I grew up just on the other side of the Dot Com Bubble. I didn’t spend time on forums or online bulletin boards. I never had dial-up internet as a kid. But I’ve watched Wikipedia grow from a highly suspicious source into the default first-pass place to go for basic, accurate information. More pertinent to us all, I’ve gone from using a 2005 Baseball Encyclopedia bought at my local bookstore to, well, not doing that because of sites like Retrosheet, Baseball Reference, and FanGraphs.
These foundational online resources continue expanding their toolsets to make baseball research more accessible. Baseball Reference’s Stathead tool is perfect for people who love numbers trivia. Which batter hit the most home runs off Bob Gibson? You enter Bob Gibson in the Versus Finder and learn it was longtime Cub, Billy Williams, with ten.
If you ever dip your toe into the water of advanced stats, there’s no better free site than FanGraphs. They’ve been on a tear recently, building out fancy leaderboards and experimental research interactions that use MLB StatCast data. The FanGraphs blog is the most thorough and entertaining baseball writing I regularly read, even if some of their statistical deep dives go way over my head.
But this article isn’t to espouse the virtues of these common resources. The beautiful thing about the internet is that people can build silly, small projects and toss them out into the world. It’s inexpensive, it’s fun. Here are a few such creations I’ve found for baseball fans. They are in no particular order, and range from fabulously inane to shockingly useful.
Ribbie TV takes MLB’s game data and cleverly renders it as a pixel art baseball video game of yore, displayed on a fake CRT television screen. Pair it with a radio broadcast or let it sit silently in the corner of your screen, and you have a fun way to check the score of a game. It can be a bit slow to update, but it makes up for that with its overall cuteness.
This little website is fantastic. Straight from its creator:
This app is an attempt to answer the question “What game should I watch today?”
If you’d happily watch whatever the most intriguing game is on a given night, whether because you only have a loose allegiance to an individual team or perhaps your favorite crew has an off day, then navigate here. Every game is given a score from 0 to 100, with higher scores representing more intriguing elements. That could be because an ace is on the mound, a top prospect is making a debut, or there are vital playoff implications. Perhaps an aging slugger is only a few hits away from their next milestone, or you just learned that a team is going for their tenth straight win. Either way, it’s a great spot to go by default if you know you want to watch baseball tonight, but you’re not entirely sure which game is worth the commitment.
Has Fernando Tatis Jr. Hit a Home Run?
Fernando Tatis Jr. did not hit a home run in the first two months of the 2026 regular season. Given his pedigree, that was a shock even one month into the season. So, in a fit of classic internet humor, someone made a website that asked whether he had yet managed to hit a home run.
Until May 30, it was easy to manage the message on display.
Now it’s a fun Tatis home run tracker with silly, almost garish designs and a log with both basic and advanced statistics about each dinger. It would be more impactful had Tatis remained without a homer until I finished this post, but we still have the memories.
While MLB releases condensed games and various overviews of the previous day, they aren’t nearly as flexible as Grounds Crew Baseball.1 You can watch quick highlights from any games of interest. A simple interface lets you swap between games, or you can begin watching from a big button in the middle and keep clicking Next until sated. While I’m satisfied by MLB’s fifteen-minute overview, this implementation is still plenty smart for someone who wants a bit more control in a clean interface.
I can say a lot about how bad MLB’s app has become. In fact, most sports apps are a bit rough, whether due to rough edges, gambling odds, advertisements, or trying to be overly flexible to accommodate all possible sports. (Obviously, MLB doesn’t have all of those problems. It’s just a slow, bad app.)
Play-O-Graph is the page for a sane baseball fan to view the status of today’s games. Made by the same guy behind Grounds Crew Baseball, it’s added minor league and KBO data. Every bit of interface is accessible, clean, and clear. Until I landed on the beta of a baseball app that I won’t cover here, I had a shortcut icon to this website on my home screen. If baseball scores are what you most care about, don’t bother with anything else. Use that ESPN or Yahoo! Sports app for NFL or whatever, but give baseball its space to shine.
We love more good puns!
This webpage with a straightforward name has no intention of copying Play-O-Graph’s setup. It’s an ambient music generator that streams live when MLB games are in action, and is otherwise unavailable. More a creative techno-musical project than something strictly related to sports, its output is somehow still evocative of baseball. It ramps up during important plays, but is generally mellow and flows along perfectly for background noise while working. Eastern Standard Time offers only occasional day games that intersect with my workday, so I haven’t spent much time here, but I admire the orthogonal thought that led to its creation and the quality of the implementation.
It’s a pun: the site’s creator wanted to watch highlights while enjoying his morning coffee. ↩︎