Whether you’re a baseball fan or not, there’s a lot to love about Ribbie, a vibe-coded website that turns real-time Major League Baseball (MLB) data into 8-bit broadcasts with arcade-style, animated pixel art.
“I love how much data is available to baseball fans […] but when I try to follow a game with ESPN Gamecast, I find it kind of boring,” Ribbie creator Eric Brownrout told TechCrunch.
Still, the idea for Ribbie didn’t materialize until Brownrout generated a pixel-art image of Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber to use as his fantasy baseball team’s logo.
“I love the aesthetic, and started thinking about ways I might be able to apply it to a data or visualization tool,” Brownrout said. “A quick Google search revealed the MLB public StatsAPI, and I realized I could theoretically recreate an entire baseball game in the same pixel format.”
Like many other tech workers in San Francisco, Brownrout has now spent many nights experimenting with Claude Code. He stands out, though, because his tinkering yielded something that’s delightful.
“I used Claude Code and Codex extensively to turn a project that would have easily taken months into something I could build and launch in a few weekends,” he said. “I used Codex to build the image- and sprite-generation workflow, and Claude Code helped with the web app development. I’ve never built a video game before, so this was a new one for me.”
Visiting Ribbie — an onomatopoeia of the baseball stat RBI (runs batted in) — transports you to a pixel-art living room that shows which MLB games are being played, and you can select one to “watch” with Ribbie. (You can choose to zoom in on the screen and cut out the living room graphics, if you want something more practical.)
On mainstream play-by-play apps like ESPN’s Gamecast and MLB’s own Gameday, the interface is pretty basic, clearly displaying information without frills.
Ribbie prioritizes aesthetics instead, with unique pixel-art representations of every stadium and player. But it’s still simple enough to see the score of the game, as well as who’s pitching, hitting, or on base.
Because the data for all of these visualizations comes from the MLB’s API, you can find most of the information you’d be used to seeing on other apps, but it makes for a more descriptive play-by-play. Brownrout recently added support for fantasy baseball, which allows people to add their rosters and track which players are currently active in their respective games.
“I just really love the aesthetic of the miniature pixel-art stadiums,” Brownrout said. “There’s something so satisfying about it that’s hard to put a finger on. I think it’s one of the reasons people are obsessed with games like Stardew Valley. It’s an entire pixel world in the palm of your hand.”
Passion projects like Ribbie feel refreshing because they’re not trying to extract anything from us, something rare at a time when we’re so inured to being tracked everywhere online. But can projects like Ribbie last? Is it inevitable that the MLB’s lawyers will come after Ribbie because the mammoth sports organization feels threatened by a pixelized sprite of Shohei Ohtani?
These are real risks, but Brownrout thinks he’s got his bases covered (pun intended). He referenced a legal case from 2007 in which the court ruled that baseball stats are facts, and therefore are not copyrightable. This allows fantasy baseball products to exist without the MLB’s permission.
“The API is the same one that powers fantasy baseball websites, third-party stats sites, live game threads on Reddit […] So it’s historically been used for all types of official and fan-created projects,” he said. “Ultimately, the project is completely free and non-commercial, and I try to make it very clear on the website that Ribbie is an unaffiliated fan project. It’s a ‘love letter’ to baseball, not something trying to compete with MLB.tv.”
Though Brownout is pretty busy as the co-founder of AI SaaS platform Frigade, he’s still finding time to build Ribbie for the love of the game.
“I’m adding sound effects and fuller animations to make it a little easier to passively follow along with while it’s on in the background,” he said. “My neighbors must think I’m crazy, because last night I was in my bedroom doing 100 takes of ‘Ball! Strike! Out!’ on my iPhone to record for the Ribbie audio track.”
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