Independent Baseball Analysis Tue, September 8, 2026
Called Third

Original Research

Baseball questions, tested with data. Read the findings and the work behind them.

A refined editorial layout of baseball research materials, scorecards, pitch diagrams, and data sheets arranged on a clean white surface.

49 articles · Newest first

Research queue
August 27, 2026 12 min read

The Third Time Through Is Real. Here’s What’s Carrying It.

Baseball’s most institutionalized number — the ~25-point times-through-the-order penalty — is real: after selection correction the paired estimate is 17–21 wOBA points (the estimate controls who is batting and who is pitching; it does not control the manager’s decision to leave him in). What carries it is the surprise. The fastball’s 0.36-mph decline replicates in every season but its wOBA harm is not established; in the local same-start, same-pitch-count comparison the famous first-pitch ambush reverses (descriptively, −7 to −11 pp); and the signature that survives every in-sample design in both independent pipelines is contact — 1–2 fewer whiffs per hundred pitches, +3.6 to +4.5 points more two-strike contact in the zone (its 2026 sign held out of sample; its magnitude beat the frozen interval). The question the rule is named after — the trip or the pitch count — is unanswerable on these data: at the same pitch count, the third look IS the top of the order.

August 19, 2026 11 min read

Should You Burn One? A Challenge Is a Wasting Asset. Teams Hoard It Anyway.

We built the ABS challenge optimizer we promised in July. Two challenges at first pitch are worth about 2.3 points of win probability; the second is worth 60% of the first, so a team with one left is playing a different game than a team with two. The rule is a threshold — challenge when your confidence beats C/(G+C) — and it moves from ~55% sure in a first-inning 0-0 count to ~5% in the bottom of a one-run eighth, one out, tying run on second, 3-2, one challenge left. Measured against it, the league’s mistake is hoarding, not panic (0.57 vs 0.05 points per team-game): three-quarters of team-games end with a challenge unused, and the bar for using one falls in the right direction but too little and too late. Two independent methods, converged within 4% on the headline; team differences are noise, so no leaderboard.

August 17, 2026 16 min read

Where Cal Raleigh Broke — and Where He Didn't

Cal Raleigh’s 2026 collapse — a .394 wOBA to .255 — lives in the ball off the bat: about 95% of the lost run value in a model-based decomposition. What pitchers throw him accounts for roughly none of it (−4% and +6% in two independent estimates, intervals around zero), his swing decisions and miss rate for about −0.7%, and his bat speed is intact (73.1 → 72.5 mph). The pattern is consistent with a centering loss; flush contact fell from about one in seven balls to one in twenty. The one visible change in his swing — soft stuff met about 2.4 inches deeper — was already in place in late August 2025, while he was hitting .475 hard-hit, and it does not explain the loss; the IL did not start it, and the cause is not identifiable from tracking data. “They went upstairs and he’s chasing” is an artifact of the fixed 2026 ABS box. Two model families, cross-verified; sealed lines and endpoints we’ll score in October.

August 10, 2026 8 min read

The Book Is Good by Pitch 150. We Can't Tell You When It Was Written.

We tried to film the adjustment every broadcast narrates — the league writing its book on a rookie over his first months — and couldn't find it happening. What we found instead: a debutant's first 150 major-league pitches predict the diet he'll see a full season later at least roughly as well as an established hitter's opening week predicts his (+0.43 vs +0.39 — a comparison whose tolerance is wide, so read it as no detectable penalty rather than equality), and whatever the league settles on in those first 150 pitches is mostly still in place in September. Our reading of the 2026 class is that there's no rookie script, only hitter-by-hitter plans; and Kevin McGonigle's class-largest 17.6-point fastball deficit stops being remarkable once you price in the search that found it.

August 1, 2026 13 min read

The Park in Your Swing: Baseball's Buildings Bend the Swings Taken Inside Them. Fenway Bends Them Backwards.

Statcast's bat-tracking era makes an old broadcast claim testable: does the same hitter swing differently depending on the ballpark? Across 649 hitter-seasons and 32 physical buildings, the league-wide park pattern is real — it repeats across seasons and, for three of four swing metrics, predicted 2026 from hash-sealed 2024-25 estimates (tilt r=.73 hierarchical / .42 matched-pairs; swing length failed the sealed test). Coors' attack-angle and swing-length effects are the only named-park claims passing both independent pipelines — swings measured there run 1.46 degrees flatter. And our pre-registered Fenway prediction failed backwards: righty swings at Fenway aim AWAY from the Monster, not at it, while the lefty control hand shows nothing. The 36 hitters who changed parks for 2026 show only a drift-sized shift — adaptation transfer unproven, sealed for a 2027 re-score. Two frontier-model pipelines, three adversarial review rounds, mutual sign-off.

July 26, 2026 11 min read

The Anatomy of a Slump: What Eleven Straight Losses Actually Tell You

Four teams hit the skids in July — the Marlins lost eleven straight, the first ten all by three runs or fewer — so we decomposed every slump and then backtested 491 of them from 2021-2025 to ask what a slump predicts about the next 30 games. Almost nothing: no detail of the slump (depth, luck, close losses, bullpen form) adds any out-of-sample power beyond season record and season xwOBA differential, a null that survived an independent 33-feature machine-learning attack. Close losses predict nothing. 'They're due' predicts nothing. The famous streak cliff is mostly survivorship arithmetic — controlled for who's playing, streak length adds no resolvable next-game effect, just a small monthly drag. One signal survives: cold bats revert. September 8 update: the original 30-game forecasts are scored, with five of six supported teams inside their 80% bands and a 2.76-win average miss. Includes the publication-timing disclosure and Opening Day source correction.

July 25, 2026 9 min read

The Re-Test Report: We Promised Six Follow-Ups. Here's What Held.

Since April our public Research Queue has carried due dates for re-testing early findings on more data. At the All-Star break we ran all six re-tests — the original methodologies, no new choices, roughly twice the data. Four held or strengthened: the April Sell List went 11-for-11 against its frozen projections, 79 of 80 umpires really are calling better games under ABS (+2.35 points), the bat-speed effect graduated to clear zero, and the arm-angle carry tax now clears both tests. One weakened: the walk-spike piece's three named relievers all fell under our own pre-registered stability filter, and we've posted the correction. Mechanisms replicated; small-sample leaderboards of names did not — exactly what our reliability work predicts.

July 23, 2026 7 min read

What Travels

Deadline week runs on one ritual: a pitcher gets traded and everyone reads his ERA. Our research says that's close to backwards. The arm travels — release, spin, and velocity repeat at 0.90–0.97, the most reliable things in the sport. The brain travels — a starter's edge over his own stuff is ~85% pitcher-owned, not a gift from his park or catcher. What doesn't travel is the thing on the trade graphic: the half-season line, which repeats at 0.10–0.23. And since most deadline trades are relievers: the ledger your new setup man was traded on repeats at 0.17. A field guide to reading your team's new pitcher, assembled from four verified CalledThird studies.

July 16, 2026 8 min read

The Best Seat in the House

The ABS challenge became a leaderboard the moment it existed — who's the best challenger, which team has the highest "challenge IQ." We pulled all 5,843 challenges through the All-Star break and found the leaderboards are mostly noise: winning a challenge is close to a coin flip (53% overturned league-wide), and no individual is reliably better than another. But WHO challenges is the whole game. The catcher — with the best view of the strike zone in the building — wins 59%; the hitter, 48%; the pitcher, 36%. And the catcher's success climbs the more obvious the miss, while the hitter's stays flat: catchers have judgment, hitters have conviction. The one durable edge is free and structural — let the catcher decide.

July 16, 2026 10 min read

The Coin-Flip Line

A batter’s strikeout rate — an outcome — repeats from season to season better than a pitcher’s called-and-swinging-strike rate, one of the purest measures of his stuff, and on fewer chances. Across 44 stats we find the thing that decides whether a leaderboard repeats isn’t whether it’s a “skill” or a “result.” It’s how much each event tells you — the per-event signal — and that, measured on one set of players, predicts how the leaderboard behaves for a completely different set at 0.96. Pre-registered, out of sample, with two opposite methods that started on opposite sides and converged. The skill-versus-result frame we all reach for is a shadow of that, not the cause.

July 10, 2026 11 min read

Same Stuff, Different Brain

Two starters can throw the same pitch — same velocity, same movement, same slot — and get different results. The gap between what a pitcher’s raw stuff predicts and what he actually allows is a real, repeatable skill worth about 26 runs a season. We built two independent models to hunt for what it is — location, sequencing, the ballpark, the catcher — and eliminated every suspect. The edge repeats year to year at 0.59, and the two methods agree on it at 0.91. It isn’t the park and it isn’t the catcher; roughly 85% belongs to the pitcher. The brain is real. Nobody can name it yet.

June 30, 2026 9 min read

What’s Real and What’s Noise in the Bullpen Ledger

How a reliever throws repeats year to year; what the bullpen ledger credits him for barely does. A reliever’s velocity carries over at 0.95 and his whiff rate at 0.63, but his win-probability output carries over at just 0.13 — and within a single season it correlates with itself at only 0.17. We made two independent methods fight over it across 177 relievers. The skill is real and durable; the scoreboard is nearly random. The blown save is a true account of what happened, not a verdict on the pitcher.

June 30, 2026 9 min read

The Firemen the Save Stat Can’t See

83% of the win probability relievers create happens outside save situations — the save stat watches the smallest slice of the bullpen. We added up the wins relievers actually bank across 8,092 relief appearances, then made two independent methods fight over the names. Colin Holderman has been one of the most valuable relievers in baseball this year with zero saves; value and save credit correlate at just 0.22. We name the hidden firemen on win-probability magnitude, never on rank — because at a half-season the order is noise.

June 26, 2026 9 min read

The Fielder’s Fingerprint: Two Gloves, Same OAA, Opposite Skills

Outs Above Average gives every fielder one number; it hides a direction. We split five seasons of directional OAA into the outs a fielder earns charging in versus covering deep — his “tilt” — and made two independent methods fight over it. The tilt is a real, repeatable skill (YoY r=0.28, ~0.29 at short, center, and left) that has nothing to do with sprint speed (r=0.04), and OAA averages it away: 37 same-position pairs in 2025 had matching OAA and opposite gloves. Lindor charges in, Baez covers deep — same number, opposite craft. The honest limit: it’s a fingerprint, not a forecast.

June 21, 2026 9 min read

A Bad Start Is Forever. A Good One Isn’t.

Every July, fans ask which first-half teams are real. We pooled five full seasons (2021-2025, 150 team-seasons) and tested it out of sample. A team’s quality is real (random-split r=0.74), but the first half predicts only about a THIRD of the second — and almost all of that third is in the basement. A bad first half predicts the second at R2=0.33; a good one at just 0.07; the .500 muddle is noise. 82% of clearly-bad starts stayed buried vs 67% of good ones staying up — gravity pulls down harder. The signal locks in by ~game 40 (Memorial Day); run differential and the plain record predict it best (fancy stats add nothing); bat speed is noise. Plus: the biggest frauds (2023 Angels 44-37 -> 29-52) and what the rule says about 2026.

June 21, 2026 11 min read

The Jump Tax: The Steal Is a Decision, Not a Physique

Josh Naylor is among the slowest runners in baseball and stole 22 bases in 23 tries in 2025. Not with his legs, and not with a big lead — his resting lead is 3rd-percentile — but with an ambush: on the pitches he picks, his lead jumps to the 97th percentile, the biggest standing-to-go swing in the game. We decomposed the stolen base across 70 qualified runners with two independent methods over three rounds. The jump and the legs are real, separable, remarkably repeatable skills (the jump persists year over year at 0.79) — but neither predicts who actually banks steal value. That is conversion, which tracks run value at r=0.87 and barely repeats. Single-season steal value is ~44% small-sample noise. There are two ways to be elite — pure speed (Buxton) or pure ambush (Soto, Naylor) — and they bank the same runs.

June 16, 2026 11 min read

The Adjustable Swing: Hitters Have a Dial. It Isn’t Wired to Anything.

Statcast started measuring the shape of a swing in 2025 — the attack angle — and the instruction industry turned it into a product. So we tested the premise: do hitters adjust their swing shape to the pitch, and does it help? The first half is true and genuinely cool — hitters have a ‘dial,’ steepening ~10° on low pitches and flattening on high ones, and how much they turn it is one of the most reliable, year-over-year-stable traits in hitting (split-half 0.94; two independent methods agree on who at r=0.99). The second half isn’t: the dial adds no power (its effect can’t be told from zero once you know a hitter’s bat speed and average swing shape), and it doesn’t save contact either — the more adjustable hitters whiff slightly more, worst at the zone extremes where matching your plane is supposed to help. ‘Ideal attack angle rate,’ the marketed metric, is ~88% bat speed. The least-adjustable qualified hitter in baseball is Juan Soto. Two independent methods, two adversarial review rounds; the cross-review caught and killed a contamination bug before it could ship.

June 10, 2026 11 min read

The Arm-Angle Gambit: We Went Looking for the Cheat Code. We Found a Tax.

Pitchers across baseball are dropping their arm slots, chasing the pitch-lab promise that a lower release unlocks a sweeper and a new level. We priced the gambit within-pitcher across 374 arms, two independent methods, two adversarial review rounds. The slot credit is indistinguishable from zero five different ways — and the study’s most interesting number (+0.28 runs/100 for the bundled repertoire change) died in cross-review as target leakage; rebuilt clean, both methods land at ≈+0.03, the same as pitchers who never moved. The one effect that survives: droppers lose an average 0.46 inches of four-seam ride (10 of 15, Wilcoxon p=0.011) while stable arms gained. The scoreboard among the 16 droppers: nine better, seven worse — a coin flip. Early-signal by design; full re-test queued for the All-Star break.

June 6, 2026 10 min read

The Two-Strike Brake Belongs to the Pitcher, Not the Hitter

We set out to build the hitter version of the Pressure Grade — one number for how a hitter changes gears with two strikes. Two independent models, run blind to each other, converged on the same answer: the famous −1.4 mph two-strike bat-speed ‘brake’ is mostly a mirage. Roughly two-thirds to ~85% of it is the pitch a hitter is thrown (slower, softer, lower) with two strikes, not a decision. The real adjustment is small (~−0.3 mph), lives in swing shape not speed, and — while a stable year-to-year signature (r=0.73, two methods agree per-hitter at r=0.98) — adds about one-thousandth of AUC to predicting two-strike whiffs over the stats already on a hitter’s card. A descriptor, not an edge.

June 6, 2026 7 min read

Hitters Aren’t Chasing More Under the Robo-Zone

Correction, August 17, 2026: we published the opposite of this on June 6 — chase up from 30.0% to 32.3%, a +2.3-point jump. That was our ruler moving, not the hitters. Statcast’s 2026 zone columns report the fixed per-batter ABS challenge box, about 2.6 inches lower at the top than the tracked zone we measured 2025 with, so the comparison reclassified pitches instead of measuring behavior. Put one box on both seasons and chase goes 32.0% to 32.4% — +0.4 points, with an interval that contains zero. And within an inch of the enforced edge, where a precise zone is supposed to act, hitters chased 2.0 points less.

June 4, 2026 12 min read

We Tried to Build a Pressure Grade. Most of It Was Skill in a Costume.

Everyone has a read on who melts down and who locks in. We tried to turn it into a number two independent ways — a Bayesian pipeline and a gradient-boosted ML pipeline, six seasons, 3.85M pitches. The single ‘Pressure Grade’ doesn’t exist: the clutch residual is noise (r=0.08, a coin flip), and no composite beats a pitcher’s plain overall skill out-of-sample — it loses or ties. Our own headline hypothesis — that command separates the pressure-proof — failed out-of-sample. But the multi-dimensional read survived: the two methods grade each pitcher’s stuff/command/contact nearly identically (stuff agreement r=0.95), and a pitcher’s overall skill predicts his future high-leverage results better than his past high-leverage line does. The honest version is now on every pitcher’s page.

June 3, 2026 11 min read

The Bat-Speed Arms Race: We Went Looking for the Treadmill. It Isn’t There.

Hitters keep swinging harder and MLB offense keeps slipping, so the take writes itself: everyone’s selling out for bat speed and whiffing for it — a treadmill. We tested it on 254 hitters across two seasons of bat tracking and couldn’t find it. Within a hitter, adding 1 mph of bat speed (2025→2026) is worth about +0.27 runs/100 PA — a modest positive lean, not a penalty — and it comes with no whiff cost at all (exit velo +0.66 mph and xwOBAcon +12 pts per mph, whiff flat). The 2026 ‘offense crisis’ is mostly the calendar: against the matched window, the tracked-swing population is flat and bat speed actually rose. The elegant ‘free vs bought speed’ story is a clean null, and the result survives an explicit attrition correction (bat speed doesn’t predict who washes out). Two independent pipelines (interpretability-first + ML) and two cross-review rounds. Borderline by design — re-test at the All-Star break.

May 28, 2026 14 min read

The Two-Strike Swing: Not Shorter — Slower, Flatter, and Deeper.

Every coach says ‘shorten up with two strikes.’ Bat-tracking from 332,111 swings says the swing barely shortens (−1.3%). What hitters actually do is one coordinated compact move: slower (bat speed −1.8 mph), flatter (attack angle down ~1°, and more once you control for location), and deeper (contact point about an inch closer to the catcher). Roughly 60% of hitters make all three adjustments at once — a geometry that, as far as we can tell, has never been published. The brake buys contact (the biggest decelerators cut their two-strike whiff rate ~3pp) at a cost of ~30 points of xwOBAcon. Andrés Giménez is the league’s brake artist in both 2025 and 2026; Victor Scott II is the mirror image — he speeds up AND steepens. Every finding was independently reproduced by two analysis pipelines and replicates in 2026.

May 24, 2026 10 min read

Umpires Don’t Have Personality Types. They Do Have an Outside Corner That Spans 19 Points.

We pre-registered an attempt to cluster 83 home-plate umpires into discrete calling-style types. Two independent statistical methods both refused — four of five kill gates fail in both, including an inter-method ARI of 0.105 against a 0.30 threshold. But on the outside corner, the league spans 18.9 percentage points: Stu Scheurwater calls outside-corner strikes 12pp above league baseline; Alex MacKay calls them 7pp below. The asymmetry isn’t catcher framing (r > 0.94 after dropping top framers). And on count-conditioned zone behavior, three independent location-controlled methods agree the broadcaster myth has the sign backwards: umpires CONTRACT the zone on 0-2 by ~18pp, not expand it.

May 14, 2026 12 min read

Three Weeks Later: The Walk Spike Is Fading, and We Know Who’s Paying the Bill

Three weeks ago we said about half the walk spike was the new ABS zone. With two more weeks of data and a much harder analytical pass: the number has muted to ~+26%, the spike is fading (W1 9.61% → W7 8.79%), and we can now name the pitchers paying the price. Three pitchers cleared bootstrap stability in both pipelines: Kyle Finnegan (command-archetype, +11.4pp walks), Riley O’Brien (stuff-helped, −8.3pp), Camilo Doval (stuff-helped, −7.5pp). Spearman ρ ≈ −0.27 between stuff-minus-command and walk-rate change, both methods.

May 6, 2026 11 min read

We Tested the 7-Hole Tax Six Different Ways. It Isn’t There.

Two national outlets reported that umpires call a different strike zone for hitters in the 7-hole. We ran two independent statistical pipelines on every angle the claim could hide in — raw replication, pitch selection, borderline-pitch zones, per-umpire, per-hitter, and the catcher mechanism. Six tests, two methods, two cross-reviews. All null. The bias claim is not in the data we have.

April 25, 2026 9 min read

The April Sell List

Six MVP-pace April hot starts that two independent statistical methods say won’t last — Pages, Rice, Trout, Judge, Carroll, Muncy. Six sleepers baseball isn’t talking about that both methods independently flagged as real. And the one big name we couldn’t make up our minds about (Murakami, with caveats). Three rounds of independent dual-track analysis, two cross-reviews, one retraction.

April 19, 2026 12 min read

The Coaching Gap That Lives Where Hitters Don’t Chase

Six rounds of independent dual-track research on 2.9M pitches across five seasons. One finding survived: low-chase hitters extract +0.04 wOBA more on predictable pitches than high-chase hitters. Power doesn’t matter. Contact rate doesn’t matter. Discipline does.

April 18, 2026 8 min read

The Physics Behind the Tunneling Atlas

Trajectory equations, model validation (4.9" systematic bias that cancels for relative comparisons), decision-point sensitivity analysis, and how to reproduce the tunneling model.

April 18, 2026 12 min read

The Pitch Tunneling Atlas

654 pitchers. 739,820 pitches. The first league-wide tunneling model. Plate diversity explains 11x more whiff variance than decision-point similarity — but tunneling IS real (p=0.016).

April 17, 2026 7 min read

Minnesota Buys Leverage. Cincinnati Buys Certainty.

The Twins and Reds are solving ABS in opposite ways. Minnesota: 3.2/game, most total value. Cincinnati: 72% overturn — the highest in baseball, with 91.7% in early counts.

April 16, 2026 6 min read

The Best ABS Challengers Are Catchers

940 challenges. Catchers overturn 60.6% vs batters’ 45.5% (OR=1.85, p<0.001). They challenge closer pitches and still win more — in every count bucket.

April 12, 2026 8 min read

Cam Schlittler’s Three-Fastball Blueprint

231 pitches, 22 K, 0 BB. Schlittler rebuilt his arsenal into a perfectly balanced three-fastball attack — 100th percentile usage balance, 20.6“ of horizontal spread, and a remade cutter with +7.2” of vertical break.

April 10, 2026 8 min read

After a Fight, the Zone Gets Cleaner

7 bench-clearing brawls, 6 complete pairs. The zone doesn’t expand or shrink — but accuracy improves unanimously (+2.0pp, p=0.001). Umpires stop giving freebies off the plate.

April 9, 2026 7 min read

The Wrong-Way Slider: Imai’s Impossible Pitch

Tatsuya Imai’s slider breaks 10.4 inches the wrong way — 0th percentile among all RHP sliders. League-wide data shows arm-side-breaking sliders get 4.2pp fewer called strikes on edge pitches.

April 9, 2026 6 min read

The Walk Rate Spike: Umpires or Pitchers?

Walk rate is up nearly a full point in 2026. The obvious suspect is ABS squeezing the zone. The data says pitchers are nibbling more — shadow-zone strike rate actually rose +4pp.

April 9, 2026 8 min read

CB Bucknor by the Numbers

4,174 pitches, 3rd worst accuracy in MLB, and the highest average miss distance of any umpire. A data profile of baseball’s most controversial umpire — now that ABS can measure it.

April 7, 2026 7 min read

The Fireman’s Dilemma

4,044 reliever entries, 6,516 inherited runners. The outs gradient determines most of the outcome: 44% strand at 0 outs, 82% at 2 outs. Whether individual strand rate is skill or noise remains an open question.

April 6, 2026 8 min read

Do Pitchers Lose Their Command?

4,892 starts, 729K pitches. The average pitcher’s scatter is flat. But 14% of starts produce a scatter blow-up, and the distribution is asymmetric. Garrett Crochet’s scatter increases 31.5% on average.

April 6, 2026 7 min read

Four Kinds of Zone

83 umpires, 380,000 pitches, and a 21-percentage-point gap in borderline strike rates. A two-axis framework that tells you what to expect from tonight’s home plate umpire.

April 6, 2026 5 min read

The Umpire Effect: How Much Does It Matter?

For every game this season, we computed the run-value impact of every wrong call. CB Bucknor’s BOS-CIN game tops the list at 4.08 wOBA — roughly 4 runs shifted by umpire errors in a game decided by 1.

April 6, 2026 8 min read

The Challenge System Is Quietly Favoring Defense

541 ABS challenges, 55% overturned, and a 10-percentage-point gap between the fielder side and batters. Plus: the count tradeoff, the late-inning fade, and why defense has captured 4.8 more runs than offense from the challenge system.

April 5, 2026 7 min read

Which Pitchers Can You Predict?

We trained XGBoost on 729,827 pitches to predict the next pitch. The broad model barely beat the count baseline — but five pitchers stood out. Chris Sale’s next pitch is predictable 58% of the time.

April 5, 2026 5 min read

Catcher Framing in the ABS Era

74 catchers, an 18.7 percentage point gap between best and worst framers, and a counterintuitive finding: in the ABS challenge era, good framing may gain value because it influences the batter’s decision to challenge.

April 5, 2026 8 min read

The Anatomy of a Missed Call

379,155 called pitches, a 7.2% miss rate, and the half-inch cliff where human judgment breaks down. Plus: challenge value by count, catcher framing ranges, and where umpires miss most.

April 5, 2026 7 min read

The Count Tells You Everything

We built a pitch prediction model on 729,827 pitches. XGBoost beat the marginal baseline by 2.1pp — but beat the count-conditional baseline by only 0.5pp. The count already encodes nearly all predictive information.

April 5, 2026 6 min read

Two Myths the Data Kills

Pitchers don’t measurably lose their command late in games (r = 0.007). Plate discipline doesn’t predict future hitting (r = -0.019). Two baseball beliefs that don’t survive 729,827 pitches.

On the Research Queue

Every follow-up we’ve promised to come back to — with the article that owes you the answer and when we expect to deliver it.

01

The ABS Effect on Umpires (full-season)

Due: End of 2026 season (mid-season checkpoint delivered in The Re-Test Report) ·From: The Four Kinds of Zone

The mid-season checkpoint is in — and delivered in The Re-Test Report: 79 of 80 umpires improved on their 2025 baselines (+2.35 points), and the early cohort didn’t fade. What remains owed is the definitive end-of-season answer, including whether the improvement can be decomposed into challenge-system pressure vs. secular trend.

02

NPB-to-MLB power translator

Due: Before next April retrospective ·From: The April Sell List

Munetaka Murakami’s 56-homer NPB peak has no MLB comparable — Ohtani’s best in Japan was 22 — so our model had no choice but to treat him as league-average. Before the next hot-start retrospective, we want an honest power translation for Japanese sluggers in his tier, even if it’s only a range.

03

The Coin-Flip Line — does per-event signal transport across seasons?

Due: End of 2026 season ·From: The Coin-Flip Line

Our reliability law was validated across players within one tracking era — per-event signal measured on one set of players predicted how leaderboards repeat for a disjoint set at 0.96. The harder test we promised in print: lock the per-event signal from past seasons and predict, in advance, how the next season’s leaderboards will repeat. Across time, not just across players — that’s what would make it a law.

04

Best Seat — the view, or easier calls?

Due: End of 2026 season (second half doubles the challenge sample) ·From: The Best Seat in the House

Catchers win 59% of challenges to hitters’ 48%, and the gap holds within every distance-from-the-zone-edge bin. But catchers challenge on defense and hitters on offense — different pitch populations — so we can’t yet fully separate “best seat in the house” from “easier calls to judge.” A matched-pitch decomposition (same locations, same counts, opposite challengers) once the second half doubles the sample.

05

Does the edge survive the trade? (within-player test)

Due: Parked September 8, 2026 — better measurement or more data needed ·From: What Travels

September 8 update: Our corrected pilot and follow-up feasibility check did not justify launching the full study promised in What Travels. Noisy estimates and limited team-change samples leave the proposed test too weak for our requirements. We have parked the follow-up pending better measurement or more data. Whether the edge survives a move remains unresolved.

06

Bat speed: free vs. bought — season-end look

Due: End of 2026 season ·From: The Bat-Speed Arms Race

The break re-test graduated the headline effect (adding bat speed now clearly pays) but opened a crack in a null: speed gained without extra swing length (“free”) clears zero on its own, while “bought” speed is flat — a difference just under our pre-registered bar. A full season decides whether the free/bought distinction is real.