The Dale Sveum .009% Club

Playing Immaculate Grid with baseball cards

By Jesse Spector

If you haven’t played Immaculate Grid, it’s a daily game that Brian Minter developed last year which has found a home at Sports Reference: you have nine guesses to fill nine squares with baseball players (or another sport’s athletes) based on who fits the category of a 3x3 grid’s columns and rows.

You get one chance per day, but if you fill out a grid and want to play more, there’s always incognito mode or another browser. Yesterday, having already played a fun grid (my favorites are team-based rather than statistics-based), I decided to see if I could pull some baseball cards out of a shoebox and rifle through those cards until finding nine players who would make a grid. I succeeded.

The percentages listed with each player represent how many of Immaculate Grid’s 50,000-plus daily users selected a player for each box. This is how the game is scored: you get the sum of the nine squares’ percentages as a “rarity score.” I’ve seen some folks get as low as 3 — this one came to 18.

Nearly half of the rarity score for this grid comes from Rafael Palmeiro, who won two Gold Gloves at first base in Baltimore before his fugazi Gold Glove in 1999 with the Rangers. That was the year Palmeiro played 28 games at first base and 128 as Texas’ designated hitter, winning the defensive award over Tino Martinez and forever convincing me that the Gold Glove was bunk.

The 1993 Fleer card that I pulled was from Palmeiro’s first go-around with the Rangers, and not as exciting for this grid as the other 1993 Fleer that came out of a shoebox, the center square of Mike Moore, seen pitching with the A’s, and with “SIGNED BY TIGERS” in the corner — perfection for the Oakland/Detroit intersection.

This grid, for having a rarity score of only 18, knocked my socks off with the level of star power it delivered. Tim Raines and Ivan Rodriguez are Hall of Famers, Palmeiro would be if not for the stigma of his finger-wagging at Congress amid the drug scandal, and Kenny Lofton should be in Cooperstown. David Wells is definitely a Hall of Very Good player, threw a perfect game, and wore number 33 on the Yankees at the same time that I wore it on the high school team at Saint Ann’s. While I’ve got no particular connection to Miguel Dilone, he’s here on a dinged-up 1983 Topps card, representative of the first cards I got my hands on as a little kid, and definitely more than dinged up along the way — I’ll love that set forever.

And then there’s Dion James. By the time I got to his card, I already had most of the grid filled up. Primarily an outfielder, I wondered if he had played any first base for the Yankees, and it turned out that he did: once in 1993 and six times in 1995. I remember him for his bat — literally, that is, because when the Yankees had FanFest at the old New York Coliseum in the 1995-96 offseason, I bought a game-used Dion James bat for my dad.

It’s hard for me to believe that James only played 273 games with the Yankees, because I associate him so strongly with my dad in those years. While I don’t specifically remember it, it’s funny that the top hit for “Dion James Yankees” on YouTube also involves Lofton, long before he also became a guy my dad loved. He really dug lefty-swinging journeyman outfielders on the Yankees. This may be why I love Jesse Winker on the Mets so much.

Also in on that play from 1993, young Cleveland third baseman Jim Thome, who was the No. 1 answer for the Orioles-White Sox square on this Immaculate Grid.