Tough Call

Scorekeeping practice on real plays

Watch the play. Make the call. See how you stack up against the official scorer.

Tough Call shows you a real play from pro baseball, starts the clock when the clip ends, and grades your ruling against the official scorer’s. Hit or error. 6-3 or 5-3. Wild pitch or passed ball. You call it, then you find out.

Open Tough Call How it works

Free. Runs in your browser on any phone. No account needed to start.

The Tough Call play screen: top of the 6th, one out, 2-1 count, runner on second, play 7 of 20. The clip has ended, the timer reads 4.2 seconds, and the prompt asks what the call is, with Error selected over Hit.

How it works

Three steps. Twenty plays a session.

  1. Watch the play.

    A real clip from a pro game, with the situation above it: inning, outs, count, runners. The right call often depends on it.

  2. Make the call.

    The clock starts when the clip ends. Tap through the call the way a scorer thinks it through: what happened, who touched the ball, whose error.

  3. See the official scorer’s ruling.

    Your call is graded field by field. Right result with the wrong fielder sequence counts as partly right, and you see which part missed.

The fine print, up front

What this uses, and what it doesn’t

  • Real plays, streamed from MLB.

    Major league, minor league, and spring training video, played straight from MLB’s own servers. Tough Call never downloads, stores, or re-hosts a clip.

  • The official scorer is the answer key.

    The ruling comes from the same MLB play record as the video: the result, the putouts and assists, which fielder was charged with the error and what kind. Nobody here hand-labels plays.

  • Judgment calls are marked as judgment calls.

    Hit or error is sometimes a coin flip that good scorers argue about. When a play is one of those, you see Judgment call and the ruling, and it doesn’t count against your streak.

  • Free. No ads. No selling data.

    It uses MLB’s video, so it can’t be sold, and it isn’t. There is no paywall and no ad tracker, and your data goes nowhere.

  • Not MLB. Not GameChanger.

    Tough Call is an independent project, not affiliated with either. It’s a trainer, not a scoring app. Keep scoring your games wherever you already do.

  • Clips can go away.

    MLB decides what stays online. When a clip stops loading, the play is retired from the bank. If MLB asks us to stop, we stop.

There’s a tough call coming at your next game.

Get the reps in before then. It works in any phone browser, and you can add it to your home screen.

Open Tough Call