This was a post I had started in September of 2023. I played really consistently through the playoffs last year, but fell off during the off season as things got busy around the holidays. I’ve been getting back into the swing of including Immaculate Grid in my daily routine with the season coming up and was recently inspired to dust the draft off by a tweet from the Director of Design and Product Management for Sports Reference, Adam Darowski.
What is Immaculate Grid?
If you aren’t familiar, Immaculate Grid is a daily trivia game where you attempt to guess Major League Baseball players that meet the criteria for the two intersecting squares. You have 9 guesses to guess 9 squares, a nod to the immaculate inning. There are several other sports available, but baseball is the OG.
After you finish, you receive a “rarity score” based on how popular your answers are. The lower your score, the better you did!
Here is my Immaculate Grid wish list. Batter up!
User accounts
The number one thing I would like to see for the game is the ability to create an account and save your game history.
Currently, your grid history is stored in your browser. When switching to a different browser (or a different device), you do not have access to your history. You also lose your data if you accidentally clear your browser’s history. I had this happen once (I believe after an iOS update).
Thankfully, I have screenshots for most of my grids, so I can go back and recreate them as I originally filled each one out. But I always feel like I’m cheating when I do this. And I have no incentive to redo my grids until I know they’ll be preserved.
There’s so much more that could be done with user accounts!
Player Profiles
On Baseball Reference, every player has their own page with an overwhelming number of metrics, statistics, and awards. As an example, here’s the top of Mike Trout’s page.
I think it would be so cool to have a player profile just like this for Immaculate Grid! Here are some stats that I’ve been curious about in my own game play:
- Most common players used.
- Most common players used correctly.
- Most common players used incorrectly.
- My best and worst rarity scores.
- My best and worst rarity scores when certain teams or stat categories are included.
- My guess percentage for each team, each stat, and each award category. Examples: winning percentage for Boston Red Sox squares, 200+ career HR squares, etc.
- My (strike out? touch em all?) percentage for guessing an entire row for a given team, stat, or award category.
- My percentage by league (American, National, Negro).
- Some type of metric that weighs the percentage of correct answers against the total number of possible answers. For example, guessing a square with 10 possible answers is worth more than guessing one with 650 possible answers.
Final Rarity Scores
Rarity scores are calculated based on the sum of the overall percentages for your answers. If you have an empty square, it’s worth 100 points. But as more people complete their grids throughout the day, your rarity score changes.
It would be great to be notified of your final rarity score, or have that easily accessible. I guess if you return back to a past grid, it should show your “final” score. But it’s not clear if rarity scores only count if the grid is completed on the day of, or if it continues to update as more people complete that grid. A few other score related ideas:
- Highest/lowest rarity score with empty squares. For example: with 1 square empty, lowest is X and highest is y. With 2 squares, etc.
- Average final rarity score overall, over the course of a season (see below).
Private Groups
I have a few text message threads with friends that play the game. Usually we share our summaries after completing a grid, and wait until everyone has finished to send a screenshot of what our finished grid looks like.
It would be really great to have groups where you can see each other’s grids after everyone has completed their own or a given grid number. Maybe some basic stats like group average rarity score, average correct, etc. could be neat too.
Grid Randomizer
Sometimes I just want to generate a random grid on the fly to play. I don’t think each grid needs to be preserved, but it probably could receive a unique ID in case someone else stumbles on that same grid combination (or it is chosen as an official grid). Could also be cool to have the ability to specify a maximum and/or minimum number of possibilities each square should have. As an example: “a grid where squares have more than 50 possible answers but less than 300”.
Some More Random Ideas
- Ability to see a list of grids with a specific category. For example, Grids with Gold Glove Winner: 123, 321, 213.
- Introduce the concept of seasons. There could be averages, high/low scores, etc. for each season. Could be a calendar year, or reset after the World Series.
- Ability to replay grid for fun (unranked).
- Ability to replay a grid to continually improve your score.
- Ability to replay a completed grid where you can’t reuse players that you used in previous plays of that same grid.
- Ability to generate a random grid, with
Year in Review
A lot of social services have a “year in review” feature where they recap your activity throughout the year. Could be really cool to see overall statistics around how you perform during a year, a season, or an off season.
Milestones and badges
It would be really cool to get badges or milestones added to your profile. The way the Apple Watch and Apple Fitness does this comes to mind. These could line up with baseball statistics:
- Grids completed. 100, 200, 300, etc.
- Iron Man: 2,632 grids completed (hopefully we get there!)
- Complete game: 9 grids completed
- Batting 400: sustain a percentage over 400.
- etc.
Badges could be available any time, or only on specific days encouraging people to participate regularly.
Conclusion
These are pretty disorganized thoughts I’ve had over time. But hopefully some of them make it into the actual game!
If you are reading this and work for Sports Reference, I’d love to chat over coffee. Or better yet, chat over a beer and a hot dog at a ballpark. I know at least one of you is local to me!
One response to “My Immaculate Grid Wish List”
User accounts for the love of all things baseball reference!!!