Every public hitting stat conditions on what the hitter did — none of them ask what the pitcher actually threw. We grade all three million pitches a season and measure each hitter's production against what those pitches implied. The gap is your edge.
Built on peer-reviewed methodology · read the paper · free boards, no account needed
wOBA, xwOBA, and wRC+ grade both the same. PQS doesn't. It models the expected run value of every pitch from pre-contact quality alone — velocity, movement, location, count, platoon — then credits each hitter with the runs he created above what the pitches themselves implied.
Highest PQS+ — production dramatically better than what their pitch diet implied. The clearest signal in the book.
Negative surplus on big names — sell-high candidates and fades before regression shows up in wOBA.
TPS leaders: who actually produces against the hardest pitching. The hitters you want when playoff matchups get nasty.
From the actual book — hitters where raw stats and surplus tell opposite stories:
Luis Arráez — PQS+ 87
feasts on mistakes, elite-diet wOBA lagging
Michael Harris II — PQS+ 71
2,182 pitches of below-diet production
Ke'Bryan Hayes — PQS+ 72
name value the numbers don't support
Nick Kurtz — PQS+ 163
1,954 pitches, produces like a top-10 bat
Michael Busch — PQS+ 155
2,442 pitches of quiet excellence
Hunter Goodman — PQS+ 151
the catcher nobody's watching
Full boards + scouting notes for all 228 qualified hitters in the guidebook.
Every hitter in the guidebook gets a full workup: percentile bars across the surplus family, a plain-English scouting read, and (Complete edition and up) his pitch diet and leverage profile. This is Aaron Judge's 2025 entry, from the real book:
Try it risk-free. The free boards show you exactly what the metric looks like before you spend a dollar. If a guidebook isn't what you expected, email me within 3 days for a full refund — no questions, no forms.
| ESPN / Yahoo / Fangraphs | The Surplus | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | What the hitter did | What he did vs. what the pitching implied |
| Pitch quality accounted for | ✗ None | ✓ Every pitch, 3M per season |
| Forward-looking | ✗ Backward-looking totals | ✓ Validated YoY correlation |
| Identifies overrated names | ✗ Rewards them | ✓ Flags them before regression |
| Scouting writeups per player | ✗ | ✓ Every hitter, plain English |
Free tools are great at counting. The Surplus is built for the question they can't ask: how much of that was him?
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