Make-Up Games: Immaculate Grid (2023)

Baseball is more than just the game played on the field. It can also be the game played on the virtual field. So, Baseball Prospectus is going to write about, review, discuss, whatever the many, many baseball video games released in the last half-century that the genre has even existed.

Immaculate Grid

Creator: Brian Minter
Producer: Sports Reference
Platform(s): The World Wide Web
Genre: Puzzle
Release Year: 2023
Availability: Free, at http://immaculategrid.com

Why this game?: On Monday, June 5, the Immaculate Grid twitter account posted its 63rd grid. It received one retweet and two likes. Within weeks, it was a humongous hit on baseball twitter, with a 20,000-person follower base and six-digit engagement on each highly anticipated midnight reveal.

If that backstory doesn’t seem familiar, thank you for emerging from your hole in the ground to read this specific article. Immaculate Grid follows in the footsteps of Wordle, the linguistic Mastermind clone that took the world by storm during the pandemic, thanks to one little trick: social media shareability. Ironically, what made Wordle a million-dollar idea was an element of early video games, in general long since discarded, in the form of the high-score screen. Comparing, and kibitzing over, the word of the day turned the game into almost a sport in itself, where shared experience was often greater than the experience actually being shared. Immaculate Grid taps into that same set of tools, the latent bonds of useless, enjoyable fandom, and combines it with the unstoppable desire to remember some guys.

How does it play?: The game itself is simple. Each day, starting at midnight Eastern, it provides a 3×3 grid headed either by teams, career milestones, or single-season achievements. The player has nine attempts to fill those nine squares by selecting a name that matches both requirements: either to have played for both teams, or to have played for one while fulfilling the requirement of the other. The game can pull up a database of every player in major-league history to check the answers. The goal is to get all nine correct, thus completing an immaculate grid, and then share it online with one’s friends.

Unless, of course, it isn’t. And that’s where the blessing and curse of the game set in.

Early on in the game’s rise, I set down some house rules for my friends. Getting nine answers in a given day was trivial, at least for the sort of people who write a novel’s worth of words about baseball each year. At that stage, the game had fewer features, but it did provide one: the most popular choice for each square. Therefore, I declared, you wanted to avoid that one player if at all possible.

But then the game expanded, providing exact popularity percentages for each choice, and then combining them to provide a rarity (read: sicko) score. The game was the same, but also, it wasn’t. By assigning points to a specific aspect of the program, it was also establishing a value for playing that specific way. 

Most games exist to be mastered. There’s a princess in the last castle, a final boss, an evil tree trying to take over the universe. You play the game, you learn it, you improve at it, and then you beat it. That formula doesn’t really work for Immaculate Grid, because there’s no end boss, no difficulty curve. It’s more like a crossword: like video games, a good crossword provides a sense of satisfaction over mastery, but it’s an ephemeral joy, like the feeling of stretching a muscle. 

You can assign a point value to games like this, but it doesn’t really matter. The game doesn’t mean as much as the discussion it generates.

What this game does better than the rest: No question. It allows you to remember some guys. 

A lot of jokes have been made about guys, the guys who remember them, and the pleasure that this remembering inevitably evokes. And those jokes will continue to be made, because the force behind it is very real. People love trivia, as Jaya Saxena wrote for GQ in 2018, because it provides a garden of uselessness in our demanding, specialized lives. The mental debris that we pick up, as we travel from one mandatory life event to the next, is what makes us who we are, far more so than the one thing we’ve been trained to do. 

Trivia and media have co-existed since the quiz shows of the golden age of television, and yet it’s a little surprising that sports, with its meticulous records and histories, has never really bonded to the format in the same way. You would think that ESPN, especially given its dearth of programming in its early days (and desire for inexpensive programming in its modern state) would see the appeal in a 30-minute, one-set show. But sports trivia is too broad, and ironically, its adherents tend to be too specialized; fans who know baseball and hockey and soccer as deeply as their sports’ specialized fans are rare, in a way that generalized knowledge about arts and science are less so. 

Still, despite the systemic roadblocks, sports and trivia feel underserved. And perhaps that’s how Immaculate Grid continues to evolve: expanding categories beyond just teams and milestones into other achievements, to encompass more of baseball trivia. Because there’s a lot out there that isn’t really being put to use, in any communally useless way. 

Its industry impact: To Be Determined. Wordle scores no longer clog the social media timelines of the entire planet’s population the way that they did in 2021, but the game appears to have settled in as a permanent modern-day newspaper distraction, the way that Jumble and bridge puzzles quietly killed half hours for generations in the print era. Immaculate Grid is, comparatively, still a newborn game; the limitations of its structure (teams and combinations have long since begun to repeat) could easily cause interest to peter out, and the current fracturing of Twitter can’t help its natural momentum. 

Or, just as easily, it could evolve, and seize a foothold in the sparse genre of sports puzzle games, joining Sporcle and MLB Pickle as casual web games perfect for early morning cubicle work and late nights with sleepless babies. 

Wins Above Replacement: 2.0. It’s an impressive rookie season, and we’ll see how its career goes from here. Perhaps some day we’ll get the timed grid, the sicko grid (most popular answers count as wrong), the Chad grid (only most popular answers count as correct), and a hundred other variants. A collection of toggles to turn on and off would help the game lean into its single greatest strength: the result, shared on Twitter or BlueSky or Geocities or whatever, which serves as a tiny little Andy Warhol, the player’s personal expression. Perhaps it’s to only select players who were employed by the Seattle Mariners. Perhaps it’s to find nine guys who fit the grid who are all named John. The artistry isn’t in beating the game, it’s in building the best challenge run.