The hottest online game in sports right now is the brainchild of a software developer living in Braves Country.
Brian Minter started working on Immaculate Grid, an online baseball-themed trivia game, as a personal project to explore a new JavaScript framework. What he developed was a viral three-by-three grid where users are challenged to name nine Major League Baseball (MLB) players that match with the criteria set by each cell’s row and column.
Users have been drawn to the game over the last 100 days because it tests a fan’s knowledge of career-defining stats and challenges them to name baseball players past and present. Examples from a recent game includes: Name a LA Dodger who had over 200 hits in a season? and What about a player who was on both the New York Mets and the New York Yankees during his career? Some categories may have hundreds of potential answers, others may have just a handful.
“I saw a lot of people just on social media filling out these kinds of grids manually…and anything that’s manual is ripe for opportunity if you can automate it,” Minter told Hypepotamus.
It is one thing to build a game, it is a totally different ballgame (pun intended) to create a viral game sensation. Immaculate Grid’s growth is something akin to what we saw with Wordle, a daily word game that became its own online hit and was ultimately bought by the New York Times early in 2022.
An Atlanta native, Minter said he’s been a big Braves fan his entire life. He officially launched the Immaculate Grid on April 4th of this year. Minter added that it was mainly friends and family playing the game during the first month, but the website went “viral” once it was shared on the Baseball Subreddit and the popular Foolish Baseball Twitter page.
The puzzle has been going strong for 100 days, and has attracted over 100,000 daily users looking to test their knowledge of America’s pastime.
Next Step: Acquisition
So what’s next for Minter after his viral success? Well, the Immaculate Grid made headlines this week as it was acquired by Sports Reference LLC. The company runs the website Baseball Reference, a statistics site popular with baseball enthusiasts that reaches around one million users a day.
The details of the deal were not disclosed, the acquisition has already had a major impact on the game itself. Immaculate Grid is now embedded into the landing page of Baseball Reference, making it easier for users to test their knowledge on the 23,010 baseball players throughout MLB history.
Sports Illustrated reported earlier today that new features have rolled out on the grid giving users the ability to click through potential players to see other players they could have selected.
As sports writer Dan Gartland wrote, “it’s a sports nerd’s dream.”
