Baseball — a free home run derby in your browser

Ten pitches, one tap each. There is no aiming and no power meter: your timing is the entire swing. Swing a fraction early and you pull the ball; a fraction late and you slice it the other way; miss the window altogether and it is a strike.

The catch is that the window shrinks with every pitch, from about a third of a second on the first to a tenth of a second on the tenth, while the pitch itself gets faster and breaks harder. Your score is home runs out of ten. Free, no download, no sign-up.

How to play

• Tap anywhere to swing — or press space on a desktop. There is nothing else to do.
• The two white lines are the foul lines. A ball outside them is foul however far it went.
• Swing slightly early for the longest ball. Dead-on timing is a fraction shorter, and it is the only game where being perfectly on time is second best.
• The window shrinks and the pitch breaks harder with each of the ten pitches.
• Your score is home runs out of ten, and your top 5 is kept on this device.

Why the perfect swing is a fraction early

One tap has to produce two numbers: which way the ball goes, and how far. Both come out of the same quantity — how far your swing was from the moment the ball arrived — and that is what makes a one-button batting game work at all.

The direction is the intuitive half. Swing early and the bat meets the ball out in front of the plate, so the ball leaves toward the pull side; swing late and you make contact deeper, and the ball goes the other way. Push it too far either way and the ball crosses a foul line. That much matches real hitting.

The distance is the interesting half, and it is why a dead-perfect swing is not the best one here. A ball struck exactly on time leaves on a flat line — hard, but low, and a flat ball runs out of room before the fence. A swing a fraction early catches the ball slightly under and out in front, which puts it in the air at a better angle, and that is the ball that carries. Real hitters talk about this constantly under the name launch angle: exit speed alone does not produce home runs, exit speed at the right angle does.

So the peak of the scoring curve here sits a little to the early side of centre, and it is worth finding, because the difference between the best swing and a merely good one is the difference between the warning track and the seats. Once you know it, the game becomes about holding that same fraction-early timing while the window closes from roughly 280 milliseconds down to around 110.

A note on what is not modelled. There is no strike zone here and no balls, because a derby is not an at-bat: every pitch is hittable and you get ten of them. The only thing between you and ten home runs is how repeatable your timing is when the pitch keeps getting faster.

More games

More from 🕹️ Arcade & one-tap games:

• Fruit Slice — Swipe to cut the fruit and miss the bombs. Several in one stroke pays the square, so timing beats speed.
• Fishing — Cast, strike when the float dips, then reel — but let go the moment the fish runs, or the line snaps.
• Curling — Slide eight stones down the ice. A light one curls; a hard one takes theirs out.
• Volleyball — Move, jump and keep it off your own floor. Hit it rising and it goes long.
• Stack Rush — One tap: drop the sliding block on the tower. Miss the edge and it gets sliced. How high can you go?

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