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We test what baseball believes.
Rigorous, original analysis that holds conventional wisdom up to the data — automated umpire reports after every game, and tools to explore 730,000 pitches yourself.
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.
PitchersThe 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.
Bat TrackingThe 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.
ABSHitters Are Chasing More Under the Robo-Zone
A precise automated strike zone was supposed to reward patience. Through 2026 so far, the league is chasing more, not less — out-of-zone swing rate is up from 30.0% to 32.3%, a +2.3-point jump. And it isn't a calendar trick: the rise holds when we compare the exact same March–June window in both seasons. We report the pattern, not the cause — but the simple story, that a fair zone makes hitters more patient, is not what the first season of full ABS shows.
PitchersWe 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.
Bat TrackingThe 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.
Game Reports
Nightly umpire accuracy reports for every MLB game with scores, missed calls, and ABS challenge data.
Explore →Umpire Profiles
83 umpires with 2025 zone styles, 2026 live accuracy, borderline strike rates, and game-by-game detail.
Explore →ABS Challenges
Challenge success rates, catcher efficiency leaderboard, and count strategy heatmap. Updated nightly.
Explore →Pitcher Profiles
Every arm graded on its attack profile — first-pitch strikes, zone vs nibble, pitch mix, platoon splits, and outcomes with men on — plus command consistency, blow-up rate, and inherited-runner strand rates. Updated nightly.
Explore →Hitter Profiles
Plate approach vs league for every hitter: first-pitch swing, chase, contact, swing% by count, two-strike and RISP outcomes, contact quality, platoon splits, and a live chase-rate trajectory. Updated nightly.
Explore →Zone Explorer
Interactive pitch location visualization — dots or heatmap — filterable by game, team, umpire, and handedness.
Explore →Count Calculator
At-bat outcome probabilities by count. Compare 2025 full season vs 2026 so far, plus umpire accuracy view.
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