FAQ
Plain answers, stated so they can stand alone. The current record: 0 hit · 0 miss · 9 open — the ledger has the receipts.
Ask us anything · andy@feverbaseball.com
The basics
- What is Fever Baseball?
- Fever Baseball is a baseball publication built on an instrument called the Future Value Radar (FVR). It finds mispriced baseball talent using batted-ball physics validated on eleven seasons of public MLB play-by-play, publishes every prediction on a public timestamped ledger that resolves by computation, and covers the baseball card market angle for every player it tracks. Everything refreshes nightly, automatically.
- Is it free? What's the catch?
- Free, all of it — the boards, the ledger, the daily Overnight, the player pages, the emails, the daily game. The business model is simple and disclosed: some card listings link to eBay through an affiliate program, labeled right where they appear — and every dollar the paper earns is published in public on The Till at feverbaseball.com/earnings. Open books. The record itself will never sit behind a paywall, because a public record you have to pay to audit isn't a public record.
- How can I support the paper?
- Four ways, all optional, all gathered at feverbaseball.com/support — with the open books on The Till at feverbaseball.com/earnings. Start your eBay card shopping from the paper's link — it costs you nothing extra and pays a small commission. Drop something in the tip jar, one-time or monthly. Send bitcoin, if your binder sits next to a wallet. Or simply subscribe and share the site — attention is the currency a young paper needs most. Whatever comes in shows up in the public register, to the penny.
- What's your track record so far?
- The live count is printed on every page: 0 hit, 0 miss, 9 open. The site is young — the first call windows close in late September 2026 — so the honest answer is that the record is mostly still being written. That's exactly why every call was timestamped before the outcomes: when the results arrive, nobody has to take our word for anything.
- How do I know you won't quietly delete a miss?
- The ledger is append-only: calls are never edited after filing, corrections are appended in public, and misses get stamped on the record with the same rubber stamp as hits. Every edition also lands in subscriber inboxes the night it prints — an archive we couldn't quietly rewrite if we wanted to. Deleting a miss would cost more than eating it, which is the design.
- Who makes this?
- A lifelong baseball fan and card collector, an engine built from scratch on public play-by-play data, and a stable of AI agents working the night shift — ingesting games, refreshing boards, printing the morning edition. One human sets the standards; the methodology page shows the receipts, including the findings that weren't flattering.
The engine
- What is a call, and how does it resolve?
- A call is a falsifiable prediction filed with four parts: a metric, a threshold, a window, and a UTC timestamp. When the window closes, the engine computes the metric and stamps HIT or MISS — nobody argues, and nothing is edited after filing. A hit rate with the misses removed is marketing, not measurement.
- What is EV95?
- EV95 is a hitter's 95th-percentile exit velocity in mph — how hard he hits the baseball when he really connects. It's used instead of average exit velocity because top-of-range contact is the skill and mishits dilute the average. It is the most stable metric in the FVR engine (year-over-year correlation of 0.88), which makes it a better forecaster than any batting average.
- What is the luck gap?
- A hitter's actual results on contact minus what the physics of his batted balls say those results should have been, adjusted for ballpark. Negative gap: the results are underpaying the contact — breakout shape. Positive gap: the results are borrowing — fade shape. The gap tends to close in both directions, which is what makes it a signal.
- Why isn't a star like Shohei Ohtani on the boards?
- Because the boards rank mispricing, not talent. A superstar whose stat line already pays him in full for his contact quality has no gap to bet on, so an honest mispricing detector says nothing about him. Stars like that live in the Index — full player pages with a computed explanation of exactly why no board flagged them.
- Why are there no MLB pitchers on any board?
- FVR's pitcher signals are stability-tested but not yet outcome-validated, and the house rule is that no signal produces flags or calls until it passes the same pre-registered out-of-sample bar the hitting signals passed. Until then, big-league arms appear only as tracked-but-ungraded Index pages. The rule costs the site its most clickable names, and the rule stays.
- How is the engine validated?
- On eleven seasons of public play-by-play with a pre-registered protocol frozen before the test data was examined — one evaluation, published regardless of outcome. On the held-out seasons (721 qualified batter-seasons), the composite signal separated top from bottom quintiles by +1.15 annualized WAR. The methodology page also discloses a computation bug found during the work and a null result: clutch hitting is not a repeatable skill.
The cards
- What does any of this have to do with baseball cards?
- Performance leads the card market: breakouts, milestone chases, and prospect debuts move card prices after the fact. Fever Baseball publishes its signals and milestone watches first, in public, with the timestamp to prove it — then links each player's eBay listings so collectors can act on their own read. The Chase page exists precisely because milestones are the hobby's oldest price catalyst.
- Should I buy cards because of one of your calls?
- No — buy cards because you love them. Nothing here is financial advice; collectibles are speculative and can lose value; and our own rule is that we take positions in a player's cards only after the call is published, never before. What the site offers is honest information, early — what you do with it is yours.
The paper & the games
- How often does everything update?
- Nightly, automatically. A pipeline ingests every MLB and Triple-A game, rebuilds the boards, refreshes all 120+ player pages, prints The Overnight with newspaper-style box scores, updates the milestone chases, and emails subscribers. Every page shows its as-of date.
- What is The Card Back?
- The daily mystery-player game every collector already knows how to play: cover the front, read the stats off the back, name him. Six guesses, a new card at midnight ET, same card for everyone, streaks saved in your browser, Prospect Issues on Saturdays. Free, at feverbaseball.com/cardback.
- How do I follow along?
- Two free emails: the Sunday Radar Digest (the week's drift, every call's countdown, the Chase, the Wire) and The Overnight (last night's baseball, graded, every morning after games). Sign up on the homepage. There's also the Discord for arguing the boards, and the site posts on X.
- I found an error — what do I do?
- Tell us: andy@feverbaseball.com. If you're right, the correction is appended in public and the original stays visible, struck through by honesty rather than deleted. Being auditable is the entire point of the operation.