Playball – Watch Mlb Games From a Terminal

Now that is an understatement.

Yeah, you can see the statsapi.mlb.com endpoints in the files of the features folder.

> I misinterpreted "watch" completely different

(profile bio) > I’m Josh; from Minnesota

Say no more.

It would be neat to recreate early radio, where a broadcaster would get a play-by-play over the wire and then announce it as if watching it, complete with sound effects. It was one of Ronald Reagan's early jobs.

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should"

- Everyone's favorite chaotician

Perhaps not posting the “here’s how to destroy a nice thing” ideas, which makes them more widely known and thus more likely to be created by someone, would help reduce the incidences of “nice thing destroyed”. That next step towards destruction is never quite as obvious to everyone as you think. Sure, a few people have probably thought of it, but odds are they won’t do anything about it. Sharing them widely like this is like leading a flash mob to hold up lightning rods in a thunderstorm and saying “it would be such a shame if lightning struck one of us”.

It seems like MLB themselves have been experimenting with this. On their website, they have a feature called "gameday" that animates the game. For a while now they've had a 2d view, but now they also have a 3d view that you can switch to.

It is buggy as hell, but neat that you can move around the field and watch player movement off the ball. But there are a ton of glitches, like players getting frozen or duplicated, batters, umps, and catchers getting swapped (funny to see the ump at bat), and mixups with mount visits. In time, I can imagine this as a great way to watch though. Especially for novice players and fans learning the game and trying to figure out things like who should back up which throws in which situations etc.

> The obvious next step is to train a model to turn these detailed updates into realistic live-action video.

Wasn't obvious to me- sounds like you've got an idea that might be fun to pursue.

When I first read the description of this project I actually assumed that it was using ASCII in the terminal to recreate the current state of the game...

Why would they shit a brick over people using data to ask a computer to generate videos of... a game they already captured video of?

That video would be such slop. It wont be as fun as watching an actual pitch/hit.

Also the fun baseball stuff, the kind jomboy covers, wont ever be in the video because its not in the feed

It would be funny to reverse generate Stratomatic card picks and dice rolls from the real data.

Yea I agree. Pretty loose usage of the term. More like "Watch MLB stats change in a terminal window".

Yeah Im just now realizing how the baseball scoring conventions are basically a DSL for a baseball game. There is a standardized way for expressing what happens in a game. I wonder if this has been leveraged in any interesting programs.

here is an example inning:

K | 6-3 | BB | 2B (RBI, R1-H) | F8

There are also fans who record what happens in baseball games purely for their own enjoyment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_scorekeeping

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaseballScorecards/

https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1lzpwrq/reasons_i... / https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/68qdm9/people_who...

I love scoring games when I go to a ballgame. It keeps me engaged, and it's fun to see how I mess up compared to the professional scorers. Did you do MLB scoring? If so, do you do scoring if you see a game now, or are you sick of it? :D

Has any of it been automated?

It's this company [1].

They pay people to watch every play of every game and apply a formula that grades the relative difficulty in order to develop their advanced statistical models.

Some of this stuff has been automated, but a lot still hasn't and still relies on the "eye test".

[1] https://www.sportsinfosolutions.com/

Is it fun to get paid to watch baseball or does the constant live updating take the joy out of it?

This was an old timey job of my pop....covered all the local minor league baseball games .

My first thought of this app is that it would just show a filled in version of a scorecard in person - one of the first hobbies of mine

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Lee-rich...

I just wish MLB and its broadcasters weren't pushing gambling so hard. It's ridiculous and bringing so much toxicity to the sport.

I get why people say its boring but I love it as well. I don't follow it anymore really and if I tune in randomly I feel similarly - it seems boring. It just takes some exposure before you can appreciate it. The emergent narratives within games, series, and seasons is really special.

I for one wish it would go further. Despite being in Austin, I often can't watch the Astros - as if I'm going to drive a six hour round trip to go to every game otherwise - without subscribing to some channel which is inevitably only available with companies I don't want to do business with. I'd happily pay ~300/yr for a streaming subscription that gets me all those games though...

I think streaming is part of why I DON'T watch baseball. The DTC streaming package for my local team is $20/month. Baseball is something that I would flip on the local team and watch after work passively. The value just isn't there for $20!/month.

I also think it has a huge negative impact on youth interest in baseball. I personally got into baseball as a kid because my father would do the same - get home from work and turn on the game because it was on OTA TV. How are you getting kids interested in the sport if they can't even watch because the parents don't want to fork over that cost? Huge ripple effect. The RSN's which typically carry a vast majority of local baseball games (mlb.tv is blacked out for local markets) bet big on streaming and lost a ton of money[1]. They, in turn, attempted to gouge the remaining dedicated fans at an inflated cost. I already pay $82/month for YoutubeTv. If it's not on there, I just won't watch - in turn, I also go to the ballpark less and really don't keep up with the local team at all.

[1] Bally Sports (Diamond Sports Group) 2023 Bankruptcy

I always thought the sharpest declines were around steroids and the 94 strike.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4735/sports.aspx

The data shows that the biggest drop was around the 60s. This is probably due to TV. The strike looks like it had some effect and the steroids era not much.

I think baseball needs more national stars. People like Ohtani and Judge, but they are not on the level Ken Griffey, Jr. was in 93-94. None of them reach the level of Mahomes or Manning either.

I've been getting into baseball and what I love about it is the rising tension.

Like how people take turns playing offense and defense and how you can only get runs by touching home plate - and if the inning is over, you just lose all your progress.

It kind of just feels like a board game with some many things happening at once in such a small amount of time.

As an international fan of several US sports MLB are miles ahead on streaming. I can access every single game through their in-house streaming service. Live or on demand. I can pause, skip ahead in-between innings, choose TV or radio commentary. I can watch on my computer, TV, phone, web. They even had a cool experimental Vision Pro app. The NBA isn't too far behind these days. The NFL was good but they've started selling their own in-house streaming rights to national broadcasters internationally so I've went from their decent in-house service to a pretty terrible third-party one.

Gridiron football would probably work well for something like this: each play has a line of scrimmage, yards gained or lost, and a summary of the play (eg: from their own 47 yard- line, QB#3 threw a lateral to RB#8 with 3:08 remaining in the third quarter and gained 2 yards and was brought down by DT#10). Most importantly, there are defined "plays" that run from snap to down, which means you can summarize it.

NBA play would be very different and very difficult, because there are no defined plays, only possessions. It'd include relative locations on the floor (lane, 2pt area, 3pt area), list of players who touched the ball, and what the outcome was (2pt, 3pt, turnover, out-of-bounds, etc).

I saw it mentioned elsewhere in these comments, but plaintextsports.com is my goto for live sportsball stats

MLBT is terrific. Seems better than playball. I like having it open on a second screen.

Espn has a feed of soccer events (cards, shots, goals, etc), but that doesn't give you anything close to a complete state-of-the-game in the way that baseball scoring does.

I did a tour of an MLS stadium yesterday and the tour guide was showing some of the equipment the players wear during the game and the _teams_ actually have a moment by moment read out of exactly where all all the players are on the field and what they are doing, where contact is made on the ball, their heart rate and lots of other stuff, and the ball itself has electronics in it in some leagues, so it actually _is_ possible to completely reconstruct a game from a data feed. Just that the feed isn't public.

I was just thinking about this for F1 - someone mentioned plaintextsports but it doesn't seem like F1 is there.

Already thinking about the ways you could represent a race with a text[^1], could be a very interesting project but not sure if there's any APIs.

[^1]: Baseball for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453733

Lights out and away we go. Max Verstappen wins the Grand Prix!

Sure, there's a few live text commentaries e.g. https://www.motorsport.com/f1/live-text/f1-azerbaijan-gp-liv... . Not quite in a standard format, though...

Maybe? ESPN has an unofficial API: https://github.com/pseudo-r/Public-ESPN-API