Following a live baseball game just got a whole lot more visually appealing thanks to Ribbie, an independent web project that converts real-time Major League Baseball data into retro 8-bit broadcasts with arcade-style animated pixel art. Created by Eric Brownrout, co-founder of AI SaaS platform Frigade, Ribbie was born from a love of pixel art aesthetics and a desire to make game-watching more engaging than traditional interfaces like ESPN Gamecast or MLB Gameday.
Built in weekends with Claude Code and Codex
Brownrout leveraged generative AI tools to accelerate development. "I used Claude Code and Codex extensively to turn a project that would have taken months into something I could build and launch in a few weekends," he told TechCrunch. The toughest part was generating sprites and pixel art to represent every stadium and player, but AI automated much of the workflow. The result is a website that drops you into a pixel-art living room, where you can pick a live MLB game and watch it with descriptive animations. For a more practical view, you can zoom into the screen and remove the room graphics.
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Official MLB data and legal safety
Ribbie uses the same public MLB API that powers fantasy baseball sites and third-party stats platforms. Brownrout is aware of potential legal risks but feels protected by a 2007 court ruling that baseball statistics are facts and not copyrightable. "The project is completely free and non-commercial, and I make it very clear on the website that Ribbie is an unaffiliated fan project," he says. It's a love letter to baseball, not a competitor to MLB.tv. He recently added fantasy baseball support, letting users track their rosters in real time.
Sound design and future plans
Despite his day job, Brownrout keeps improving Ribbie. He is adding sound effects and fuller animations to make it easier to passively follow a game. "My neighbors must think I'm crazy: last night I did 100 takes of 'Ball! Strike! Out!' on my iPhone to record for the Ribbie audio track," he jokes. The project echoes other low-tech but high-impact initiatives, such as the Meta Glasses aiming to redefine wearable computing. The idea that a fan can build something this polished with accessible tools is inspiring for the tech community.
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Pixel art, originally a technical constraint in 1980s video games, is now a deliberate aesthetic choice. According to Wikipedia, modern pixel art often evokes nostalgia. Ribbie perfectly exemplifies this: it blends data, AI, and art into a product that doesn't try to monetize the user, but simply makes them rediscover the beauty of the game. In an era of obsessive tracking, projects like this are a breath of fresh air.
