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KGJB batting mechanics


Ian Jones

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So, perusing the internet about the game, I saw a lot of people asking does batting even do anything? Or saying that power has more to do with whether a player is a good batter. Or trying to make sense of it by saying that batting is the players ability to make contact with the ball, etc. But as is the case with old games, the answer is usually much simpler. After doing a lot of testing, here are my finds if it helps anyone. So try to think of it like your mind only had the capabilities of a super nintendo. It's of course randomized, but in a sense think of power as how far the ball will travel on a horizontal plane, and batting is where the ball will averagely travel on a vertical plane. So 1 batting 10 power = deep pop flies and home runs, 10 bat 1 pow = lots of grounders in the gaps, 1 bat 1 pow = all manner of irrelevant shots to the infield, 10 bat 10 pow = deep line drives and HRs. Now, why does it seem like batting does nothing? why is the 1 bat 10 pow guy better than the 10 bat 1 pow guy? It has to do with KGJB being a game of excesses. Pretty much any rating over 7 is nearly superhuman. And the game is dominated by infielders with 8+ fielding ratings that control their speed as well as their throwing power. A SS with a fielding rating of 8 or 9 means that there are practically no infield gaps from behind the pitcher to the 3rd baseman. He can reach all of that. Same with a 2B, just the opposite side. This is physically improbable on a 90' diamond unless the fielder was already cheating one way or another before the hit. And that 8 or 9 rating gives him the ability to throw out basically any runner at first. So when that 10 1 guy hits a gap shot between 3rd and SS, its scooped up easily and hes thrown out. Those little blooper hits that go right above the pitcher's head? That's contact batting heaven but your 8+ shortstop or 2B kills those in their tracks. The 10 1 batter has no gaps to hit, and unless he has a 10 speed rating, he has very little chance of beating out a throw to first. So the 10 1 batter has no where to go unless he once in a while bloops one over the SS head to get him on first, but if theres already a runner on, then the 8+ outfielder behind him will likely scoop it up and smoke the runner at 2nd or 3rd...which isnt a hit for the 10 1 batter. The 1 10 batter is of equal caliber, but hes predominantly hitting pop flies, and not only does he get lucky and hit one an outfielder can't reach on occasion, but also some of his crappy pop flies carry over the fence where even an all 10 outfield is useless. If the infielders ratings are lowered, that 10 1 batter becomes much more successful. If your team had all 10s in the outfield and all 5s in the infield, those 1 10 batters would be easy outs and the 10 1 batters would be nightmares at the plate. Having said that, if the teams are situated with the average 2B and SS rating being 6-8 and the average outfield rating being 7-9, any combination of Batting and Power that equals 10 should end you up with a batter that bats .300-.320, so long as your pitcher's average ratings stay the same

Edited by Ian Jones
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  • 3 weeks later...

Very interested in this topic and hopefully you and others see it and reply. A friend and I have completed over 20 full seasons and the batting mechanics are still largely a mystery to me. We also kept track of all those seasons stats so I'm able to do some analysis of real-world data to see how BAT and PWR affect batting results. Here are some notes:

 

Higher BAT rating leads to a bit higher batting average - To analyze this I took 26 completed player season where batters had a 9 or 10 in PWR and plotted their BAT rating vs. their batting average. There was a slight positive relationship (r-square = .32). I did the same thing for a group of 64 player seasons where batters had a 7 or 8 in PWR and saw a similar positive relationship (r-square = .15). So I don't know why, and there are MANY exceptions, but the BAT rating does appear to cause players to get a few more hits.

 

Higher BAT rating leads to a bit FEWER home runs - I did the same analysis here with the 2 groups but this time found r-squareds of .39 and .29 showing that a LOW BAT actually resulted in more HR on average. There are many exceptions, but it's generally true. In the sample of 26 players with a 9 or 10 PWR rating, 7 of them also had a 10 in BAT. The best any of those 7 players finished was 13th place in that list of 26. In fact those 7 players finished ranked 13, 15, 18, 21, 23, 24, and 26. On the flip side their ranks in AVG were 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 14, and 15. So there is something happening there for sure.

 

The relationship in both of these cases is subtle, but I do believe it exists. Next I have some other notes:

 

Idea from RBI Baseball - RBI Baseball fans struggled with a similar question of what - if anything - the batting attribute does in that game. Eventually someone who could pick apart the code figured out that it serves as a penalty for not hitting the ball on the barrel. If the pitch makes contact with the end of the bat instead of the sweet spot, then the batters power rating would be reduced based on their batting rating when the game performs the hit result calculation. In practice this doesn't do a whole lot because the power rating is huge compared to the batting rating so a powerful batter making bad contact will still be a lot better than a weak batter making good contact, so that's why it was hard to tell if the rating even does anything. I wonder if a similar thing could be at play with Griffey.

 

Results of hitting a ball trigger a canned animation. There isn't a true physics engine - This is more obvious if you bunt vs. the computer. There are only so many paths the ball can travel when you bunt - maybe a dozen or so - regardless of the batter. You will see the ball go in the exact same path again and again if you pay attention to it. The same thing happens when batting, but there are a lot more possibilities. Nonetheless, if you play enough you will notice there are certain batted ball paths that happen repeatedly. 

 

How to Find the Answers - There are two ways I can think of to find the answer to how the batting mechanics work. First is a long shot, but someone with a lot of SNES hacking ability would need to analyze the code. This would of course give us the true answers, but there are not a lot of people who can hack SNES games beyond just the text or graphics, Griffey is programmed in a difficult to decipher way according to people who have hacked it so far, and the overlap between a Griffey fan and a dedicated SNES hacker is probably very small, if it exists at all. Anyway, that is an option technically.

 

Next way is with analysis of game play. To do this, you can play on an emulator and take a save state immediately before an at bat, then replay the at bat again and again and again. I've done this a bit and haven't made any breakthroughs, but I noticed two things:

 

1) The pitcher becomes set on what pitch to throw at some point before he winds up. If you do the save state idea, the pitcher will throw the same exact pitch every single time. Not totally surprising or useful, but the pitcher appears to lock into a pattern of what pitches to throw in what order. Anyway, this finding is good because it lets you control for the effects of pitching easily. Since the pitch is exactly the same, you know any difference in the hit result are due to the batting inputs.

 

2) Referring to my point from a bit above, it's possible if you swing at the exact same time that the ball will go in exactly the same path. By that I mean you can hit a homerun that goes in the exact same spot and measures exactly the same distance again and again. You'll also notice the number of batted ball animations is reduced. If you play this at bat 50 times in a row, you'll start to see there are only so many paths the ball will travel. So that tells me based on a certain batter/pitcher matchup and a certain pitch thrown, there are only a certain number of hits that can result - and some results, say a 575 ft HR, are not possible. Clearly the timing of the swing affects whether you pull the ball or hit opposite field, so if someone has a tool to do this, we could probably prove that pressing B on a certain frame will always cause the same hit result.

 

I'm sure the hit result is determined by the batter's ratings, swing timing, batter's location in the box (maybe), pitchers rating, and pitch thrown ... but how that all works I am really stumped on. If anyone wants to help, I think we can make some progress.

Edited by eagles2231
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@eagles2231 so I haven't done any absolute testing in either of those ways, and anything I say is just an observation of lots of cpu vs cpu (manage only) games as i try to create rosters that will give more realistic stats for the full season game while trying to keep in mind the programming limitations of early console games. Basically just changing the ratings around a lot and observing the results it has on the game. It's true there are no real physics. I feel like that is best seen on grounders, when they go through the infield without so much as a bounce lol. I'm honestly not even sure that when you swing on a pitch even correlates to where it will go in the field. I've seen the cpu swing early on pitches and send them to the opposite field. But I don't actually press the buttons often so I can't speak as much on that. And I've seen the cpu hit the ball dead on and it go foul. And, if the game is calculating a "sweet spot" on the bat, then it must be huge because, as far as the game is concerned, these guys are swinging bats that are 4ft long. The game is designed for "swing away" style of play and that's very important to think about.

 

First, let's talk about pitching as a precursor to batting. What the ratings actually do is very evident, no mystery there. But i think its important to talk about the cpu decisions that the ratings affect. Cpu pitchers overwhelmingly throw fastballs with no movement. But the speed and control ratings do effect the decision of what percent to throw the different pitches. These pitches may be pre decided before the game even starts, but a pitcher with 6spd and 10con will throw more curve balls during the course of the game than a pitcher with 10spd and 6con. However, I think you'd have to have a pitcher that has a 1spd and 10con to even get close to the pitches being half and half. That may or may not be important later.

 

There is also a decision that the cpu makes based on a player's BAT rating. The decision to bunt. If there are men on base with a force out situation, and a batter steps up to the plate with a low bat, even if he has a high pow rating, the cpu is likely going to bunt with that batter. Which is frustrating to watch, because that batter is the least likely of anyone to hit into a double play. And I think that's important because it is seemingly signaling that maybe the team that generated the ratings and the team that generated the gameplay mechanics were not always communicating enough.

 

Now lets talk about button mashing. So...as a manager....the hit and run play. Risky if theres not 2 outs because you cant call your guys back to their bases if the batter pops up, BUT this dramatically increases the batter's ability to make a contact hit and get on base. You can take a lineup of guys that are batting less than 300 (which is piss poor by this game's standards) and AT LEAST load the bases with 2 outs and one runner on once per game if you do it every time there's 2 outs and a runner on. Even guys that have been popping up deep to the outfield all game start hitting base shots with more regularity. This is signaling to me that there are 2 different swings that can be controlled, but how is a question. It can only be the result of a couple things though. It's either a result of you sending a baserunner and then swinging, signaling to the game to go into hit and run mode, or it's a result of you tapping the swing button instead of holding it down, we've seen that mechanic in plenty of NES and SNES games. So, with the 2 batter ratings, there is a strong possibility of 2 swings, each rating controlling one of them, and only one rating coming into play for most people because they only swing with one type of button press.

 

Now let's combine those trains of thought. This is entirely speculative at this point but coincidentally there are two pitching ratings along with two batting ratings so lets go with it for the sake of the idea. It's possible that BAT, or the contact swing, is controlling how well the batter hits certain pitches, and POW, or full swing is controlling how well the batter hits certain pitches. Which falls in line with POW being more meaningful because of the cpu's tendency to overwhelmingly throw one type of pitch. But I won't spend a terrible amount of time on that because its not something I have any certainty on whatsoever.

 

High bat rating and its effect on HRs. It def seems to be the case that a 6bat 10pow batter will hit more HRs than a 10 10 batter. That was actually the beginning of my observation of what the bat rating is controlling. The high pow rating is creating those deep balls capable of going over the fence, but the high bat rating is turning a larger percentage of those deep shots into line drives that dont actually clear the fence, whereas the low bat rating is turning a larger percentage of them into pop ups that just happen to be long enough to be HRs. However, I will also say this...in my roster, my average batters are 3/3s, 2/3s, 3/2s 1/4s etc. I changed the formula i was rating them with to give them higher bat and lower pow and i noticed an increase in HRs. Which seems to contribute to either my thought that bat rating is measured against, likely CON rating on certain pitches, or also a contributor to your thought on the sweet spot, however I lean away from the sweet spot thought because that would mean a 10 10 batter should hit remarkably more HRs than a 6 10 batter.

 

Some other observations that don't have to do with batting but are worth noting. Speed and baserunning decisions. Stealing bases is this games weakest point, and the cpu will only decide to steal with runners of 8+ speed, it won't decide to steal that often any way, and even when it does, the batter swings most of the time, creating a hit and run play (signaling that the cpu is controlling its portion of the game in "manager mode"). I can also tell you with reasonable certainty that the catcher's fielding rating doesn't affect the cpu's decision to steal or not. However, a runner's speed and a fielders fielding rating DO affect cpu baserunning aggressiveness. An 8+ spd baserunner will often try to take second (often unsuccesfully) on those shots that land just in front of an outfielder regardless of the field rating. Extra bases on shots over an outfielders head seem to be determined by a spd vs fielding calculation, and baserunners with 5 or less spd tend to be station to station even if the fielder hasn't gotten to the ball yet, or has too weak of an arm to throw the runner out from his position on the field, but will take an extra base if the no fielder is even close to the ball yet by the time he reaches the current base. Whereas 6 spd and above will be determined more aggressively in that situation. The cpu WILL rarely go on a sac fly situation if the runner is on 3rd, but the runner needs to be very high spd, the fielder needs to be not high fielding, and the ball needs to be caught close to the wall. The baserunning decision making and SPD rating is so strictly coded that it is where i begin in my ratings formulas. There's nothing I can do to change that part of the game so every other rating is relative to the speed ratings that need to be applied to make the players run the bases right to avoid RBIs on non HR hits only occurring when the bases are loaded and the fielders are throwing rainbows to home plate.

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Some notes back to you here...

 

  • When you swing definitely matters, at least for a human player. You can control whether the ball goes to the right of left side of the field based on your swing timing. Occasionally it will go to a different part of the field than where you swung, but it's not random. The question as the whether it's you get more hits aiming a certain way, I'm not sure. 
  • The computer bunt logic I never really noticed, but that is a good observation.
  • Hit and run is a very interesting observation. I really doubt there is a second swing type, but that could be confirmed through save states. If there was a second swing type (say power swing and control swing) then why would the devs not just have mapped that to a second button, or at least put it in the instruction booklet? As a human player I always "hit and run" when there is a player on base (except 3rd base) because you can virtually always get back to the original bag safely if you swing and miss. I only do this to get an extra jump on the basepaths at very little risk, but it never occurred to me that it may give a boost to the batter too.
  • Pitching must have some effect on hitting as you noticed, but what that is I am not sure. Here are some thoughts:
  1. As a human pitching to the computer, the computer hits noticeably more poorly if you throw all slow balls. If you throw fast pitches you will get hammered. I strongly suspect there is logic programmed in to make fastballs result in more hits and homers. I am not sure if the pitcher's SPD rating matters and how much, but the pitch type matters for sure.
  2. I noticed the computer will typically select a relief pitcher according to the platoon advantage (e.g. they will put in a lefty pitcher to face a lefty batter, and righty vs. righty, probably 90% of the time). That makes me wonder if there is some advantage programmed in.
  3. Last thing, which should be obvious on some level, is fatigue. If a pitcher is tired and huffing and puffing, then he won't be able to throw as fast or curve the ball as much. I am not sure if that really translates into the batter having more success, other than the fact that the pitches will tend to come in over the plate and slower, thereby making them easier to connect on. Seems likely though if they programmed in a fatigue system they would have programmed in a boost to hit results.
  • I keep coming back to the batter location and sweet spot idea. I don't know if the ratings are tied to this at all but from experimenting with save states it does seem to matter. I have tried standing as far away from the plate as possible and then as close to the plate as possible and seeing whether i could recreate the exact same hit from different distances from the ball. I wasn't able to, meaning where on the bat you make contact does effect where it goes. Now I can't say with 100% confidence my test was conclusive, but it seems to be. I also don't know if it's better to hit the ball off the end of the bat, the middle, or get jammed close to the hands. This would also help explain why a lot of people online believe the batting stance affects hit results. That always seemed unlikely to me from a programming perspective, but maybe there is some truth to it. Larger players have larger bats and a bigger sweet spot to hit the ball with.
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  • 1 year later...

Thanks for sharing. I don't think it answers my main question but still very interesting to read as a KGB super fan.

 

This line: "Increased pulled ball percentage to 75% if hit in centre posn." seems to indicate there is an element of randomness, which makes sense. I don't see how it could have been programed any other way really. 

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On a different note, I built a MAME cabinet recently and was playing SNK's Baseball Stars 2. I realized KGB is a pretty shameless ripoff scaled down to run on an SNES. Here are some observations:

 

  • Overall art style is quite similar with cartoony oversized, exaggerated characters.
  • Batters have special animations when warming up/waiting for a pitch, which are often very similar between the games. Baseball Stars 2 often has them chewing tobacco but in KGB it's replaced by bubble gum.
  • Batters who strikeout can break their bats over their knees.
  • When pitchers get tired they start huffing and puffing on the mound between pitches.
  • When hitting a HR they show a very similar animation of the batter strutting to home plate and dancing or flexing.
  • If a fielder tags a runner during a pickle/rundown play, the baserunner gets knocked out.
  • I saw an original design doc that was used to pitch KGB and on the main batter/pitcher matchup screen, they originally planned to have picture boxes in the top left and top right of the pitcher's face and batters face. This is exactly how Baseball Stars 2 looks. I'm guessing they couldn't get it to work well on the much weaker SNES hardware.
  • Kevin Edwards (programmer quoted in a post above) commented on twitter that KGB originally had a fight sequence animated. Baseball Stars 2 has this too.
     

Overall though, they just look and feel very similar. Baseball Stars 2 came out a bit before KGB and there is 0 doubt in my mind the designers played it and were highly inspired by it. If you have played/loved KGB, I highly recommend checking out Baseball Stars 2 (not the NES game, but the arcade or Neo Geo one). You will definitely get a feeling of deja vu. It's a great game and superior in ways, but definitely light on content and replayability compared to KBG (only 8 teams and no real players).

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