The sweeper vs. slider vs. curveball vs. slurve discussion has been something that’s become a lot more mainstream in the last couple years due to the “sweeper” becoming a much more popular pitch, and it’s something that has trickled down to MLB The Show 24 discussion in recent weeks on OS.
It can be sort of complicated to talk about pitch types because different people can define pitches in different ways, and if you hear some older pitchers discuss the sweeper, they’ll say it’s always been a thing and that it’s just a slider. When you factor in that SDS has defined each pitch a certain way for years, it’s also understandable why they might be slow to change the names associated with certain pitches in their game.
With that in mind, I wanted to break this thread out on OS into three separate categories: pitch types, pitch names, and freaks — yep, freaks.
Pitch Types
This is the most complicated breakdown to do because we have to classify the pitches themselves and then how they’re classified in The Show. First off, The Show is getting four more gestures this year and all the motions are now going to be flipped when using left-handed pitchers. On top of that, sinkers are going to be harder to throw this year. I don’t believe SDS has stated what the four new gestures are as of now, but we’ll know perhaps as soon as today when the dev team shows off oodles of gameplay in their Developer Tournament on Twitch.
Either way, for the purposes of this discussion, SDS has the slurve, sweeping curve, knuckle curve, 12-6 curve, curve, and slider. There are other pitches in the game (obviously) but these are the ones we care about for this topic. The game does not have a sweeper (or a gyro-slider). If you want a definition of these pitches, you can go a couple ways, but I’ll use a data explanation via OS user InASimulation, and a more condensed version that comes from MLB pitcher Trevor May.
I’ll start with the Trevor May version as he does the “all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares” point by saying all these pitches being mentioned now are sliders but it doesn’t go the other way:
May says:
In the past, a slider is anything that breaks like a curve but is thrown harder than a curve. Now…
-Gyro = tighter vertical and horizontal movement than a curve to get the higher velocity
-Sweeper = heavy horizontal movement with not much concern for vertical movement (or velocity)
-Slurve = arguably a sweeping curve in some circles, but basically a little more horizontal movement but the same vertical movement as a curve, just with more velocity
Then we have a deeper explanation of the pitch types that comes from InASimulation on OS:
I’ll check Baseball Savant, BrooksBaseball, and Baseball Prospectus’ PitchFX leaderboards.
-If BrooksBaseball says their slider “sweeps across the zone,” then slurve.
-If it says their slider is anything else, then slider.
-If it says their curve has “sweeping glove-side movement,” then sweeping curve.
What all this comes down to is vertical movement, horizontal movement, and velocity. Arm slot would also matter, but SDS actually already factors that into things for the most part. That said, I could argue the pitcher motions are a little too rigid and could use a general upgrade at some point. (A cool video showing off one pitcher motion comes from a YouTube creator named strawberryyogurt0.)
Nevertheless, the arm angles are how guys like Adam Ottavino become truly villainous to go against some years in the game. We’re not worried about spin rates here, but we are concerned about the jargon of what to call these pitches, which we’ll now get to in the next section.
Pitch Names
Again, we have:
- Slider
- Slurve
- Sweeping curve
- Knuckle curve
- 12-6 curve
- Curve
But we do not have:
Again, we go back to OS user InASimulation here because, well, he has the same opinion as me and thus it must be right.
Honestly I think SDS is right in theory, just not in practice.
The slurve sits 72-88 mph and mirrors the slider’s pinpoint motion. While the sweeping curve sits 68-84 mph and mirrors the curve’s motion. But on default/live rosters they call sweeping curves slurves and slurves sliders.
They basically programmed the sweeper in before people called it a ‘sweeper’ and said “we’re going to make this a slider with tons of horizontal movement but only use it as a pitcher’s curveball even though the sweeping curve can do that job.”
Also, in my opinion sliders are gyro sliders. Whenever I face a slider that has like 99 break or something, it just feels off.
(Also there are basically no palmballs and only a couple vulcan changes, so those pitches being in MLB The Show feels outdated to some extent, but that’s just a side point for today.)
In other words, SDS already has a lot of this in place if they’d like to “update” their jargon and create the sweeper or gyro-slider. The issue would be confusing folks as they’d be changing a couple pitch types to other pitches already in the game. So the question is would the confusion be worth the “realism” bump? Since I write for OS, I say that it is worth the slight confusion.
As for the freaks…
Freaks (And How To Incorporate Them)
Some players and their pitches do not fit into tidy little boxes. I highly doubt SDS can be adding specific “pitch types” for everyone who doesn’t fit into a specific box with their repertoire, but one thing that was mentioned by OS user CBoller1331 that was appreciated by the peanut gallery was the idea of changing the general “break” rating for a pitch in MLB The Show into two break ratings: vertical and horizontal break rating. This would obviously not be some small task to implement by SDS, but it gets to the point about freaks.
One more time let me go back to InASimulation to point out some of those freaks and why this matters in terms of horizontal and vertical movement:
Jhoan Duran’s splinker: Use a sinker as forkballs don’t have enough movement in this game.
Dauri Moreta’s slider: Screwball as it breaks the opposite way of a normal slider.
Joey Lucchesi’s churve: Changeup
(Also have Zack Wheeler throw a slider and a slurve.)
In essence, for some of the freaks there’s already a solution of sorts if SDS wanted to be a little more flexible in giving certain players a pitch they don’t technically throw based on spin rates and all that. Beyond that, giving themselves a little more flexibility in the form of different movement planes that can be tweaked in-game could allow the freaks to showcase their stuff a bit more.
The mention about Wheeler is seemingly an even easier fix as SDS just doesn’t like usually giving a pitcher a slider and slurve in their repertoire, but there’s no reason they can’t do that if they want to on the official roster.
Bottom Line
This discussion can transfer to other pitches in the game (changeups, splitters, and so on) — and has in the thread on OS. While SDS is right to say their game balance was in a good spot for the ’23 cycle, rethinking pitch types and how to make them stand out more in the future is certainly an area SDS could really focus on in the cycle after ’24 launches.
