CalledThird
Data-driven baseball analysis
for the thinking fan
Original analysis that tests baseball's conventional wisdom with real data. Automated game-night umpire reports. Interactive tools that let you explore the data yourself.
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.
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.
Bat TrackingThe 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.
UmpiresUmpires 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.
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
Starters with 2025 command consistency and blow-up rates. Relievers with official inherited runner strand rates.
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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