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 MLB play, 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.
Free. Runs in your browser on any phone. No account needed to start.
How it works
Three steps. Ten plays a session.
Watch the play.
A real clip from an MLB game, with the situation above it: inning, outs, count, runners. The right call often depends on it.
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.
See the official scorer’s ruling.
Your call is graded field by field. Get the result right but miss the fielder sequence and it’s Partial, and you see which part missed.
Three ways to practice
Mixed plays, drills, or a whole game
Practice
Ten real plays, mixed the way a game mixes them. Mostly the plays that make a scorer stop and think, with a few routine ones so you don’t overthink the easy ones.
No account neededDrills
Fifteen drills, one kind of call ten times in a row: hit or error, wild pitch or passed ball, who gets the error, dropped third strike, infield fly, balks, and the weird ones nobody practices.
No account neededLive
Score a real game as you watch it, pitch by pitch, on TV, a stream, or a recording. MLB or minor league, live or any game back to March 2015. Each call is graded when the official scorer rules.
Free account
Tough Call Live
Your screen supplies the play. The official scorer supplies the answer.
Pick a game and tap the batter who is on your screen. Tap the pitches as they come, the way you would in a scoring app. When the ball is put in play, make the call. The grade comes back as soon as the official scorer rules.
Live never shows the count or anything past the batter you’re on, so it can’t spoil the play. Official scoring sometimes changes after a game; your Live calls are checked again overnight.
What you get
Built for the parent with the scorebook
The official scorer is the answer key.
Every play is graded against the ruling the official scorer actually made: the result, the kind of batted ball, who touched the ball in what order, and which fielder was charged with the error and what kind. Nobody here hand-labels plays.
Drills for the calls that get missed.
Fifteen of them. Some ask one question per play, like hit or error. Others ask for the full call, like a double play with every touch in order.
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.
A clock, a streak, and your stats.
The timer starts when the clip ends, because at a real game the next pitch is coming. Sign in and your accuracy, median time, and streak build up by kind of call, with your Live calls alongside.
Works in the offseason.
Practice and drills use recorded plays, so they work all winter. Live works on any recorded game back to March 2015. Season status
Free. No ads. No selling data.
There is no paywall and no ad tracker, and your data goes nowhere. Start without an account; sign in only if you want your stats kept or want to use Live.
A trainer, not a scoring app.
Keep scoring your games wherever you already do. The pickers follow the order a scoring app like GameChanger asks for, so the reps carry over. Tough Call is an independent project, not affiliated with MLB or GameChanger.
Made for scorekeepers who are still learning.
Drafted last week or ten seasons in, the scoring guides explain the rules behind the tough calls, and Start here covers the notation and the verdicts.
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