Product Motivation
Why I Built AiBS
The product motivation behind AiBS: better baseball conversations, clearer evidence, and a more useful front door to ABS.
ByColby Reichenbach
Overview
The rules changed. The public tools around them were still weak.
ABS created a new baseball conversation almost overnight. Teams were managing a challenge resource. Umpires were being evaluated in a new way. Fans were arguing about fairness, pace, and strategy. But the public product layer around that conversation still felt thin.
AiBS was built to fill that gap. The goal was not to create a generic baseball site with ABS as one category among many. The goal was to make ABS the primary subject and then build the surrounding product carefully enough that the conversation around it could improve.
That means fewer empty takes, fewer unsupported claims, and a better path from instinct to evidence.
Gap
The public conversation needed structure.
A lot of baseball discourse around ABS still defaults to reaction instead of inspection. That is understandable because the raw subject is technical: strike-zone geometry, challenge retention, leverage context, and overturn behavior are not easy to hold in your head without a good product.
AiBS tries to solve that by giving users simple routes into the system. Instead of asking them to reverse-engineer a pile of raw events, it gives them dedicated surfaces for teams, umpires, games, and explanations.
Standard
The product should earn stronger opinions.
The aim is not to remove opinion from baseball. It is to sharpen it. If a user thinks a team is spending challenges well, there should be a chart and a page that let them test that instinct. If a user thinks an umpire has become volatile, the product should help them inspect that pattern rather than just repeat it.
That is the underlying reason AiBS exists. It is a tool for better baseball reasoning.
The product is meant to give baseball arguments a better foundation, not a louder microphone.