These are unforgettable All-Star snapshots, midsummer memories of a sport steeped in tradition. Pittsburgh-winning Tony Gwynn took the win on the slide. A majestic Cal Ripken Jr. hit a farewell home run for the All-Stars in Seattle.
Hall of Famers like Stan Musial, Derek Jeter, and many other great players had something in common. That is, I never changed teams except for the All-Star Game. Their idiosyncratic identities give their stars extra brilliance, but they keep them far away from the new game that’s taking baseball by storm.
Name is pure white gridAnd apologies to the rising Atlanta Braves, who had an eight-man National League squad for Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Seattle, but this is the hottest thing in sports.
Named after a perfect inning in which a pitcher takes a side strikeout on nine pitches, the grid is a daily quiz in the form of a tic-tac-toe board designed by suburban Atlanta software developer Brian Minter. The game averages about 200,000 players every weekday, he said.
“I thought it was going to be one of those niche games that didn’t have a lot of fans,” Minter said in a phone interview. “But it’s not like this.”
Players are only allowed 9 guesses to fill the 9 boxes with answers corresponding to the categories listed at the top and left. Most of these categories are teams, so the correct answer would be someone who played in the franchise listed above and beside each square.
Like an online brain teaser, the site is a perfect match for Baseball Reference, which acquired the site for an undisclosed sum on Tuesday. This is also a victory for a former major leaguer who traveled around the country.
“I love it,” said former outfielder Mike Cameron, who coached Saturday’s Futures Game in Seattle and played for eight teams over 17 seasons. “When I think about all the players I played against, my head starts spinning. I played against every team in every division and had a lot of teammates from the beginning. I know a lot of those players because I was just there.”
Former six-team catcher from 1996 to 2006, Todd Green plays every day comparing grids with his two sons and son-in-law. He has taken advantage of himself twice and he playfully scolded his family for not doing so, he said.
“We try to fill that slot with back-up catchers from our playing days,” Green said. “We all jumped a bit. At first he was just trying to find all nine answers, but now he’s taken more time.”
Minter, 29, had seen similar games online, but wanted to see if it was possible to create an automated grid using a new JavaScript framework and a different hosting provider. rice field. This worked well and allowed players to instantly panic when the correct answer appeared on the grid in the form of a player’s headshot. Until Tuesday, only high-profile players tended to have real photos, giving their careers an unofficial status symbol.
“It’s kind of like, play, but try not to get too excited,” former 8-team relief pitcher CJ Nicowski said, turning a blank headshot into a Twitter profile picture. “But the time has come for those who know.”
After the sale to Baseball Reference, nearly every player now matches the actual headshots displayed at the top of the website’s stats page when selected in the grid. The new host also provides a complete list of all possible answers to each box, but otherwise the game has the clean, simple setup Minter has been using since he started playing the game this spring. is provided.
“The main goal is not to screw things up,” said Sean Forman, president of Baseball Reference’s parent company Sports Reference, which manages statistics for several sports. rice field. “It’s incredibly rare to have a product that fits our audience so quickly. However, we are working to launch those sites as soon as possible.”
Forman first became aware of Minter’s site earlier this season when visitors to Baseball Reference’s “multi-franchise” tool spiked.
“Two months ago we had very little traffic,” Forman said. “Now he’s one of the top five visited pages every day.”
This could mean that most players stumble somewhere, even though some users are cheating. Tuesday’s average score was 6.9 out of 9 on the afternoon bonus grid. Minter said last month he noticed that adding rarity scores (the lower the better) would encourage players to ask for the most obscure answers instead of asking for answers. Simply complete the grid.
The site immediately calculates the popularity of each answer for the day. For example, by late Tuesday afternoon, 50 percent of users chose Tuesday American League starter Gerrit Cole for the Astros/Yankees plaza versus Nikowski, who played one and two seasons in Houston. Users were only 0.01 percent. A few months for the Yankees.
The sum of the 9 responses (with a 100 point penalty for leaving the box out) creates the rarity score.
“The flip side of rarity score is, can you get the most popular person instead of trying to get the worst person everywhere?” Nitkowski said. “I think it’s fun either way.”
If the All-Star Game is a showcase for baseball’s greatest achievements, the rarest Immaculate Grid Board represents the opposite, honoring more random names from the nearly 23,000 who have ever played in the majors. It’s the place.
“It gives you the opportunity to think about players that you haven’t really thought about before,” Minter said. “When I think of the Astros/Yankees, I immediately think of Gerrit Cole. But it’s fun to think of those older players. Give me a reason.”
