A life in games
It started with an Atari 2600. Pac-Man, Journey Escape, Q*bert, Donkey Kong: those were the first games I played, and Pac-Man is the one that stuck. (It is the reason this company has a ghost in its name, but that comes later.) After the Atari came a Commodore 64, and at school there was the Apple IIe, which meant Number Munchers, The Oregon Trail and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
Then, in the late 80s, the original Nintendo. That is where baseball games and I got serious. I played RBI Baseball, and then every NES baseball game I could get my hands on. I didn't just play them, either. I ran full made-up leagues in a spiral notebook, in pencil: divisions, schedules, week-by-week stats, and standings I updated by erasing the row and writing it again.
The list kept going: Sega, a Tandy, a Macintosh Classic, a TurboGrafx-16, the Super Nintendo, the N64, the first PlayStation. Baseball was the thread through all of it. When I wasn't playing baseball games, I was inventing my own: throwing a ball off the garage door or into a pitchback net, making cardboard board games and card games mostly so I had something to track stats with, and buying Baseball Weekly every week so I could copy the standings into my notebook. Looking back, that magazine was my original spreadsheet.
Then I stepped away from baseball games for about a decade. What brought me back was MLB The Show 20, in 2020: online play, and how far stat tracking had come. Diamond Dynasty let me build my own team and play real opponents, and the kid with the notebook woke right back up. I found myself tracking pitch tendencies by hand during games, because nothing in the game did it the way I wanted.
From a Commodore 64 to the App Store
The same Commodore 64 that played games is where I started programming. From there it was BASIC, C and C++, and Java through the 90s and 2000s. Out of college I went into enterprise software development, and then followed the work to the web: JavaScript, HTML and CSS, all the way through Angular and React.
Today the apps are native iOS, written in Swift and SwiftUI, on a shared TypeScript and MongoDB platform, with the web side on Next.js. Since the end of 2022 I have been building with AI, first with ChatGPT and now mostly with Claude. It is a big part of how one person can go from an idea to an App Store listing. My GitHub profile sums up how I try to work in three short lines: ship it, own the stack, document everything.
All of it happens under RetroGhostLabs. The name is two loves combined: retro games and Pac-Man. It started as my avatar, the old ghost from Pac-Man, and the ghost became the company. RetroGhostLabs is me: a solo developer and founder, doing everything from idea to App Store.
Where the apps came from
PitchGuessr
PitchTunnels
DiamondOpsEvery RetroGhostLabs app started as something I made for myself first. None of them came from a business plan. They came from being annoyed.
PitchGuessr came straight out of the notebook habit. In 2021 I started tracking my opponents' pitches on a whiteboard between at-bats: a hand-drawn grid, a dry erase marker, a tally mark for every location. The whiteboard was across the room, so I moved to paper at my desk, then printed my own tracking sheets, then built a small web app that ran on my PC next to the TV. I kept building on it for years, and eventually it became a SwiftUI app that launched the same week MLB The Show 26 hit early access. Between pitches you are juggling pitch count, handedness, zone tendency and the game situation in a few seconds. My brain isn't built to hold three innings of pitch locations and still hit, so PitchGuessr does the remembering. You can read the full story in I tracked pitches on a whiteboard, then built PitchGuessr.
PitchTunnels has a similar story. I kept losing online because I had no real pitching plan, so I went looking for one: videos of real MLB pitchers explaining their tunnels, Statcast breakdowns, Reddit threads, and good players on Twitch whose sequences I tracked by hand. The idea is simple once it clicks: two pitches look identical out of the hand, then break to completely different spots, and the batter has to commit before he can tell. I turned all of that into my own location charts, one per handedness matchup, laminated and stacked on my desk. The problem was using them. By the time I'd flipped to the right chart, the pitch clock had run out. So I put them on my phone, filtered to the pitches my pitcher actually throws. That story is in I had laminated pitch tunnel charts, so I built an app.
DiamondOps came from a different itch. Looking at numbers is my favourite thing, and I have tracked things with graphs and charts since that spiral notebook. I would be on a Diamond Dynasty site and think, "I wish this could do this and that." As a developer, it was easier to build the view I wanted than to wait for someone else to. Honestly, I enjoy building tools for this game almost as much as playing it. DiamondOps opened in Early Access in May 2026 after about a year of building, and it now runs on the web at diamondops.gg and on iPhone and iPad.
How RetroGhostLabs works
RetroGhostLabs is a one-person studio, not a company with a marketing department. Every app is designed, built, tested, shipped and supported by me. If you email support, you are emailing the person who wrote the code.
Each app is built by an MLB The Show player, for MLB The Show players. They are for the grinder who tracks pitch tells in their head, who cares about quirks and sequencing, and who wants to know which card is actually more useful on Legend. If you play the game more casually, that is a perfectly good way to play; these tools just go deeper than most people need.
A few principles run through all of them. The apps are free to download, with optional upgrades, and I will always be upfront about what costs what. When an app makes a prediction, I want you to be able to see how the last ones turned out. And the apps get better by listening: most of what ships in an update started as a message from a player.
RetroGhostLabs is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Sony Interactive Entertainment, San Diego Studio or Major League Baseball.
Off the clock
Away from the keyboard, music is the big one. I love music and going to concerts, and if you are curious what I have on repeat, my listening history is on Last.fm, and the shows I have been to are on setlist.fm.
I used to boulder and climb. These days it is running, lifting and the everyday life stuff that fills the rest of the week.
What comes next
A new season of MLB The Show means a new season of RetroGhostLabs. I have a long list of things I want to build, and the next year is the busiest one yet.
I want the next round of tools to be things players ask for, not just what is in my head. The easiest way to make that happen is to tell me. Email support@retroghostlabs.com, or use the in-app feedback in any of the apps. If something is wrong, I want to hear that too.
Thanks for reading. Now go win your next at-bat.