Immaculate Grid has baseball fans hooked as sport's latest rabbit hole

Publish date: 2024-05-09

I’m hooked.

It’s helpless. It’s hopeless. This was the week that the Immaculate Grid entered my life, and it’s impossible to explain just how deep that rabbit hole has become. It’s a little like the time I discovered that every “Cheers” episode was on Hulu, a little like when that Beatles “Get Back” documentary was released on Disney+, and for the first time since 1979 a week passed in my house during which ESPN was not on my television.

Only better.

(Or worse, I suppose.)

Immaculate Grid is the brainchild of a glorious man named Brian Minter, a software developer in suburban Atlanta, and it has recently exploded in popularity because baseball-reference.com — which, as you surely know by now, already specializes in rabbit holes — purchased it.

(And if you’ll permit me a serious aside to all this fun, please read the wonderful story my friend Tyler Kepner wrote about this in The New York Times this week, at the same time he and a bunch of very good and talented people that comprised the Times’ sports section were sold out by their bosses in the most cold-blooded — and myopic — office bludgeoning you could ever imagine.)

Immaculate Grid has become a popular baseball game the last few weeks. Screengrab

Immaculate Grid — named after the three-strikeouts-in-nine-pitches “immaculate inning” — is a simple game: Every day there’s a grid, three across and three down, for nine boxes. Six of them involve naming a player who played for two teams lined up on the grid. Three others involve three of the teams and a random stat — 500 homers, 300 wins, etc.

The beauty of this is that your best score comes if you guess the pairing that the least amount of other participants have used. That is half the fun. And it actually can inspire some fury, too: In my first try at this game earlier this week, the pairing was “Giants” and “500 home runs.” I proudly typed “Willie Mays” … but the percentage given was just 4 percent — which is actually a good thing for your overall score but also means, I am sure, that the overwhelming percentage went to Barry Bonds (unless there’s a huge Mel Ott faction out there).

But like any other great rabbit hole, even the frustrating things are overcome — and overwhelmed — by the Good Stuff. I’m reminded of a favorite podcast of mine, the “Revolutions” series by Mike Duncan that a friend of mine turned me on to. While there are stretches of, say, the French Revolution that drag for an episode or two, the overall magnificence of the work always shines through.

Willie Mays was a possible answer in a recent Immaculate Grid. Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

Same deal with “Immaculate Grid,” when you’re trying to come up with the least-likely player who played for, say, both the Mets and Royals (I’m proud to say I picked Amos Otis, as did just 2 percent of other players on Saturday) or the Cardinals and Orioles (Andre Miller, 10 percent!).

Now you may ask yourself: Do I really need another time-suck in my life? You already have daily crossword puzzles. You already have Sudoku. You already have Wordle, and the various musical “Heardle” games, and you probably play some form of Scrabble or Word Chums on your phone (with multiple opponents, no doubt), and if all else fails there isn’t a device in the world that doesn’t allow you to play Solitaire.

And we won’t even get into binge-watching “The Bear” or “Jack Ryan” or “The Righteous Gemstones,” or binge rewatching “Mad Men” and “Eastbound and Down” and “Truth Be Told,” or making time for the documentaries on Bill Walton and Rock Hudson and Mary Tyler Moore, or squeezing in your regular podcasts like “SmartLess” or “The Rewatchables” or “The Woj Pod,” and maybe you still want to make time for a book every now and again ….

Yeah. You probably don’t need something else.

But if you’re a baseball fan? You need the Immaculate Grid. I know I do. It’s helpless. It’s hopeless. I’m hooked.

Vac’s Whacks

I don’t know why the NBA thinks this bonus tournament that nobody seemed even remotely interested in is so groundbreaking. We’ve seen it for years, but it used to be called “the NIT.”

One of the fun parts of writing that ’88 piece that ran in The Post on Thursday was talking to Darryl Strawberry, who sounds and seems terrific. He has visited schools, hospitals and places of worship to speak about the evils of opioids, and next week he’ll be at two maximum-security state penitentiaries in Missouri with the same messages for convicts: Say no to drugs.

Daryl Strawberry throws out the first pitch at the Mets’ game against the Yankees in July 2022, Getty Images

There’ll be a wonderful event Tuesday night at 7:30 at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale. Old friend Ed Randall will interview Steve Garvey and Roy White, focusing on the Dodgers-Yankees rivalry of 1977-78, and proceeds will go to Fans for the Cure, a charity devoted to prostate cancer awareness, education and screening. For ticket info: http://www.fansforthecure.org/talkingbaseball.

Every now and again, it’s good to take the pulse of the pilgrims at Stan’s, around the corner from Yankee Stadium. The general consensus from a visit last Saturday: The Yanks look as dead in the water as Bud Light right now.

Whack Back at Vac

Jay Cummings: After seeing the Starr Insurance patch on the pinstripes, I called and they were offering heart attack and depression insurance for watching the Yankee games, and they also had a special, throwing in the Mets. At least the Mets were on Apple+ Friday; too bad the Yankees weren’t on Amazon Prime.

Vac: Ladies and gentlemen, New York baseball in July 2023!

Alan Hirschberg: The NBA’s new, fake “in-season tournament” sounds as exciting as LIV golf.

Vac: I’m willing to be open-minded about a lot of things, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard one NBA fan clamor for an in-season NBA tournament, and I know a lot of NBA fans.

Adam Silver and the NBA announced an in-season tournament earlier this week. Getty Images

@MyersLorne: In regards to your column about the ’88 Mets, I was always disappointed that they didn’t bring back Ray Knight and traded Kevin Mitchell after winning the ’86 World Series.

@MikeVacc: You’ll be hard pressed to find one member of the ’86 team who won’t insist that they would’ve won another if Knight had still been on the team.

Steve Sachs: Do you think Daniel Vogelbach even owns a baseball glove?

Vac: See, there are a lot of cheap, easy jokes to make about ol’ Vogey. But this one has a little something extra. Bravo.

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