The Rarity Score

Why Being Remembered Isn’t Always About Being Known

*Spoiler Alert: Reading this may raise my score in The Immaculate Grid. Proceed with caution.

Most baseball fans know about The Immaculate Grid. Hosted on Baseball Reference and powered by Sports Reference, it is a daily game of remembrance, a test of both memory and obscurity. The premise is simple: nine squares to fill in, each one formed at the intersection of a row and a column. The categories, typically MLB teams or notable distinctions like MVP or First-Round Draft Pick, guide your answers.

Your task? Find a player, past or present, who fits both the row and the column. But, the real challenge is in the twist: rarity wins. You are not just trying to find a correct answer, you are trying to find the rarest correct answer in each of the nine boxes. The goal is to be immaculate, like the “immaculate inning,” when a pitcher strikes out the side with just nine pitches. Nine pitches, three strikeouts. Nine guesses, nine correct answers. Pure precision.

To underscore how rare and special this is, I asked current Blue Jays starting pitcher, Kevin Gausman—back when he was with the Giants—what moment made feel like he had truly “arrived” In the big leagues. He did not hesitate.

“When I threw an immaculate inning,” he said.

Now, an immaculate inning to me as a hitter would be one pitch, one home run, but I digress.

That is the spirit of the grid game: finding something remarkable hidden in plain sight. There are many answers that fit each square, but the joy comes from unearthing something obscure. It is not very satisfying to plug in Aaron Judge every time you see a Yankees square. Sure, he fits, but everyone is probably guessing him too. Bad for your score, good for being right.

In summary, the game has nine squares and you get nine guesses (pitches). Rarity wins. There is no timer—although I have suggested adding an optional one. A wrong guess (a player who doesn’t meet the criteria) costs you one pitch, meaning a perfect, immaculate grid is no longer possible. And the more common your correct answer is, the higher your rarity score climbs. Your score for each square is the percentage of people who chose the same answer. The lower the percentage, the better. The goal? A final score that shows your baseball brain went where few others did.

Every so often, I hear from a fan that says I was in their Grid for the day. It is a nice feeling to be remembered, even for just a moment. I love reminiscing about ‘70s and ‘80s baseball players, so I play the Grid when I can. Once, my ESPN Radio play-by-play partner Roxy Bernstein and I filled out the Grid while driving from Houston to Dallas. We put our heads together and got a rarity score of 6. That means, on average, our answers were chosen by less than 1% of the people. That is a solid score.

That is the goal. Find scarcity.

But then I started thinking about what that really means to me as a former player.

In truth, being someone that Grid players want to find is the definition of a double-edged sword. To be a great Grid answer means you are rare. To be rare sometimes means you are forgotten. Many players do not get picked often because not many people remember them. So, if I am a great Grid answer, does that mean that people do not remember, or even know, me?

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I posted on X:

“The Grid happens to be a place where you are forgettably memorable or memorably forgettable.”

Since there are 30 teams in MLB and most players’ fame is local, it makes sense that you can have a whole fanbase of an organization that knows you well. For me, fans in Philadelphia or Chicago. But in Pittsburgh or Seattle? Maybe not. Even with years in baseball media, people may not recall my exact major league path, the teams I played for, stat by stat.

Even with a Hall of Famer like Ken Griffey Jr., people forget he played briefly for the Chicago White Sox.

The advantage of playing the Grid as a former player is that I remember the guys who passed through my teams, even if just for a moment. That was why Steve Montgomery came to mind for the square at the intersection of the Oakland A’s and the Philadelphia Phillies. I played with Steve in Philly. I also faced him in spring training one year. He was pitching for the A’s when I scored on a contact play from third.

A’s - Phillies - Montgomery.

He was the perfect answer. His rarity score had so many zeroes after the decimal point that he practically did not register. That is gold in the Grid world.

When you retire from playing, you grapple with what your relationship will be with the game. In an ever-changing landscape, it is easy to see how you may become rarer with time. If I am 0.1% today, in five years, I might be 0.01%, until there are so many zeros between the decimal and the “1” that it might as well be zero. Forgotten.

I have made guesses where I am almost certain I was the only one to guess that player that day out of hundreds of thousands. But that is only because I played with that player (in this case, Eddie Zambrano of the Cubs). I also had a second, back-up guess that day—another near-invisible choice with the same rarity, or close to it.

But being “desirable” in the Grid does not feel like being a rare jewel or a vintage wine. It is not about growing in value over time. It is about slowly slipping into obscurity. I cannot name the extra outfielder on the 1953 Detroit Tigers or where else he might have played in the ‘60s. One day, that will be me.

And yet, maybe I will be remembered—not for the stats or the teams, but for something more personal. A moment. A connection. I still remember Phillies catcher Bob Boone’s handwritten autograph as the first one I ever received through the mail. That mattered to me. Maybe I will stay in a fan’s heart because of something I said, or did, or signed—not necessarily something I hit.

Still, I realize that both can be true. You can be remembered… and forgotten. Many Grid game players do not recall that I was a first-rounder. Or that I played for the Rangers. Or that I once had 200 hits in a season.

We spend a lot of time trying not to be closed into the boxes the world tries to create around us, with or without our permission. The Rangers and Cubs box reminds me of being traded after my dad passed away. The Phillies and 200-hit box? That is the year I notched my 200th hit against my old Cubs, the team that traded me—the one that did not see me as an everyday centerfielder. And that hit? It was a homerun which felt like that perfect mix of sweet revenge and personal accomplishment in one moment.

I will never forget checking the Cubs and Phillies box. The Cubs traded me less than 24 hours after my grandfather passed, marking the first Christmas my family spent apart and the burial of my grandfather whose favorite question to ask me was: “You still hitting that ball?”

We lived a life inside those boxes— bigger than uniforms or stats. And sometimes, even I forget the finer details of my career. But that is replaced by a fan’s memory of the teams where I played and the impact I may have made on and off the field. That is more enduring.

We may be rare, forgotten in some circles, but uplifted in others. We realize we can, and do, live beyond the box.

Not every player gets remembered in the headlines or the highlight reels. Few get inducted in the Hall of Fame or become the face of a video game. But if you make it to a Grid box—if someone, somewhere, pauses to think of you—that means you left something behind. A memory. A moment. A connection that outlasts the stats. A sense that to them it may not be about rarity, but about something personal and positive in their experience with a player.

We all live inside boxes at times—teams, roles, seasons, sorrows. But we also live beyond them, in the hearts of those who remember not just what we did, but thankfully, who we were.

That’s not just a rarity score.

That’s legacy.