GoKawiilWhether 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.)
Left: ESPN Gamecast / Right: Ribbie Image Credits:Ribbie (opens in a new window)
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.
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