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. The creator, Eric Brownrout, explained how he fell in love with the aesthetic of pixel art and started thinking about ways to apply it to a data or visualization tool. A quick Google search revealed the MLB public StatsAPI, and he realized he 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 because his tinkering yielded something that’s delightful: Ribbie is a project that would have easily taken months to build into something he could build and launch in a few weekends.
Visiting Ribbie 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. 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.
The data for all of these visualizations comes from the MLB’s API, which means that you can find most of the information you’d be used to seeing on other apps. However, it makes for a more descriptive play-by-play and gives a nostalgic feeling of playing old-school arcade games. Brownrout has recently added support for fantasy baseball, which allows people to add their rosters and track which players are currently active in their respective games.
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?
