag between deciding to swing and pressing the button, plus lag in the game recognizing what button you pressed, plus lag in the game beginning the swing animation. Those lag times might seem small but they’re perceptible and account for most of the reason the pitches appear slower. It’s out of necessity. If the pitches appeared actual speed, you’d have to press the button to swing before a real life batter would have to decide to swing.
yeah, but those lag times are different. pressings the button on your controller and the computer recognizing the input is waaaaaaaay faster than you brain coordinating all your muscles in your arm to swing
Awesome video. I’ve always believed this must be the case, because if you were actually facing 100mph most people wouldn’t be able to hit it, and it would make people mad, and they would say the game sucks and throw controllers and break things and would subsequently not buy any future MLB The Show games. So making the game playable for everyone is probably the best marketing strategy 😂
There is a problem with this methodology. You're finding the average speed of the ball during its entire journey to the plate, whereas pitch speed in real life is measured right out of the pitcher's hand. So a 100 MPH fastball in real life is actually closer to 94-95 when it gets to the plate so it may not actually be as far off as it seems.
Right. But we can just find the actual "hang time" of a 100 mph pitch with drag, and use that to tune our reference point. Might be a 5% difference, but one consistent across the board.
If the pitch starts at 100 mph, but finishes at 95mph, then the average velocity has to be between 95 and 100 mph. Even if the pitch spends most of its time at 95 mph, that's still 10 mph faster than the 85mph in the game.
Turning the slider down has to make sliders and change ups awful, moving so slow it couldn't reach the plate so your brain has no clue what's going on.
I also feel like the speeds are lowered as IRL baseball players do not have to wait for their PSI to reach a certain area before deciding to make their swing.
I always had a feeling but that's wild, low 70s for legend. Velo University did a study a while back and found average velo for 7th-8th graders was 74.3 MPH. So ur telling me that hitting a baseball is so hard that on legend difficulty it feels impossible to hit a 7th graders fastball? That's wild
74.3 is a little high for a 7th grader I would say once you get into 9th or 10th grade it's about average. To be fair it does depend on if you are doing travel baseball or not, but I feel like mid 70s just seems really high for being 12 or 13.
I coach youth baseball. I’ll never admit it to them but I have a couple kids I coached on the Jv team and I couldn’t hit their fastball. Not in an at bat situation where I was getting breaking balls mixed in. lol
The math seems to check out and everything, but I just can’t believe this. I’ve had the “privilege” of seeing what 100mph looks like in the batters box, and in my opinion, legend with max sliders looks way faster than the 99.8mph pitch I saw was. Maybe I’m crazy, but I felt like I could still track the ball and make a decision, albeit a quick decision, to take or swing I n real life, In the show w max sliders, If I’m not almost pre swinging essentially, I’ll get my doors blown off. Again, not arguing the math, but I still feel like there’s something missing that we might not know about or something.
I'm in the same boat. seen 100 irl (cages tho).. and i have been only playing on legend for years. I think depth perception is a huge factor, but also I think the rhythm and timing of loading a swing while considering the pitcher's mechanics is a factor that is difficult to capture in a video game. Also, irl a pitcher's body language sometimes indicates direction of the pitch, which in real life can lead to whiFs on inaccurate pitches because it was so far off target. but in the game, the nuance of analyzing a pitcher's mechanics are lost - which imo makes the pitcher more deceiving/harder to hit. Edit - I read a comment about accounting for acceleration, and this is also a factor imo. MLB reads speed on release, not at the plate like they used to.
The flat screen is important, but also a real pitch doesn't travel at a continuous 100 mph, it's closer to 92 by the time it crosses the plate, so it definitely takes longer than 375 ms to reach the plate. Plus with pre-loading during a swing, you are already in the act of swinging vs waiting to read a pitch before pressing a button. They're incomparable
@@blackmichael4126 If this game was accurate to real life speeds, it would be even harder to hit than real life. Finessing the PCI in those in between areas at even slower speeds is near impossible enough. The hitting system is flawed in this game.
i think there’s something to be said about it being harder to put a dot on a virtual ball with a controller rather than hitting a ball irl with natural depth perception in play. if i faced an 8th grader right now im taking him deep
I’m a really good Show player but I’m not near the best of the best. In MLB the Show 22 I played a whole RTTS season on legend with fastball and offspeed pitch speed sliders one short of maxed. I batted .366 with 42 home runs and a 1.200 OPS. Considering those are Barry Bonds numbers and I’m nowhere near being a Barry Bonds level Show player, I think it’s safe to say that MLB the Show hitting doesn’t hold a torch to real life
At the end he unintentionally showed why stealing signs is such a huge deal in baseball. If you know what pitch is coming it decreases the difficulty ten fold.
It’s a video game 😂 if they actually made the ball feel like hitting a irl 105 mph ball nobody would hit the ball let alone play the game. 😂 legend is completely fine
I used to play Earl Weaver Baseball. I think it could run on a 286. It certainly could run on a 486. It was so early in gaming that it wasn't clocked for computer speed. I remember trying to play it on a fast pentium several generations in. 8 bits, and I think I was getting 2 frames. The home run music sounded like the burst from A-10's main gun.
I think because of the drag on a real baseball, the time of travel may be equivalent to something in the mid to low 90’s, making the difference between real life and the show a little smaller.. But I think the point still stands that in the show, the pitch does look slower. Of course, depth perception on a screen versus real life and trying to control an onscreen dot could be a factor too
So glad you made a video of this. MLB TS 2007 literally was the last actual hard to hit game at all settings. For whatever reason even when Aroldis Chapman was included in the game the game has never allowed for consistent 100 mph 4 seamers. Aroldis was throwing heat and you'd never ever hit 104 even up in the zone. The same can be said with 2 seamers where real life MLB pitchers can consistently hit 100 they were always 95-98 even up in the zone. The game has some ultra weird mechanics that they have never updated and made more realistic.
As a person who just started playing mlb the show and getting into baseball. If it was real time they get to the plate. I wouldn't play. At the end of the day it's a game and it's meant to cater for everyone not just people who play baseball
Dumb question: when they say "from the pitchers mound to home plate", are they measuring from the edge/tip of the plates on the mound/at home (ie the shortest possible distance), or from middle of the pitchers mound to the middle of home plate?
Its impossible to hit at realistic speeds. Ive made a baseball game and I had to slow down to 90% to have it humanly playable, i think its around that for mlb the show too.
Why not at the very end of the video speed up the game so that it takes 375ms for the pitch to cross the plate so we have a visual idea of what MLB players see?
now im curious how it scales between fastballs and offspeed vs real life. if the fastball is only 83, would an 85 mph changeup be 68 mph? would it be faster? slower? and if the gap between the fastballs and offspeed is greater in game than real life, does that make up for how slow the fastballs are in game?
I think they're taking into account lancency from when you press the button on the controller to what happens on screen so of course they slow the pitches down to give you time to adjust PCI and actually swing at it accommodate for that
I play offline on legend 1 tick up on the speed sliders and I bat around .300 with a 50 contact hitter. Thanks for making this vid because I thought i was playing close to the real velo but now i see its more like 76 mph fastballs😅
You have to calculate brain to finger input lag, on top of the controller input lag, as well as the server lag, so it really is probably equivalent after you account for the extra reaction time delay
Online in this game was always weird especially during the recent installments with major latency, and input issues. Off speed is way too slow online and any fastball below 96 feels like a slow ball pitch. That’s why I think pitching feels impossible (aside from HOF difficulty up). It just feels unnatural. Even offline when I used to do franchise, I had to turn the off-speed pitch speed slider up a bit, did the same with fastballs (while playing on HOF). This game has A LOT of work to do.
Now go play Coop with all the latency on each pitch and see how fast that is. The 100 mph fastball there feels infinitely faster than it does in the practice mode.
Nice work! I wonder if you could have used the replay camera to get a bird's-eye view of the pitch. Then you could have measured exactly how far forward the pitcher's release point is, and it would have been easier to see when the ball crossed the plate. EDIT: It would also be interesting to use that camera angle to make the same check on exit velocity. If the game says my home run had a 100 mph exit velocity, is it also only 83 mph?
I wonder what the response time between the hit input and animation is and if that is a part of the game mechanics calculations. Say pitch speed is 500 ms but there is a 125 ms lag between button press and swing animation would make it "feel" like 375 ms.
Since MLB 2019, I've only payed Legend with pitch speeds maxed. If you could do this test with MLB 2019 you'd find its faster, since then each year the maxed out pitch speeds on Legend keeps getting slower.
One thing you probably didn't account for is the speed is measured at release (or about 50 ft) and by the time it arrives at the plate the air drag might slow down a 100mph ball to 93 or so. But That's still within 5% accuracy
Jared’s right. Cause the acceleration and air resistance and such will vary depending where. A ball will behave differently in Denver (highest elevation ballpark) than it will in say Philly (lowest elevation ballpark)
a heater going ~95mph loses about ~8mph as it crosses the plate in a pretty linear fashion, if you’re calculating the average speed as 82mph, then that means that the integral from 0 to 1 (let’s say this is your delta) being modeled in the form of (initial speed - 8 * t)dt is equivalent to your initial velocity - 4 mph, if we convert that backwards, that means that if you record 82mph, it’s actually 86mph since thats what radar guns measure, the speed out of the hand
The amount of speed it loses is based on spin rate of the ball, elevation, humidity and plenty of other factors. Trying to calculate the "average" speed drop, and then figuring out if the game matches this to any degree, that is if deceleration even exists in the game (it likely doesn't) is way too much work to not be getting paid directly to figure it out.
I mean, the only thing that matters with deceleration is the space it's traveling. Real mlb and real life all use out of hand and exit velocity for speeds. Everything decelerates considerably, messing with the the speed you can calculate as a object travels over a space. Its mathy, compicated and not fun in the end, (ive done it manually). A crude example of deceleration - ball should move faster in first few frames outta the hand, then last few. Doesn't matter, still a good video. Love your stuff jared. You should make more.
I think speed difference has more of an impact on difficulty than raw speed. You can always time the pitchers wind-up to slow-down the effective velocity. The speed differences on the show are crazy. I'd love to know the actual speed of the legend FB and CH. Is the displayed 100mph fb and 80 mph CH more like 83mph and 50mph?
You want to be able to play the game and still have fun right? If it actually was 100+ or that nasty 100 sinker/splitter you're probably striking out almost every time.
I’d be curious to see it on 144fps. Also, the issue with the speed going down when going up in difficulty could possibly be fixed by taking 5-10 pitches on each difficulty and averaging them out. While they should be coming in at the same speed they aren’t coming in at the exact same spot each time, not to mention the discrepancy between the game and your monitor.
Im not a gamer, but i assume there's a slight lag between hitting the buttons and the controller and the actual animation of the swing, right? If the game is designed to compensate for that, then it makes perfect sense that the apparent speed of the ball (on legend at full sliders) would be slightly slower than real life
I always noticed how much they've reduced the pitch speeds to cater to kids. Back in 08 the pitch speeds were fast if you weren't sitting fast ball you werent hitting it. You should do a video on the older mlb the shows pitch speeds
You should use this same data to verify speeds of old school pitchers. Like i always hear Nolan Ryan could pitch like 105 mph or something. I've heard some guys in the 1930s were touching 100 mph. There is baseball footage dating back to early 1900s. Why hasnt anyone took your approach and verified actual speeds some old school hurlers would throw?
Does the batter’s ability have anything to do with the speed of the pitch coming in? I feel like as my player progresses the pitching feels slower but I can’t tell if that’s actually what’s happening in game or if I’m just getting used to it
My theory on how MLB players make a decision to swing and adjust to ball the path is because they are relying on instincts more than eye hand/bat coordination. Their lifetime of practicing hit balls engrains seeing the ball and hitting it so much that it becomes instinct, part of a primal or even survival response, not much different than how you instantly pull away from a hot pot when you accidentally touch it.
You’re not factoring input latency just frames. You lose at minimum 2 frames from the wireless controller, another 1 frame (minimum) based on your screens latency, and that’s a best case scenario; so 24 frames x 16.67 = 400ms, not that far off from real life.
This is a nice theoretical experiment but I’m not sure how accurate it can be. What I feel that seems least realistic is how the ball spins and how it relates to pitch movement. When I go to batting cages I can hit in the fast cages which can clock anywhere from 70-85 mph depending on how they are setup and whether it’s an arm style machine or wheels. The wheels tend to be more consistent from pitch to pitch. Most batting cages have hard rubber balls with small divots like golf balls but there are cages that use real baseballs. It’s so much easier to track a real ball than the rubber ones because of the seams. As good as the Show is it cannot realistically replicate spin rate or the rotation of the ball. I have faced pitchers that could throw above 90. The ball still has to travel the distance from the mound to the plate but good eyes will pickup the rotation and be able to react to it. You really can’t do that in the Show… I usually play in Dynamic mode so the difficulty is based on how well I am doing. The levels also determine hittable area which shrinks as the difficulty grows. If one plays with the zone mode the hittable zone is indicated by the outer reticle. It gets pretty small above All Star. ⚾️
I get it but you have to think about that the game has to be setup for latency. Online for sure but there is latency from the controller input to the game. It's not 1:1 like it is in real life. So maybe that's a factor as well? Really cool video though!
You're not accounting for air resistance though. The 375ms would be correct if the ball traveled 100mph the entire way to the plate, but it starts slowing down as soon the pitcher releases it.
But the 100mph pitches mean its TOPPED OUT at 100 as it crosses the plate....for most of the balls journey it is going under 10 , under 20 , under 30, under 40, etc....and REACHES 100 at the end . So these calculation make no sense.
When I tell people that I throw 100mph, this is what I mean
@@TheRealJeff2 haha🤣
And if you measure it in kilometers per hour even sounds like you pitch faster like “yo I can pitch 160 km/h” 😂😂😂
Most underrated comment ever
@@BK_718more like 161 (even 1 extra kmh counts 😂)
To be fair as someone who has seen mid 90s fastballs irl. Your process time at the plate is different in real life than it is on a screen.
Yeah, I find hitting 80 irl easier than hitting 100 mph on hall of fame on mlbts
Yea lmao I can hit mid 80’s irl as well but just started playing the show this year and I can’t hit veteran difficulty very well, much less all star. Dam do I suck
@@520winter like every time I strike out on mlbts I say hitting on that game is more difficult than irl
Then you're not loading in time irl
I gave up on the game 12 years ago or so, just preposterously difficult to see the ball and therefore time and locate the control stick properly.
Crazy to think that the hardest difficulty in MLB the Show is the about the same MPH as high school baseball
Makes a lot more sense now that if you throw 100+ you can just throw that every time, and blow it by everyone
@@Jarodactylmlb players have faster reaction times to real pitches than we do in the video game with almost a 20mph difference
Also the game is running at 60 fps pretty sure if you test this on 120 fps mode the pitches are even faster.
@@abesview5855Wouldn’t the pitches just take double the frames on 120 FPS
@@mythic5343 If they take double the frames then based off his calculations the pitch speed would be double?
Certainly explains why almost every MLB position player who plays this game is elite lmao
Yep...
That's why they're in the mlb
packy?
Wow a professional baseball player is really good at a simulation baseball game surprise surprise
To them these pitches would look slow af
Balls slow down considerably on their way to home plate, by about 10 % of their initial speed.
And importantly velocity is measured at the hand not at the plate. But that would only to about 90-95 “real world equivalent”
@@dalemoses2443fox showed the plate speed way back in around 2009 and its way slower. A pitch released at 95 gets to the plate in the mid to low 80s if i remember it correctly. The 375ms is not accurate at all and this whole analysis is flawed.
It did bother me he didn’t account for the slowing down, not only that but a ball that curves would have a longer travel, and the ball also goes up first and down as it gets to the plate. Even just taking the average speed would be fine tho
I was at the batting cage a couple weeks ago hitting "65 mph" pitches, but I could barely hit it fair. So looked on Google Maps and saw that the distance from the pitching machine to home plate was only 40 feet. A 65 mph-pitch at 40 feet is equivalent to a 99 mph fastball.
Cuz it’s a batting cage bro what did you expect
he quite clearly said he was expecting 65 but it was actually equivalent of 99…. according to his calculations
@@karsonmapes no duh but what batting cage do you know is actual mlb mound length? And especially if it’s a pitching machine that is able to move then if it IS mlb mound length why wouldn’t he just move it? When you set a pitching machine to a speed it’s always based on the velocity coming out. The rest is on you, aka the length.
@@vuhzz
The batting cages I've been to the pitching machines are fixed in position. Which would make the posted MPH a bit misleading. Which is the point being made.
@@vuhzz do you know what an anecdote is
Very cool video. The reason MLB the show can't actually do 100mph is because not a single person, even an MLB player would be able to hit it. Click delay, latency and all that jazz doesn't exist in real life, theoretically. You still need to swing at what you think will be a strike.
Good point but still fastablls in this game feels super slow while being dificult to hit it which is odd.
There are far more factors in the game like you said that would make realistic speeds genuinely impossible latency being the biggest, but the other thing that the game has that makes it hard is the zone hitting it’s much easier naturally when batting irl to see the ball and naturally move your arms towards it then it is do with just your thumb moving the zone to the ball, which is what makes people struggle so much, if people used directional hitting or something timing would be honestly piss easy cause your only pressing a button but it’s straight ass to use but adding the fact you’re using both thumbs to do different tasks makes it’s so difficult on what is a very much hit table speed irl. you’re right thumb is trying to time while your left thumb is tryna track the ball, it is still way easier than hitting an irl baseball in every way but the multitasking and less reps is what makes it so much harder for casuals to pick up and do pros have played baseball all their life, millions upon millions of reps and it’s why they’re so good at it people wouldn’t do even a quarter of that on a damn video game and those who do are the guys who hit like .800
In real life, there is only lag between deciding to swing and actually swinging. In the game, there is lag between deciding to swing and pressing the button, plus lag in the game recognizing what button you pressed, plus lag in the game beginning the swing animation.
Those lag times might seem small but they’re perceptible and account for most of the reason the pitches appear slower. It’s out of necessity. If the pitches appeared actual speed, you’d have to press the button to swing before a real life batter would have to decide to swing.
AND you have to finesse the PCI which is already impossible at high difficulties as is.
@@dhLord64 it’s really not
yeah, but those lag times are different. pressings the button on your controller and the computer recognizing the input is waaaaaaaay faster than you brain coordinating all your muscles in your arm to swing
@@supitschillbro You don’t have to line up your PCI in real life tho. You just hit what you see
Not to mention the lag they program into the game multiplied by hundreds if stupid boosts for this and boosts for that that shouldn’t even exist
Theoretically if you set the video to 1.25 speed at 6:08, that’s what 100 MPH would really look like.
Great comment was looking for this
that would be about 104, but I mean...that's happened many times in MLB so it's not a bad comparison at all
Made my hurt jump. That’s some heat
DANG that's fast!!!!
Awesome video. I’ve always believed this must be the case, because if you were actually facing 100mph most people wouldn’t be able to hit it, and it would make people mad, and they would say the game sucks and throw controllers and break things and would subsequently not buy any future MLB The Show games. So making the game playable for everyone is probably the best marketing strategy 😂
There is a problem with this methodology. You're finding the average speed of the ball during its entire journey to the plate, whereas pitch speed in real life is measured right out of the pitcher's hand. So a 100 MPH fastball in real life is actually closer to 94-95 when it gets to the plate so it may not actually be as far off as it seems.
Right. But we can just find the actual "hang time" of a 100 mph pitch with drag, and use that to tune our reference point. Might be a 5% difference, but one consistent across the board.
Somebody did a study on this thing a couple years ago and he came out with saying that a 100mph in the show was 85 mph IRL, so idk what to believe
Assuming fairly constant drag force that still means the ball’s average speed is 97 mph
Wrong. The speed capture the mlb uses is the speed AS IT crossed the detector...not the average.
If the pitch starts at 100 mph, but finishes at 95mph, then the average velocity has to be between 95 and 100 mph. Even if the pitch spends most of its time at 95 mph, that's still 10 mph faster than the 85mph in the game.
Turning the slider down has to make sliders and change ups awful, moving so slow it couldn't reach the plate so your brain has no clue what's going on.
6:41 is what earned my sub. That made me laugh. Looking forward to more content.
I also feel like the speeds are lowered as IRL baseball players do not have to wait for their PSI to reach a certain area before deciding to make their swing.
Now factor in input lag and latency from horrible servers and it feels like 120mph
I’ve always wondered this
I always had a feeling but that's wild, low 70s for legend. Velo University did a study a while back and found average velo for 7th-8th graders was 74.3 MPH. So ur telling me that hitting a baseball is so hard that on legend difficulty it feels impossible to hit a 7th graders fastball? That's wild
Really puts into perspective how crazy hitting a baseball really is
74.3 is a little high for a 7th grader I would say once you get into 9th or 10th grade it's about average. To be fair it does depend on if you are doing travel baseball or not, but I feel like mid 70s just seems really high for being 12 or 13.
its still just as crazy though how hard it is to hit a 100mph fastball
I coach youth baseball. I’ll never admit it to them but I have a couple kids I coached on the Jv team and I couldn’t hit their fastball. Not in an at bat situation where I was getting breaking balls mixed in. lol
To be honest, I find it harder to hit it in mlb the show at max values and maxed out difficulty than hitting 95 off the machine.
I wonder if you tested on 120 if it would be different considering youll be getting double the amount of frames.
game doesn't run at 120. If it did, he would just get a slightly more accurate reading.
@@dhLord64 I run my MLB 24 at 120 FPS
@@abesview5855 It supports 120hz but is capped at 60 fps.
@@dhLord64no it is not
@@anthonymartinez4540 it's literally capped at 60 fps. Google it
The math seems to check out and everything, but I just can’t believe this. I’ve had the “privilege” of seeing what 100mph looks like in the batters box, and in my opinion, legend with max sliders looks way faster than the 99.8mph pitch I saw was.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I felt like I could still track the ball and make a decision, albeit a quick decision, to take or swing I n real life, In the show w max sliders, If I’m not almost pre swinging essentially, I’ll get my doors blown off.
Again, not arguing the math, but I still feel like there’s something missing that we might not know about or something.
I'm in the same boat. seen 100 irl (cages tho).. and i have been only playing on legend for years. I think depth perception is a huge factor, but also I think the rhythm and timing of loading a swing while considering the pitcher's mechanics is a factor that is difficult to capture in a video game. Also, irl a pitcher's body language sometimes indicates direction of the pitch, which in real life can lead to whiFs on inaccurate pitches because it was so far off target. but in the game, the nuance of analyzing a pitcher's mechanics are lost - which imo makes the pitcher more deceiving/harder to hit.
Edit - I read a comment about accounting for acceleration, and this is also a factor imo. MLB reads speed on release, not at the plate like they used to.
refresh rate, input lag, lack of actual pressure. the game in general isn't really a simulation, even though it's kind of advertised as one.
I'd agree. I think it also has to do with the lack of depth perception you get with a screen. I mean it's all flat.
The flat screen is important, but also a real pitch doesn't travel at a continuous 100 mph, it's closer to 92 by the time it crosses the plate, so it definitely takes longer than 375 ms to reach the plate. Plus with pre-loading during a swing, you are already in the act of swinging vs waiting to read a pitch before pressing a button. They're incomparable
@@blackmichael4126 If this game was accurate to real life speeds, it would be even harder to hit than real life. Finessing the PCI in those in between areas at even slower speeds is near impossible enough. The hitting system is flawed in this game.
i think there’s something to be said about it being harder to put a dot on a virtual ball with a controller rather than hitting a ball irl with natural depth perception in play.
if i faced an 8th grader right now im taking him deep
Ayoo
Exactly, well explained
You could have used an angle where you could see home plate, it would have been much easier to find where the ball crosses. Home plate
I’m a really good Show player but I’m not near the best of the best. In MLB the Show 22 I played a whole RTTS season on legend with fastball and offspeed pitch speed sliders one short of maxed.
I batted .366 with 42 home runs and a 1.200 OPS. Considering those are Barry Bonds numbers and I’m nowhere near being a Barry Bonds level Show player, I think it’s safe to say that MLB the Show hitting doesn’t hold a torch to real life
At the end he unintentionally showed why stealing signs is such a huge deal in baseball. If you know what pitch is coming it decreases the difficulty ten fold.
Ive been thinking about this for years but havent cared enough to research so thanks sir
It’s a video game 😂 if they actually made the ball feel like hitting a irl 105 mph ball nobody would hit the ball let alone play the game. 😂 legend is completely fine
I used to play Earl Weaver Baseball. I think it could run on a 286. It certainly could run on a 486. It was so early in gaming that it wasn't clocked for computer speed. I remember trying to play it on a fast pentium several generations in. 8 bits, and I think I was getting 2 frames. The home run music sounded like the burst from A-10's main gun.
I'm a math teacher and I love that you showed your work. Keep that shit up!
I think because of the drag on a real baseball, the time of travel may be equivalent to something in the mid to low 90’s, making the difference between real life and the show a little smaller.. But I think the point still stands that in the show, the pitch does look slower. Of course, depth perception on a screen versus real life and trying to control an onscreen dot could be a factor too
So glad you made a video of this. MLB TS 2007 literally was the last actual hard to hit game at all settings.
For whatever reason even when Aroldis Chapman was included in the game the game has never allowed for consistent 100 mph 4 seamers. Aroldis was throwing heat and you'd never ever hit 104 even up in the zone. The same can be said with 2 seamers where real life MLB pitchers can consistently hit 100 they were always 95-98 even up in the zone. The game has some ultra weird mechanics that they have never updated and made more realistic.
Glad someone has this much time to do this math. I always wondered if it was accurate, but wasn’t motivated enough to look into it.
I bought a used monitor and the guy said "now you can up your k/d" I said nah this is for baseball. I'm trying to see Randy Johnson's fastball
As a person who just started playing mlb the show and getting into baseball. If it was real time they get to the plate. I wouldn't play. At the end of the day it's a game and it's meant to cater for everyone not just people who play baseball
Dumb question: when they say "from the pitchers mound to home plate", are they measuring from the edge/tip of the plates on the mound/at home (ie the shortest possible distance), or from middle of the pitchers mound to the middle of home plate?
You should do this with HD live feed to see which parks have juiced/accurate radar guns
Its impossible to hit at realistic speeds. Ive made a baseball game and I had to slow down to 90% to have it humanly playable, i think its around that for mlb the show too.
Why not at the very end of the video speed up the game so that it takes 375ms for the pitch to cross the plate so we have a visual idea of what MLB players see?
now im curious how it scales between fastballs and offspeed vs real life. if the fastball is only 83, would an 85 mph changeup be 68 mph? would it be faster? slower? and if the gap between the fastballs and offspeed is greater in game than real life, does that make up for how slow the fastballs are in game?
The problem is legend difficulty pitch speeds online are faster than those offline
Exactly
I think they're taking into account lancency from when you press the button on the controller to what happens on screen so of course they slow the pitches down to give you time to adjust PCI and actually swing at it accommodate for that
This is sick, curious to see how much of a difference there is between this and pitchers with outlier
Well, IRL the ball slows down a bit before reaching the plate because drag is a thing, so the gap might actually be smaller.
Im most impressed that someone took the time to analyze this.
I play offline on legend 1 tick up on the speed sliders and I bat around .300 with a 50 contact hitter. Thanks for making this vid because I thought i was playing close to the real velo but now i see its more like 76 mph fastballs😅
With delay its basically the same
You have to calculate brain to finger input lag, on top of the controller input lag, as well as the server lag, so it really is probably equivalent after you account for the extra reaction time delay
Online in this game was always weird especially during the recent installments with major latency, and input issues. Off speed is way too slow online and any fastball below 96 feels like a slow ball pitch. That’s why I think pitching feels impossible (aside from HOF difficulty up). It just feels unnatural.
Even offline when I used to do franchise, I had to turn the off-speed pitch speed slider up a bit, did the same with fastballs (while playing on HOF). This game has A LOT of work to do.
Now go play Coop with all the latency on each pitch and see how fast that is. The 100 mph fastball there feels infinitely faster than it does in the practice mode.
that outro pitch was worth a sub after watching all those calculations
Nice work! I wonder if you could have used the replay camera to get a bird's-eye view of the pitch. Then you could have measured exactly how far forward the pitcher's release point is, and it would have been easier to see when the ball crossed the plate.
EDIT: It would also be interesting to use that camera angle to make the same check on exit velocity. If the game says my home run had a 100 mph exit velocity, is it also only 83 mph?
“Up next, is minors”… drake 2.0?
It depends on what difficulty you’re on like on Legend you cannot hit a 103 mph but on Rookie you can hit a 100 mph fastball
great video, it would have been even better if you made the video 16% faster, so we could see how 100mph actually looks like in-game
Damn. Good idea. I'll have to include that when I post this on TikTok in a few days
At 83.3 MPH, you'd need it 20% faster to get it to 99.96 mph
I wonder what the response time between the hit input and animation is and if that is a part of the game mechanics calculations. Say pitch speed is 500 ms but there is a 125 ms lag between button press and swing animation would make it "feel" like 375 ms.
Since MLB 2019, I've only payed Legend with pitch speeds maxed. If you could do this test with MLB 2019 you'd find its faster, since then each year the maxed out pitch speeds on Legend keeps getting slower.
Theres an attribute called vision, that affects the speed of the pitches and the frame at which it starts to break.
One thing you probably didn't account for is the speed is measured at release (or about 50 ft) and by the time it arrives at the plate the air drag might slow down a 100mph ball to 93 or so. But That's still within 5% accuracy
That last scare get that shit outta here made me laugh cuz I say that all the time the time
This was actually interesting
Of course it’s a game. It has to feel realistic but also remain accessible to everyone… No it will never be as fast as real baseball.
WHen caculating speed/time taken dont you also need to account for acceleration?
Solid point, but I just assumed a constant speed with no air resistance. Practically an impossible experiment otherwise.
Jared’s right. Cause the acceleration and air resistance and such will vary depending where. A ball will behave differently in Denver (highest elevation ballpark) than it will in say Philly (lowest elevation ballpark)
a heater going ~95mph loses about ~8mph as it crosses the plate in a pretty linear fashion, if you’re calculating the average speed as 82mph, then that means that the integral from 0 to 1 (let’s say this is your delta) being modeled in the form of (initial speed - 8 * t)dt is equivalent to your initial velocity - 4 mph, if we convert that backwards, that means that if you record 82mph, it’s actually 86mph since thats what radar guns measure, the speed out of the hand
The amount of speed it loses is based on spin rate of the ball, elevation, humidity and plenty of other factors. Trying to calculate the "average" speed drop, and then figuring out if the game matches this to any degree, that is if deceleration even exists in the game (it likely doesn't) is way too much work to not be getting paid directly to figure it out.
I mean, the only thing that matters with deceleration is the space it's traveling. Real mlb and real life all use out of hand and exit velocity for speeds. Everything decelerates considerably, messing with the the speed you can calculate as a object travels over a space. Its mathy, compicated and not fun in the end, (ive done it manually). A crude example of deceleration - ball should move faster in first few frames outta the hand, then last few. Doesn't matter, still a good video. Love your stuff jared. You should make more.
Ending with a perfect was the best part
mlb players are really swinging a 2 pound stick and hitting the ball, while i can’t move my thumb and hit A fast enough for HoF difficulty
The distance from the rubber and home plate is based on the pointy tip of the plate
You said that a IRL pitch of 100mph takes 375ms to *reach the catcher's glove* yet you measured the time in-game only as far as the home plate.
Somebody in here has probably said it before me but it can also make a difference of if you are playing casual vs competitive vs simulation
Seeing things irl has more info than a screen. 3D for exmaple
Nice video always wondered about this but need to do it on 120
I think speed difference has more of an impact on difficulty than raw speed. You can always time the pitchers wind-up to slow-down the effective velocity. The speed differences on the show are crazy. I'd love to know the actual speed of the legend FB and CH. Is the displayed 100mph fb and 80 mph CH more like 83mph and 50mph?
damn depth perception is craaaazy cuz i can hit a 95mph fastball irl but i suck at this game😭😭
You want to be able to play the game and still have fun right? If it actually was 100+ or that nasty 100 sinker/splitter you're probably striking out almost every time.
To be fair with how most people are playing on TVs with substantial delay it would be infuriating trying to make it 1 to 1 for most people.
I’d be curious to see it on 144fps. Also, the issue with the speed going down when going up in difficulty could possibly be fixed by taking 5-10 pitches on each difficulty and averaging them out. While they should be coming in at the same speed they aren’t coming in at the exact same spot each time, not to mention the discrepancy between the game and your monitor.
Im not a gamer, but i assume there's a slight lag between hitting the buttons and the controller and the actual animation of the swing, right?
If the game is designed to compensate for that, then it makes perfect sense that the apparent speed of the ball (on legend at full sliders) would be slightly slower than real life
so i actually compared it to a actual pitch by ben joyce this year (104.8) and it got to the plate around the exact same time
This is underrated
This video just proved I might suck at virtual baseball and irl baseball.
I mean I’ve made contact with an 84 mph fastball irl and that shit is fast lol
I always noticed how much they've reduced the pitch speeds to cater to kids. Back in 08 the pitch speeds were fast if you weren't sitting fast ball you werent hitting it. You should do a video on the older mlb the shows pitch speeds
You should use this same data to verify speeds of old school pitchers. Like i always hear Nolan Ryan could pitch like 105 mph or something. I've heard some guys in the 1930s were touching 100 mph. There is baseball footage dating back to early 1900s. Why hasnt anyone took your approach and verified actual speeds some old school hurlers would throw?
The best thing I got out of this video is that FB at Allstar and HoF arent that far off.
When I'm in a slump and drop down
Does the batter’s ability have anything to do with the speed of the pitch coming in? I feel like as my player progresses the pitching feels slower but I can’t tell if that’s actually what’s happening in game or if I’m just getting used to it
First time that's ever occured to me. Might have to do a video on it.
This is why I put pitch speeds at 80%.. then when I play in real life the ball looks like its in slow motion
(Obviously not playing against 100mph in real life)
My theory on how MLB players make a decision to swing and adjust to ball the path is because they are relying on instincts more than eye hand/bat coordination. Their lifetime of practicing hit balls engrains seeing the ball and hitting it so much that it becomes instinct, part of a primal or even survival response, not much different than how you instantly pull away from a hot pot when you accidentally touch it.
I noticed it was on casual gameplay style, do the other play types (simulation, competitive) have an effect? I'd be curious to see.
Would have been nice to crank the ‘pitch speed’ up to whatever it needs to get an actual 100
they should have a fully realistic mode. I understand no one could hit anything, but itd be fun to see how long it takes to put 100 in play
replay that 87mph pitch at 1.25x and you get a 104mph pitch.
would love to see the same experiment with bat speed. i wonder if that's slower too and levels out the difficulty
You’re not factoring input latency just frames. You lose at minimum 2 frames from the wireless controller, another 1 frame (minimum) based on your screens latency, and that’s a best case scenario; so 24 frames x 16.67 = 400ms, not that far off from real life.
This is a nice theoretical experiment but I’m not sure how accurate it can be. What I feel that seems least realistic is how the ball spins and how it relates to pitch movement. When I go to batting cages I can hit in the fast cages which can clock anywhere from 70-85 mph depending on how they are setup and whether it’s an arm style machine or wheels. The wheels tend to be more consistent from pitch to pitch. Most batting cages have hard rubber balls with small divots like golf balls but there are cages that use real baseballs. It’s so much easier to track a real ball than the rubber ones because of the seams. As good as the Show is it cannot realistically replicate spin rate or the rotation of the ball. I have faced pitchers that could throw above 90. The ball still has to travel the distance from the mound to the plate but good eyes will pickup the rotation and be able to react to it. You really can’t do that in the Show… I usually play in Dynamic mode so the difficulty is based on how well I am doing. The levels also determine hittable area which shrinks as the difficulty grows. If one plays with the zone mode the hittable zone is indicated by the outer reticle. It gets pretty small above All Star. ⚾️
When MLB says the pitch is 100mph, that is measured 10 ft from the pitcher's hand. The ball slows down on the way to home plate. Did you forget that?
"get that ish outta here!"
I get it but you have to think about that the game has to be setup for latency. Online for sure but there is latency from the controller input to the game. It's not 1:1 like it is in real life. So maybe that's a factor as well? Really cool video though!
You're not accounting for air resistance though. The 375ms would be correct if the ball traveled 100mph the entire way to the plate, but it starts slowing down as soon the pitcher releases it.
People really thought hey could hit a 100 mph baseball
They should add a difficulty that sets the in game pitch speed to the speed in real life
But the 100mph pitches mean its TOPPED OUT at 100 as it crosses the plate....for most of the balls journey it is going under 10 , under 20 , under 30, under 40, etc....and REACHES 100 at the end . So these calculation make no sense.
literally smiling ear to ear while watching this
Nobody can convince me any Randy Johnson card throws less than 150 mph
If you boost the pitch speed all the way up it’s basically mlb speed
I always knew Jamie Moyer was a legend.