Hmmm, seems to me there's a business opportunity in providing lower cost, more developer friendly sports data. I remember looking into getting access to sports data since I wanted to do some analytics after I read Moneyball. Old, archived data is easy to come by, but any fresh, real-time data sources seem to have non-trivial costs.

I guess there might be some restrictions on who gets access to the official raw data for various games, depending on the sports league. If the costs for getting that data are high, then the only way to circumvent that would be to collect them yourself. Even then, I don't know if the leagues would come at you hard for gathering data and using team names or player names...