Option to not automatically "walk" on fourth ball

[photojon]

Greetings-

I have read through the plethora of requests for handling player pitch vs coach pitch in little league. I understand there is no way to handle all of the variants. It would be nice if you had a "game option" to not automatically walk a batter on the fourth ball.

Following some of the suggestions on the forums, I create a non batting player called "coach pitch". Whenever we hit the point in the when the player has exceeded his ball count, I do a defensive substitution of coach pitch for the pitcher. Unfortunately, I cannot record the player pitcher's 4th ball or I-score will automatically send him to first base. If i have the option to not automatically walk on the 4 ball, then my player pitch count will be accurate. If the batter is ultimately walked, we would also need you to add an option of "walk" under " ball in play" to manually advance the batter to first.

The benefit of this would be huge as I could have both hands on my iPad instead on one on the iPad and one on the clicker!

Thanks for your consideration,
Jon

[FTMSupport]

As you noticed, we have had several variations on this request, and trying to come up with solutions to handle them all is the challenge. There are several things that wind up being effected by allowing more than 4 balls, and making sure they are all handled in a consistent way is the challenge. We actually do have a "Base on Balls" option already under In Play. We do have this on our priority list, but still have items on the list that are useful to the majority of users. We do want to keep adding features for smaller segments of users (like your case --- you didn't mention the ages, but it is likely 6U, maybe 8U?), but at the same time we need to make sure we are focusing the most effort on things that effect the most people.

So this IS on our list, and something we definitely will add, it is just a matter of when. And the one actually comes from you guys --- the iScore community helps determine when things are done by how many requests there are for various features.

Thank you for putting this one out there again as it helps us as we continually re-prioritize.

[pnstalum]

Not sure if this will be any help, but here is how I handle this situation.

Our coach pitch batters get six pitches, on the sixth pitch, the batter gets two strikes automatically and must hit the sixth pitch. Only if the ball is fouled they get additional pitches.

Let's say a batter does the following:

1. No swing - I score a ball
2. No swing - I score a ball
3. No swing - I score a ball
4. No swing - I score a strike
5. No swing - I score a strike
6. No swint - Strikout

Doing this will give me a full count on the 6th pitch... essentially ending up in the same situation as the rules dictate, this lets me keep track of the pitch count and keep the scoring fairly close to reality. Not perfect, but at the end of the day, we don't run into this scenario very often on my team. I guess if your rules allow for more pitches... this may not work.

[danmcc]

Another suggestion to keep accurate pitch count is to use foul ball on the 4th ball forward until a walk, hit or strike out occurs. Certainly this would throw off the accuracy of the ball/strike ratio but is an option for pitch count purposes.

[Jas]

We had the 6 pitch rule last year and we handled it exactly like Pnstalum suggested. It worked for us pretty well. We scored pretty much any non swing as a ball until we got to 3 balls. Everything after that can be recorded as a strike because they only have 3 other pitches to hit.

By the end of the year though, we found that most parents didn't really care that much about the count, so we started just recording the actual result of the play (since balls and strikes don't matter as much as they do in kid pitch), or just the strikes since they can't walk anyway.

I like the idea of being pure to the game like you are trying to do though. What is your max pitches per batter? As long as it's 6 or less, Pnstalum's suggestion will work.