Hitter v1.0 · Pitcher v1.0 · Class-Adjusted Rank · September 2026 · Built on the 2025 and 2026 varsity seasons
The Power Rank is a single number from 1 to 100 that summarizes a varsity player's season — one version for hitters, one for pitchers.
Both are scaled so that 50 is the average qualified varsity player and roughly 70 is top 10%. The hitter rank is described first; the pitcher rank follows the same construction with pitching inputs, and the Class-Adjusted Rank shows alongside either one in Varsity Explorer wherever a graduation year is known. The Power Rank appears in First Pitch Advantage season reports, player cards, and dugout cards, and in Varsity Explorer.
The Power Rank combines two things:
Each half gets equal weight. The result is placed on a bell curve and scaled so 50 is average and every 15 points is one standard deviation.
Blending results with skills makes the rank more repeatable than OPS alone. Across two seasons, a hitter's Power Rank carried over from one year to the next noticeably better than his raw OPS ranking did — and it predicted his next season's OPS better than his current OPS did.
A hitter needs 60 or more at-bats in a season for a full Power Rank. Below that, one hot or cold week swings the numbers too far to be meaningful. In First Pitch Advantage, hitters with 20–59 at-bats get a preliminary rank marked with an asterisk; under 20 at-bats no rank is shown. Everything on this page is computed relative to the pool of qualified varsity hitters in that season — about 4,500 players in 2026.
We start with OPS, the most widely used single measure of hitting production. Because a 65-at-bat season is less certain than a 120-at-bat season, we apply a small regression toward the league average:
In plain terms: we add 100 at-bats of league-average performance to every hitter's line. A hitter with 60 at-bats gets pulled toward average more than one with 150. The effect is modest — it mainly keeps small samples from topping the list.
We measure five components of hitting. Each is a composite of statistics from the game log, converted to a percentile among all qualified hitters.
| Skill | What goes into it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Power | Isolated power (SLG − AVG), home runs per at-bat, % of balls hit to the outfield, hard-hit % | Ability to do damage on contact |
| Contact | Strikeout rate, swing-and-miss rate (both inverted) | Ability to put the bat on the ball |
| Discipline | Walk rate, rate of taking the first pitch for a ball, in-zone swing rate (inverted) | Willingness to work counts and take walks |
| Speed | Stolen bases per game, stolen-base success rate | Baserunning threat |
| Batted-ball quality | Line-drive rate, hard-ground-ball rate, pop-fly rate (inverted) | Consistency of quality contact |
These five are combined into a single Expected OPS — the OPS a hitter with that skill profile would typically produce. The weights come from a regression across all qualified hitters and reflect a clear empirical fact: power matters most. Its weight is roughly three times that of contact and eight times that of discipline.
Why measure skills at all, if OPS already captures results? Because results have luck in them and skills have less. A hitter who strikes out 25% of the time but hit .380 on balls in play probably had some good fortune; a hitter with elite contact and power numbers who hit .280 probably had some bad luck. The skill profile pulls each of them toward what their process says they should be.
Adjusted OPS and Expected OPS are each converted to a standard score (how many standard deviations above or below the league average). We average the two, then scale:
This is the same construction as a standardized test score.
| Power Rank | Share of qualified varsity hitters at or above |
|---|---|
| 90+ | 1.6% |
| 80+ | 3.7% |
| 70+ | 10% |
| 60+ | 22% |
| 50+ | 46% |
| 40+ | 77% |
| 30+ | 95% |
Because the underlying distribution has a long right tail (a few hitters have extraordinary seasons), the average is 50 but the median is 48 — slightly more than half of hitters land below 50.
A percentile rank would put the median at exactly 50 and make "70" mean "better than 70% of hitters," which is simpler to say. We tested both. The bell-curve version proved more stable year-over-year (correlation 0.63 vs 0.57) and predicted next-season OPS better. A percentile squashes the top end: a 1.75 OPS season and a 1.50 OPS season both land at "99th percentile," even though the gap between them is real and large. The bell-curve scale keeps that separation.
The pitcher version uses the same two-half construction: half what he produced, half the skill profile behind it, each converted to a standard score, averaged, and scaled so 50 is the average qualified varsity pitcher and 15 points is one standard deviation.
A pitcher needs 20 or more innings for a full rank — about 2,700 qualified varsity pitchers in 2026, a similar share of the pool as the 60-at-bat cut for hitters. From 8 to 19.9 innings the rank is preliminary and marked with an asterisk; under 8 innings none is shown.
We start with ERA, regressed toward the league average by adding 30 innings of league-average pitching to every line:
Because ERA is bounded at zero and skewed — bad seasons stretch much further from average than good ones — we take the square root before scoring it. Without that step the scale had no top: the best pitcher in 2026 would have landed at 91, and "90+" would have been nearly empty.
Two components, each a composite converted to a standard score among qualified pitchers:
| Skill | What goes into it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Stuff | Strikeouts per batter faced, swing-and-miss rate, called-strike-plus-whiff rate (CSW%) | Ability to miss bats |
| Control | Walks per batter faced (inverted), strike %, first-pitch strike % | Ability to throw strikes and get ahead |
The two are combined into an Expected ERA by regression across all qualified pitchers. Unlike hitting, where power dominates, stuff and control carry almost identical weight — a finding that held when the model was fit on 2025 and on 2026 separately.
Why no batted-ball component? We built one — line-drive rate, hard-ground-ball rate, extra-base-hit share — and it looked useful within a season. It failed the test that matters: a pitcher's batted-ball profile barely repeated from 2025 to 2026 (correlation 0.19) and had no relationship at all to his next-season ERA. Dropping it made the rank more predictive, not less. Strikeout and walk skills, by contrast, repeat strongly (0.50–0.76).
| Power Rank | Share of qualified varsity pitchers at or above |
|---|---|
| 90+ | 0.7% |
| 80+ | 3.0% |
| 70+ | 10% |
| 60+ | 26% |
| 50+ | 50% |
| 40+ | 77% |
| 30+ | 92% |
Because of the square-root step the pitcher scale is nearly symmetric: the median is 49, and 90+ is rarer than it is for hitters — roughly one pitcher in 150.
For the 546 pitchers with 20+ innings in both 2025 and 2026, the year-to-year correlation of the Pitcher Power Rank was 0.57. Raw ERA repeated at only 0.36 — high-school ERA carries a great deal of fielding and scorekeeping noise. More useful still: a pitcher's 2025 rank predicted his 2026 ERA (correlation −0.44) better than his 2025 ERA did (0.36). The rank is a better guide to next season than the ERA on the stat sheet.
Reading the two ranks together: a hitter at 70 and a pitcher at 70 are both top-10% players at their job. The scales are built to match, but they are calibrated on different pools and different inputs, so treat cross-role comparisons as rough.
The Power Rank deliberately answers one question: how good was this season? A sophomore at 65 and a senior at 65 produced the same. But the sophomore did it two years younger, and anyone evaluating prospects wants that in view. Rather than fold age into the main number — which would stop it meaning what this page says it means — Varsity Explorer shows a second number beside it.
The Class-Adjusted Rank adds back the average gap between a player's graduating class and seniors, measured on the 2026 all-varsity sample. Seniors get no adjustment.
| Class | Hitters — avg rank | Hitter adjustment | Pitchers — avg rank | Pitcher adjustment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 50.5 | +0 | 50.0 | +0 |
| Junior | 48.2 | +2 | 47.5 | +3 |
| Sophomore | 46.6 | +4 | 43.7 | +6 |
| Freshman | 42.5 | +8 | 42.9 | +7 |
So in Varsity Explorer a sophomore hitter at 70 shows 70 / 74; a freshman pitcher at 70 shows 70 / 77. First Pitch Advantage reports and cards carry the Power Rank only. The adjustment is additive on purpose. A statistically tidier version would also rescale by each class's spread, and it would hand out much larger boosts — but underclassmen who reach varsity are a pre-selected group with few weak players in it, and rescaling would reward a freshman for the absence of bad freshmen rather than for his own season. The additive version is the conservative one.
We validated the Power Rank two ways.
For the roughly 1,000 hitters with 60+ at-bats in both 2025 and 2026, the year-to-year correlation of Power Rank was 0.63. For comparison, raw OPS was 0.56 and OPS percentile was 0.49. Among the individual skills, Contact (0.67) and Power (0.63) were the most repeatable; batted-ball quality (0.32) was the least.
Among 2026 hitters with a known college commitment or professional affiliation, Power Rank separated them clearly:
| Power Rank | Share committed to NCAA Division I or drafted / affiliated |
|---|---|
| 90+ | ~20% |
| 80–89 | ~14% |
| 60–79 | ~7% |
| 40–59 | ~4% |
| Under 40 | ~2% |
Commitment data is available for only about 9% of hitters and is not a random sample, so treat these as directional rather than precise.
What "0.63" means in practice: a hitter at 80 this year will most often land somewhere between 65 and 90 next year. The number is a strong signal, not a guarantee. Development, injury, role changes, and plain variance all move it.
Hitter Power Rank v1.0 — September 2026. Calibrated on the Atala Analytics Percentile Database, 2026 all-varsity sample (4,506 hitters with 60+ AB), and validated against the 2025 season.
Pitcher Power Rank v1.0 — September 2026. Calibrated on the 2026 all-varsity sample (2,741 pitchers with 20+ IP) and validated on 546 pitchers matched across 2025 and 2026. Batted-ball inputs were evaluated and excluded.
Class-Adjusted Rank — September 2026. Class offsets measured on the 2026 all-varsity sample (1,848 hitters and 1,062 pitchers with a listed graduation year). Methodology is reviewed each off-season; changes are noted here.
Questions about the method: shawn@atalafinancial.com Atala Analytics · Calabasas, CA