[trehalose]

I found the patent extremely difficult to read, but I didn't see anything that describes something so specific as throwing a Pokéball, and in fact, it seemed to me that the patent specifically covers cases where the Pokémon comes out and you don't control it.

[sebastiennight]

You're correct that the patent (in Claim 1) does not specifically refer to throwing a Pokeball (just to "causing the sub character to appear" based on an input), but it seems to me to still be directly linked to this dynamic.

The article itself is quite low-quality (as usual with articles where the title and subheadline are quotes) and I'd go as far as assume it's probably a PR piece placed by another player in the space.