Product Dossier
About AiBS
A product brief for the public-facing ABS site: what it covers, who it serves, and what makes it different from a generic baseball dashboard.
ByColby Reichenbach
Overview
AiBS is built to make MLB's ABS era legible.
AiBS is a baseball product centered on the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system. It tracks challenge events, pitcher-batter context, team usage patterns, umpire behavior, and game-level leverage so a user can inspect how ABS is actually functioning instead of arguing from memory or vibes.
The public product is organized around a small set of routes that answer different questions clearly: the home page frames the current ABS landscape, team pages show challenge identity, umpire pages show review pressure and volatility, game pages show event-level context, and the About and Articles desks explain the product and publish analysis around it.
The point is not to flood the user with every possible baseball stat. The point is to turn one specific rules change into a product that is readable, inspectable, and useful for fans, analysts, and anyone evaluating how ABS changes baseball behavior.
What It Is
A product, not just a chart dump.
The site is built around a small number of public surfaces with distinct jobs. The home page acts like a front page. Team pages show how clubs are using the challenge system. Umpire pages show which plate umpires are steady, shaky, or exposed. Game pages show what happened at the event level and tie challenge decisions back to count state, leverage, and downstream value.
That routing structure matters because a baseball product is easier to trust when each page has a clear purpose. AiBS is trying to answer one practical question at a time instead of collapsing the whole system into one crowded dashboard.
- •Home: league framing and current challenge landscape.
- •Teams: identity, pressure usage, and challenge style.
- •Umpires: review exposure, variance, and performance framing.
- •Games: live or postgame event context, leverage, and challenge review.
Why It Exists
ABS needed a front-end that speaks plain baseball.
The data around ABS already existed in pieces, but the public conversation around it was still muddy. Fans could debate whether a team was challenging well or whether an umpire was unstable, but they had a weak path from claim to evidence. AiBS exists to make that evidence easy to inspect.
That standard applies to the product design too. Charts, tables, and AI explanation tools are only useful if they help a user reason through the subject faster and more accurately. The product is meant to support baseball judgment, not replace it with interface theater.
The product exists to make baseball arguments more accountable.