Battery

3real plate appearances play out one pitch at a time. You are shown the count, the outs, the runners, the score, the batter and the pitcher — and, load-bearingly, how many pitches the at-bat runs to.

Before each pitch you may call it— ball, strike, or in play — or let it go by. A called strike, a swinging strike and a foul are all “strike” for this purpose; a hit batsman counts as a ball, because the batter did not swing and it was not a strike.

You have 9 calls and there are more pitches than that. Letting one go by costs nothing and earns nothing — but it is gone, and unspent calls score nothing at the end.

Without that limit the game would be a shrug. With it, the question stops being “can you read a pitch” and becomes “which pitches can be worked out” — and the answer is that several of them can be worked out exactly.

The pitch count on the card tells you whether the pitch in front of you is the last one of the at-bat, and that single fact does most of the work.

• Not the last pitch, three balls on the board — it is a strike, every single time. A ball there would have been ball four and the at-bat would have ended. It did not end, so it was a strike.
• The last pitch, fewer than three balls and fewer than two strikes — it was put in play. Nothing else could have ended the at-bat there: a ball would have run the count on, and so would a strike.
• Not the last pitch, two strikes— it was not a called or swinging strike, because that would have been strike three. So it is a ball, or a foul. The ball is the better call, by a wide margin.

Everything else is a tendency rather than a rule, and the tables below are the whole of it. Both are counted from the 2,200 plate appearances the game actually deals from, so nothing here can drift away from the board.

A pitch cannot be revealed without revealing the count that follows it, and the count is the answer. A timed version would have to send the whole sequence to your browser to move the count without waiting for the server, and every answer would then be readable in the network tab. The clock here is the sequence itself: a pitch you let go by is gone.

2,200 plate appearances from 1988–2024, each between 4 and 10 pitches long and each featuring a batter with a real career behind him. Retrosheet records the pitch sequence for essentially every game from 1988, which is why the game starts there and not in 1901.

The 4-pitch floor has a consequence worth knowing: a ball put in play on the first pitch would make a one-pitch at-bat, so no at-bat here ends early. That is why “in play” is almost never the right call before the final pitch.

The result of the plate appearance is held back until it has run out of pitches. It is the answer to the last pitch, and usually to several before it.

Your score is the calls you got right out of the full budget of 9, not out of the calls you spent — otherwise holding them back would be the winning strategy, and the game is about spending them well.

One set a day, the same for everybody. Unlimited deals another three whenever you want more.