Hitter v1.0 · Pitcher v1.0 · Competition-Adjusted Rank v1.0 · November 2026
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. The Power Rank appears in First Pitch Advantage season reports, player cards, and dugout cards, and in Varsity Explorer. Varsity Explorer also shows a Competition-Adjusted Rank (“Adj”) beside it — the same formula, run on a stat line first corrected for who the player faced.
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 three 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 5,200 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 2,900 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 2024, 2025, and 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 repeats from one season to the next (correlation 0.24–0.28) and has almost no relationship to his next-season ERA (0.13). Adding it made the rank less predictive, not more. Strikeout and walk rates, by contrast, repeat strongly (0.51–0.74).
| 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 1,070 pitchers with 20+ innings in both 2025 and 2026, the year-to-year correlation of the Pitcher Power Rank was 0.55 (0.53 for the 661 pitchers matched from 2024 to 2025). Raw ERA repeated at only 0.32–0.34 — 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 −0.42) better than his 2025 ERA did (0.34), and the same held from 2024 to 2025. 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.
We validated the Power Rank two ways.
For the roughly 2,100 hitters with 60+ at-bats in both 2025 and 2026, the year-to-year correlation of Power Rank was 0.62 — and 0.63 for the 1,200 matched from 2024 to 2025. For comparison, raw OPS was 0.57–0.58 and OPS percentile 0.51–0.55. Among the individual skills, Contact (0.66–0.67) and Power (0.62–0.63) were the most repeatable; speed and batted-ball quality (0.31–0.42) were the least.
Among 2026 seniors with 60+ at-bats — the class whose recruiting is largely complete — Power Rank separated those who went on to Division I or professional baseball clearly:
| Power Rank | Share committed to NCAA Division I or drafted / affiliated |
|---|---|
| 90+ | ~80% |
| 80–89 | ~70% |
| 60–79 | ~38% |
| 40–59 | ~13% |
| Under 40 | ~4% |
Commitment or affiliation is on record for about a third of qualified 2026 hitters, and the records are not a random sample — a player without one may still have committed — so treat these as directional rather than precise. The 90+ row rests on about two dozen seniors.
What "0.62" 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.
A .900 OPS against the Mission League’s pitching and a .900 OPS against a weak schedule are not the same season. The Power Rank above treats them the same. The Competition-Adjusted Rank — shown beside it in Varsity Explorer as Adj — does not. It is the same formula on the same scale, run on a stat line that has first been corrected for who the player actually faced.
We split every charted hitter’s 2025 plate appearances by the strength of the pitching staff he was facing. Against the toughest third of staffs, hitters posted a .721 OPS; against the easiest third, the same hitters posted 1.057. Looked at from the schedule side, in 2026 the pitching one hitter faced would hold an average varsity hitter to about a .660 OPS, while the pitching another faced would let that same average hitter post about .905 — a 250-point swing from the schedule alone, before the hitter himself enters the picture.
For hitters the correction is applied to singles, extra-base hits, home runs, walks, hit-by-pitch and strikeouts — OPS and isolated power are then rebuilt from the corrected parts — and to the rate inputs (hard-hit, line-drive, hard-ground-ball, pop-fly, swing-and-miss, first-pitch ball). For pitchers it is applied to strikeout, walk, swing-and-miss, CSW, strike and first-pitch-strike rates, and ERA is scaled by the quality of the lineups faced. Stolen bases, in-zone swing rate and outfield rate are left as they are.
Opponent ratings can only be compared across regions whose teams actually play each other. Southern California, Arizona, Texas and Florida are tied together by hundreds of cross-state charted games. A state whose charted teams play only each other is an island: we can tell its teams apart from one another, but not how the island as a whole compares with everyone else. So each state gets a confidence tier from its own game data, recomputed every season:
| Tier | What it means | Share of the correction applied |
|---|---|---|
| A | Well linked — 20+ cross-state charted games and 15+ charted teams (or 40+ charted teams) | Full (×1.0) |
| B | Partly linked — 8+ cross-state games and 8+ charted teams | Half (×0.5) |
| C | Thin or isolated | Quarter (×0.25) |
For the 2026 season, Tier A is California, Florida, Illinois and Texas; Tier B is Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia; every other state is Tier C. This is deliberately conservative. A Tier C player is barely moved — not because his competition is average, but because there is not yet enough cross-region play to say otherwise. As more teams are charted, tiers rise and the correction grows.
In 2026 the adjustment moved 14% of hitters and 28% of pitchers by five or more points, and about one pitcher in fourteen by ten or more. The largest moves — roughly ±7 for hitters and ±10 for pitchers — are almost all in Tier A states, where schedules differ most and the data can tell. In Tier C states the typical move is within two to four points. Players from the strongest schedules go up, players from the weakest come down, and the average stays at 50.
Every design choice was made on the 2025 season and then frozen; 2026 was run with no further tuning. Three checks:
Reading Rank and Adj together: the gap between them is the schedule. A hitter at 68 Rank / 74 Adj did his damage against strong pitching; 74 / 68 means the base number flatters him. When the two agree, either the schedule was about average or the region’s data is too thin to say — the tier shown in the badge tooltip tells you which.
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.
October 2026 revalidation. Both ranks were re-tested on the expanded database — 2024, 2025, and 2026 seasons, about 5,200 qualified hitters and 2,900 qualified pitchers in 2026, with roughly 3,300 hitters and 1,700 pitchers matched across consecutive seasons. The weights, regression constants, and inputs held up; alternatives tested (different production/skill weightings, regression strengths, ERA transforms, and added batted-ball inputs) did not improve next-season prediction, so neither formula changed. The Class-Adjusted Rank previously shown in Varsity Explorer has been retired. Methodology is reviewed each off-season; changes are noted here.
Competition-Adjusted Rank v1.0 — November 2026. Opponent ratings and every design choice were fit on the 2025 charted season (835 team game logs), then run unchanged on 2026 (868). Shown as “Adj” in Varsity Explorer v2.7.0. The Hitter and Pitcher formulas themselves are unchanged; the adjustment changes only what goes into them.
Questions about the method: shawn@atalafinancial.com Atala Analytics · Calabasas, CA