The World Cup finals are on Sunday, which means that there is a possibility that someone will score the decisive penalty, and throw themselves into the Hall of Shame. If it does, the postgame analyst may offer a classic defense: only those who take the penalties can miss it. To look like a fool, you must first try to try.
Fortunately, baseball has no such requirement. You can look like a fool walking out of your shoes on a slider in the dirt or do nothing, staring at a two-strike slider across the middle of the plate. Action or inaction, the fool’s door is always open, and today, we can try to measure the stupidity.
Two weeks ago, we went I want holes in the curvesa cover there hitters fail. Today is about in a wonderful way. Welcome to Fool Points, the first leaderboard where you don’t want to be #1.
Stupid rules
A hitter can score a Fool in two ways:
- The Windmill: Swinging and missing the pitch by an embarrassing amount. Statcast tracks missed distance all-time, and the league’s 90th percentile miss this season is 8.27 inches. Miss more than that, and you earn Stupid Points, with a total that goes up the further you miss. Don’t miss twice the limit, double the points.
- Template: To take a called strike in the heart of the place. The closer the pitch is to dead-center, the more points you get for complimenting it.
Both flavors are multiplied by the calculation weight, because the context is important: a stupid action with zero claims is worth 1x, and one strike 1.5x, and two strikes. 3xbecause watching three strikes float down Main Street, or putting yourself in a third strike circle, is the most foolish thing a man can achieve in this sport.
By the All-Star break, that 4,534 whiffs and 21,323 meatballs are converted into one glorious leaderboard.
King of Kung-Fool
Ladies and Gentlemen, Your 2026 Kung-Fool Master: Coby Mayoand it is not close. Mayo is pacing the league at 52.1 Fool Points per 100 PA – second place 8 points behind – while striking out a third of the time en route to an 83 wRC+. And in a development that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched Orioles baseball this year, folks Colton Cowser joins him in the top five, making Camden Yards the proud home of the league’s fool factory.
Another leaderboard for who can beat them: Owen Caissie (who also has a 39% strikeout rate) Jake Burgeragain Jorge Solerall skaters who have never encountered a slide would not chase it in the parking lot.
Top Fool – The Biggest Windmill of 2026
Tommy Troy, June 26: A swing where Troy missed the field by about 41 inches. That’s not a typo. Three and a half feet
So Does Being Stupid Matter?
This is where I have to point out that Fool Points is the secret key to scoring hitters. Reader, they are not.
The correlation between Fool Rate and wRC+ is r = -0.245. It’s negative, so yes, it looks silly gently negative, but it only explains 6% of the variance between hitters. For proof, look up at the chart: Wilson Contreras (151 wRC+) has about the same stupid average as Coby Mayo (83 wRC+, who hits like a slugger with good ball skills). Same nonsense, 68 wRC+ points apart.
What the chart lacks in predictive power it makes up for in characterization. The four quadrants are basically new personality types:
- Fools Pay (high level of stupidity, bad hitting): Mayo, Caissie, Soler, stupidity is part of the problem of real skill.
- Playing Fools (high level of fool, good hitting): Contreras, Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, Aaron is the judge, James Wood. For these guys, stupid points are a sales tax at a loss. The judge comes here two weeks after we write him down to avoid his bowling alley is a delightful reminder that being a hole and being a fool are two different sins, the Judge shrugs at the first and shrugs at the end.
- Decent Benefits (low level fool, good hit): Luis Arraez has a Windmill score of exactly 1.13 for the entire season, almost one silly point since March. And here: José Ramírez, Ronald Acuña Jr., and interesting Sam Antonacciwho has it literally zero Windmill points. Every stupid point Antonacci owns comes from standing still.
- It’s Boring and Bad (low level of fool, bad hitting): Jeff McNeil and friends, fail with responsibility.
Windmills vs. Templates
Another layer: not all fools are the same grace of a fool. League-wide, Windmill points the number of Template points 12,614 to 8,366, and most of the top 20 are Windmill-heavy (Harper is 86% Windmill). But there are experts. Nolan Arenado leads the 20-point lead in Temple, the man known for the longest, loosest swing in baseball apparently prefers to keep it dressed while passing fastballs that are cut up the middle. And down the leaderboard, Taylor Ward quietly amassed the most Template Ratings in baseball (52.1), ridiculously paired with a very respectable 120 wRC+. Some guys are just picky, even meatballs.
There is an honest caveat here: for the elite hitters you contact, some of the meatballs they take are tricks; Arraez sings on a fastball to first base because he’s hunting for another option, not a failure. The 3x double strike weight is what separates the builders from the pictures, but it’s important to remember that early calculations take a gray area.
