A few years ago when I had a capture card, I ran a comparison of pitchers with and without Fastball Life on a Japanese Power Pros game. I just dug up some old files from the experiment and thought it might be interesting to share.
Stuff to keep in mind
- The game I used is Jikkyou Powerful Proyakyu 10 (GC) which came out in 2003.
- There've been a lot of changes to the game since then, so don't expect these results to say much about how these abilities work in MLB PP.
- For example, Gyroball didn't have the bullet spin or downward movement and only affected the visual speed of the fastball. It was also impossible to acquire the Gyroball ability without also getting FB Life 4 in the same Success Mode event. This comparison will be between Normal vs FB Life vs FB Life + Gyroball (No "Gyroball only" pitcher).
- There was no player edit nor was save and loading possible, so identical players were much harder to produce. I wasn't really inclined on proving anything, so I just did this with three pitchers with the same velocity but different pitching forms.
Setup
- First I picked out 3 pitchers:
Daisuke Matsuzaka 156km/h (Default player)
Afro Pedro 156km/h Fastball Life 4 (Success Mode creation)
Mariano Rivera 156km/h Fastball Life 4 Gyroball (Success Mode creation)
- Next I captured the 3 pitchers throwing a pitch right down the middle in pitching practice mode. I made sure the radar gun readings were exactly the same (156km/h) by tapping the button.
- Then I dumped the frames from the video, aligned the three pitch trajectories using the release point as a reference.
Results
- Here's a composite image of select frames (every odd number frame from the release point):
- You can tell Fastball Life makes the pitch travel to the plate quicker. If you look at the final frame, the normal 156km/h pitch has not reached home plate while the other two pitches have.
- Fastball Life and Fastball Life plus Gyroball appear to reach the plate simultaneously, but by comparing the last three snapshots, you see Gyroball starting out slower and catching up as the pitches near home plate. This probably gives the impression of late life.
- Here's a more detailed look with guides and missing frames restored:
- You can see the Gyroball traveling more distance over the last 5 frames. (Though this could be an illusion created by Rivera having a higher release point than Pedro and thus a more downward trajectory) Also note that in the very last frame, the Gyroball is in front of the pitching cursor, while the plain Fastball Life is behind it (ie you can see the cross on the left but it's hidden behind the ball on the right).
Discussion
This experiment wasn't an ideal comparison for several reasons. For one, the three pitchers have different pitching forms; Dice-K had his own unique overhand delivery, while I created Pedro with a generic 3-quarter style and Rivera with a generic overhand. This means the height of the release point is slightly different. Like I said earlier, with no player edit or save and load available, I was too lazy to create identical pitchers. (In fact it happened the other way around; I noticed I had three pitchers with the same velocity and different fastball abilities, and then decided to run a comparison.)
Secondly, despite trying to throw down the middle you can see the actual location of pitches is a bit off, most notably Dice-K's pitch missing by about a quarter of the K zone. Also, though you can't tell from the composite image, the release points didn't align precisely; the actual point of release seemed to have come in between frames for one of the pitchers, so I had to approximate (though not by much). In retrospect I guess I could have repeated the capture process till I got the location and timing right.
