Late Innings
Bottom of the ninth, down a run, three outs to get it back.
What it is
You bat. Before each pitch you can sit on a type — fastball, breaking ball or changeup — and if you called it right, your swing window opens to nearly twice its normal width. Wide enough to crush it.
Call it wrong and swing anyway and you are loaded for the wrong speed. You miss. Leave the bat on your shoulder and it is a ball or a strike, judged against a rectangle you can see.
That is the whole game: one decision before every pitch, paid off or punished after it.
The pitcher is the puzzle
He is not random. His mix shifts with the count — behind, he comes at you; ahead, he tries to get you chasing. His mitt shows the target most of the time, and every pitch he has thrown this inning stays on screen with the count it came at.
So the read is available. It is just spread across the at-bat, and the count keeps changing what he is likely to do next.
Nothing is a mini-game
Contact is graded, not binary. Nearly perfect timing is a home run, close is a double, decent is a single, late is an out, and badly wrong is a strike. A foul with two strikes keeps you alive.
Get the run in and it goes to extras with the outs reset. Win enough innings and a full nine-inning game opens up, where the pitcher tires across the night, his tell gets worse as he does, and a closer comes in if it is still close.
How to play
- Sit on a pitchTap a chip
- SwingTap anywhere else
On a desktop, 1 2 3 pick the pitch and space swings.
What isn't settled yet
The read works and the grading is honest. What has not been tested is whether someone who does not follow baseball can see that guessing the pitch is the point — rather than treating it as a game about tapping when the ball arrives, which is what every other baseball game in a browser is.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover art was composited from a base image created with Manus.
Late Innings is original work by Launchway Games.