THE EYE TEST
A mystery MLB player every day. All you get is his Statcast percentile chart.
Origin
On Effectively Wild Episode 2469, Ben Lindbergh bantered about the trend of posting Statcast percentile charts without the player names:
“People just post the percentiles and be like, ‘Well, this seems sustainable’ or something like that. And I’m always wondering, well, who is that? I cover baseball professionally, but I don’t have perfect recall of everyone’s Savant percentiles.
… maybe I could figure it out from context or something. If it’s super extreme, it might be someone recognizable, but there are a lot of players and it’s small samples. And I’m usually not going to know who it is instinctively.
And unless it’s a quiz, unless the point is to make people guess, which if it is fine, if you’re just saying guess the player, and then it’s a little trivia game, okay.”
It is now a quiz. The point is to make people guess. Please enjoy this little trivia game.
Credit is also due to The Immaculate Grid for the idea of a Wordle-style daily game for baseball sickos.
I’m Jay Hathaway, an indie developer. If you have ideas, comments, bugs, or feature requests, please get in touch.
Data
All percentile data sourced from Baseball Savant via the pybaseball library. Percentile ranks follow Savant’s convention: higher is always better, so K% and Chase% are inverted.
The Nerdy Specifics
- Season:2025 MLB regular season (full year of data, locked at season-end so leaderboards don’t shift mid-puzzle).
- Eligibility pool: batters with 300+ plate appearances. Same threshold Savant uses for its “qualified” leaderboards.
- The 15 batter stats: xwOBA, xBA, xSLG, Avg Exit Velo, Barrel%, Hard-Hit%, Bat Speed, Squared-Up%, Chase%, Whiff%, K%, BB%, Arm Strength, Range (OAA), Sprint Speed.
- Bat Speed and Squared-Up%require Hawk-Eye tracking and aren’t available for every batter; missing values display at the 50th-percentile baseline.