The two best pitches in your arsenal are the two that look identical coming out of the hand and then aren't. That's the whole game. A fastball and a slider that share a release point and a flight path for forty feet, and then go to different ZIP codes — by the time the hitter's brain has resolved which one it is, the bat is already late. That's pitch tunneling, and it is the closest thing to a legal cheat code that competitive MLB The Show has.

PitchTunnels is the iOS app we build for exactly this. It just shipped v1.3, and the short version is: it stopped giving you generic advice and started giving you advice about your pitcher. The longer version is below — and if you've never opened the app, start at the top.

What pitch tunneling is

Two pitches "tunnel" when they overlap through the hitter's decision window — roughly the first third of the flight — and then diverge. The hitter commits to a swing based on what he sees early. If your four-seam and your slider look the same until they don't, he's guessing. If they look different out of the hand, he's not guessing, he's just hitting.

Real pitchers obsess over this. The problem in The Show is that the game gives you a pitcher with five or six pitches and zero guidance on which two of them actually share a tunnel. Most people pair pitches by vibe. Vibe is how you give up a three-run homer to a guy on Legend.

What PitchTunnels does

You tell the app who's on the mound — pick from the catalog of 1,000+ MLB The Show 26 pitchers, or build a custom arsenal from the 13 pitch types the game uses. The app reads the arsenal and hands you the tunnels: pairs of pitches that share a flight path, ranked, with a visual strike zone showing the two paths overlapping and then splitting. Shuffle if you want variety. Thumbs-up the recommendations that work and the suggestions sharpen over time.

A few things worth knowing up front:

• It's 100% offline. No account, no login, no internet. It's a reference you pull up mid-game.
• It covers MLB The Show 26 (and still supports 25).
• It's free to download, ad-supported, and the free tier gets the real product — unlimited pitchers, every tunnel, the full catalog. Lite ($2.99/year) is the same thing with no ads. Pro ($9.99/year) unlocks the advanced tools — including most of what's new below — and drops the ads too.

That's the baseline. Here's what v1.3 added.

The Tunnels tab ranks every pairing in your arsenal — SL→SI→FC grades a perfect 100 — while the Bear Down Advisor up top tells you to save the charge for a two-strike count.

What's new in v1.3

The theme of this release is specificity. The old app knew about tunnels in the abstract. The new one knows about tunnels for the card you actually have, against the hitter actually standing there.

Smarter recommendations

• Pitcher-specific tunnel ranking (Pro) — tunnels are now ranked for your exact pitcher, factoring in the card's attributes, the batter's handedness, and where each pitch sits in the current meta. Not "these two tunnel," but "these two tunnel best, for you, right now."
• Bear Down Advisor (Pro) — tells you when it's worth spending a Bear Down charge and which pitch to throw when you do.
• Tunnel Breakdown (Pro) — the movement plot and the actual numbers behind any tunnel, for when you want to see why it's rated the way it is.

Scout any card

• Pitch Power Ranking (Pro) — your whole arsenal scored and sorted, best pitch to worst. No more guessing which offering is actually carrying you.
• Scouting tags (Free) — role, stuff, and matchup badges so you can read a pitcher at a glance.
• Handedness edge (Free) — how a given pitcher fares against lefties versus righties.

New Pro tools

• Active Roster (Pro) — set your real Rotation and Bullpen so the app's advice is about the arms you're actually running.
• Situation Finder (Pro) — answers the only question that matters in the seventh inning: who do I bring in? Pick the game spot, get the arm.
• Pitch Sequencer (Pro) — walk a live at-bat pitch by pitch, tracking the count, building the sequence as you go.

Tuning and fixes

• Pitch meta tiers re-rated to the current MLB The Show 26 meta.
• Tunnel scores audited against community consensus.
• Cleaner card detail and more accurate handedness split ratings.
• A nod to the DiamondOps.gg companion web app — yes, the ecosystem is connecting up.

Situation Finder, bases loaded with a lefty up, late and close: it ranks your bullpen for exactly that spot — Jonathan Broxton grades a 100 as the ideal arm to bring in.

This is the overview. The deep-dives are coming.

A few of these features deserve more than three bullet points, and they're going to get it. Over the next stretch I'll be writing dedicated posts on:

• Pitcher-specific tunnel ranking — how the app weighs card attributes, handedness, and meta tier, and how to read the ranking instead of just trusting it.
• Situation Finder — the actual logic behind "who do I bring in," and where it disagrees with your gut.
• Pitch Sequencer — sequencing a live at-bat without telegraphing the put-away pitch.

Each one its own post, each one with the math shown. For now: update the app, set your active roster, and go make two pitches look like one.

Why I built it

I built PitchTunnels because I couldn't hold it in my head anymore. Every pitcher in the game has a different arsenal, and the arsenal is what decides which pairs actually tunnel — so it's not one thing to memorize, it's a different set for every arm you might bring to the mound. Which two pitches to throw, in what count, and where to locate each one. Multiply that across a full staff and it stops being knowledge and starts being homework. I kept trying to track it on the side and kept losing the thread mid-game. So I built the thing that remembers it for me — and then I kept making it smarter, which is how we got to v1.3.

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PitchTunnels is free on the App Store. v1.3 shipped June 2026. Find it in the Apple App Store