Playball – Watch MLB games from a terminal | Hacker News Reader

Playball – Watch MLB games from a terminal

github.com

353 pointsohjeez146 comments

Totally anecdotal, but there are people who literally get paid to watch games and record what happens at every step. I used to have that job. This is how MLB, ESPN etc. have live updates which powers stuff like this.

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 see these folks at giants games sometimes, they usually have a little mini golf pencil and a clipboard or something.

Futurama had a joke about this hobby

Good old blernsball https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Blernsball

I helped someone extract data from one of those old DOS personal-database software programs. He had recorded every scorecard from every game he went to for many years. Each year had its own floppy disk.

I really feel like this is the only application of AI I would want to support right now. If an LLM can take in these fans commentary and then add a bunch of hallucinations and cultural biases, well, that sounds like pure entertainment.

AI Commentary seems fun, especially when you can choose different personalities, biases, etc.

It’ll be a while before it can replace a true play-by-play announcer, but with seven second TV delay it’s maybe close to feasible.

The Finals is a video game with AI voiceover for its commentary, and it’s pretty engaging. I’d expect to see this in FIFA soon if it isn’t there already.

ESPN is already partly doing this with "SC For You" [1]. It gives you a personalized feed of sports clips, generated and narrated by AI that uses the voices of ESPN on-air talent.

[1] - https://support.espn.com/hc/en-us/articles/40378137547796-Wh...

There's a Skyrim mod called Chim I've been playing with recently, it sends everything that happens in game to chatgpt then a narrator that you can talk to comments about quests, it also adds full Ai dialogue to every npc. It's very funny to ask it about how it thought you did on a quest.

I've been using these for about... 20 years or so.. https://www.reisnerscorekeeping.com/

Yeah baseball scorekeeping is an interesting part of the game.

You mean it's the only way to make the game interesting! I kid, but I had a roommate who liked to do scorekeeping, and that was an actual quote of his.

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

I scored for my son's Little League game last weekend, and it was a stressful experience. Mainly because I had never used the app before, it was also somewhat tedious, as I had to update positions every half inning. I wish it were all pre-loaded, as that would have significantly reduced my stress. It was nice being the person everyone asked what the score was all the time, as no one else was paying as close attention to the game.

The hard part about scoring little league is the rules are different and, in my experience, the apps don't account for it. So you just gotta flub it in some way to make sure you record the important bits.

A big one is pitch counts. That should absolutely be correct for safety. But if you're at an age where it goes kid pitch -> coach pitch, you gotta figure out a way to do this and keep an accurate total.

Does little league limit pitch counts per pitcher nowadays? I played as a kid, but mine aren't into it and I haven't been to a game in 20+ years.

Yes. Coaches really push them way too hard in my opinion and leagues have had to introduce pitch count limits with mandatory rest. I've heard stories of kids needing elbow surgery as young as 12-13. I tell my kids if they're throwing it harder than ~85% they're throwing too hard.

Oh, that's great that they force rest. I wasn't overused, but hurt my arm pitching when I was playing and it sucked. I definitely saw some kids getting way too much time on the mound (for their arms' sake) when we had tourneys.

Oh no, you gotta do it in one of those spiral bound scorecard notebooks. App? Pshh!

Gamechanger!

Has any of it been automated?

I wonder. I suspect there is enough messiness that most of it cant be yet but who knows.

It's easy enough to track objects on the field (I say easy enough, it's a lot of work), but in terms of tracking game state, that's all still done by stringers.

Ubiquitous sensors have probably automated out many aspects of this. NFL players now have tracking beacons which must make some assessments trivial (what players were on the field?)

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...

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/

Thats one of several companies.

I would be curious to see how automated this stuff is now with computer vision but I doubt its mostly automated.

To my knowledge, in game betting for MLB is pretty rare. But using in game data to bet in game can be profitable. I had a system I used for in game betting NBA that was profitable. I just hated watching NBA all night.

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

Don't know about baseball, but in other sports there are people who are paid to watch and hit buttons to help betting syndicates. "Courtsiders" (it started in tennis, so by the side of the tennis courts), are almost a bit behind the SOTA now, but there are accounts of that lifestyle[0]. Reading them, there is a mixture of partying and watching sport, with a local police chief in a Middle Eastern state putting his gun on the desk between you and suggesting bad things might happen if you don't leave town immediately. Fun? Up to you.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Game-Set-Cash-International-Trading/d...

What an awesome project at just the right time.

I love baseball and I love that the hacker culture seems to love baseball too.

I read that part of baseball's decline from the premiere American sport was due to its outdated revenue model (strict reliance on ticket sales). The NFL in 80s really embraced TV and reached more fans and here we are. MLB has been recently way ahead of the curve on streaming (MLB.tv, AWS StatCast etc).

I hope projects like this contribute to baseball regaining popularity

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 fully support sports gambling being legal but holy shit, the legalization of sports gambling in the USA had such a terrible effect on sports coverage.

I have not watched the MLB in a while so I don't know specifically what you are talking about but I can imagine.

There is an ad for a sports book on screen no less than 50% of a broadcast, not including ad breaks, for the majority of teams. Either it's an ad behind home plate, a jersey patch, the broadcasters themselves reading the latest odds, or a combination of those and more. It is absolutely insane.

I was just having this conversation with friends a few days ago. We do still watch games, but we all used to also watch sports news/talk shows (e.g. morning pre-football coverage, SportsCenter, and the like) and most of us have stopped. Some of the shows are now exclusively focused on betting.

I'm all for consenting adults to be able to legally place wagers at outlets that are not swindling them, or offering the kinds of loans that could get a person's legs broken.

But I'm so tired of ALL THE COVERAGE being about betting. It was more fun when the coverage was mostly sports, and Al Michaels had to sneak in the odd mention of what the point spread was for a game he was broadcasting.

Even my friends who enjoy gambling don't like the media coverage of it. I guess we're not a representative sample.

Yes this is exactly what I mean. Coverage of the sport has been replaced with coverage of the gambling games around the sport.

> Even my friends who enjoy gambling don't like the media coverage of it.

You may well be representative; it’s just that all these parties directly invested in gambling would rather expand gambling as much and as fast as they can, at the expense of turning off their whole audience.

Much like politics, it's been decades since the coverage has had anything substantial to say about the issues or the candidates, it's all treated like a horse race now, who's gained or lost 1% in the polls.

Honestly it's a lot like the alcohol ads being everywhere. I don't have a problem with drinking alcohol but this is supposed to be a sport enjoyed by the whole family, and there are broadcasts where the inning break is filled almost entirely with hard liquor advertisements. Even at the ballpark it's hard to avoid advertising for beer and other drinks.

Sort of? I mean the actual news shows have been replaced by things like ESPN Bet Live[1], which are focused on betting. I'd also like the alcohol ads to be fewer and farther between, but the gambling thing has expanded into shows too, not just ads.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN_Bet_Live)

Is there so much discussion of betting related to all the ads purchased by gambling companies?

in addition to what Jeremy said, some broadcasts even show the betting line or chances for certain things to happen as the inning is being played (like what are the chances a player hits into a double play or hits a home run, etc.) specifically for the betters.

Sports gambling should be legal. But only in-person. No apps or websites.

Gambling advertising should be completely banned. Gambling is a zero-sum activity. Actively promoting it benefits no one except the betting house.

This is a great idea. I always thought that if there has to be online gambling, it should be a government monopoly, and it should be managed by the most incompetent employees.

Unfortunately the future of sports media is ownership by parent companies that also own sports betting sites. The yearly revenue of the largest gambling sites in the US rivals the combine revenue of the MLB, NHL, NBA, and NFL, and some major sports coverage media outlets.

Penn entertainment for example acquired Barstool Sports and The Score, and entered into a 10-year deal with ESPN to create ESPN-bet, for cash and a stake in the company. ESPN is now directly invested in the gambling industry.

It's interesting to watch as an international viewer. Sports gambling here has been legal forever and although we get betting company ads during commercial breaks (and some sponsorship stuff) the US has managed to legalise it and make it toxic almost instantly. Commentators and pundits should not be giving odds on air (with rare exceptions). Pundits shouldn't be giving 'their' betting picks. The problem isn't gambling - it's the excess to which it's been implemented.

if there's anything Americans love, it's excess.

Remember, all things in moderation - especially moderation.

I'm not saying this isn't happening, the fact that the RSNs are (mostly?) owned by betting companies does not help.

But, anecdotally, my local (Angels) broadcasts don't talk about it at all. I listen to MLB Radio, and their day time shows barely touch on it (I'm pretty sure there's a odds making show on the radio, but not during prime time in the day).

MLB Network on TV, I do not see it in their main shows. MLB Central doesn't (I don't think, I'm honestly not a regular viewer) really touch on it. MLB Now doesn't, nor does MLB Tonight or Quick Pitch (their overnight highlight show).

There's ads, there's ads in the stadium (big BET MGM sign in Yankee stadium, for example).

So, anyway, on the periphery, it's certainly there, but the shows the MLB seems to put their brand on, I'm not seeing that much of it.

The closest I've see is on the Apple TV broadcasts where they might put up a "28% chance to get on base" in the corner for a batter. Interesting, perhaps, statistic, but I don't know that it necessarily encourages betting.

I watch NBC Sports Bay Area for the SF Giants. I think generally during the broadcast itself they don't mention gambling-related topics much if at all? But during pre and post-game shows they totally do and have sponsored/named segments using gambling/odds.

+1. Our kids' experience watching sports on TV is so much more cynical for it.

You'd think it would be relatively easy for the leagues to provide separate streams that omit gambling ads (and maybe sell that ad space to others).

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.

Baseball is the perfect sport for our modern screen in hand times. Lots of down time to interact with your phone and any non-routine play will be shown on replay if you don't look up in time.

Football works pretty well for this too. Hockey and Basketball require attention.

That's why I dislike watching football and baseball. Too much time allocated to what isn't gameplay.

What's your advice for getting into baseball? I don't get it.

If you are into video games, I feel like that is by far the easiest way to learn sports you aren't familiar with. MLB The Show and Super Mega Baseball are both great modern baseball video game series, there are plenty of classics like Ken Griffey on SNES as well.

Spend time watching baseball games with someone who loves baseball and is willing to talk to you about it.

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...

That's my biggest complaint as well. The MLB streaming service needs to have an everything tier. I understand that teams want to sell rights locally, but figure it out. Charge me whatever you need to charge me and share the revenue with the local team. Just make it easy for me to watch!

I too live in Austin and I watched more Toronto Blue Jays, SF Giants, and LA Dodgers games than Rangers games this year.

Charge me some portion of the carriage fee and show me the local ads rather than the generic highlights between innings. Just let me watch the local team.

The problem with showing the local ads is that they sometimes only pay for rights for a certain region. If they hire musicians for the jingle and the audience is only NYC, then the fee would generally be less than if it were for a global audience.

I think that's why they show all the baseball zen stuff rather than ads for whatever feed they are broadcasting.

My preference would be for them to pull back to a whole-stadium view and just let the ballpark sounds play. The stuff the MLB inserts is all pretty bad.

Baseball's biggest issue is that their biggest teams are also co-owners of their cable channels (and were trailblazers in this, with the Yankees and the YES Network). They don't care if you go to the game, they want you to get a cable subscription that has your local RSN, ESPN, TBS, your local FOX affiliate, and FS1 so that you can watch your team play. And that's not including games that may wind up on streaming platforms.

The post you replied to included this:

> I read that part of baseball's decline from the premiere American sport was due to its outdated revenue model (strict reliance on ticket sales). The NFL in 80s really embraced TV and reached more fans and here we are. MLB has been recently way ahead of the curve on streaming (MLB.tv, AWS StatCast etc).

I'm _hoping_ (although numbers don't seem to be showing it as a huge success as of yet) is that the Apple-MLS deal works well enough that other leagues are at least open to the idea of a no-blackout, all-inclusive package.

I hate the AppleTV thing for baseball. I pay for the MLB.TV package yet those games aren't included unless I also buy an AppleTV subscription.

College football is going the same way with ESPN and FOX properties on cable/streaming but also needing Peacock, Paramount+ and I think AppleTV next season.

For MLS the deal has been pretty good I think. Mainly because everything is all in one place.

The MLB package is very up-front about not being all-inclusive: it advertises "out-of-market" games -- games you can't otherwise access. Games on streaming services like Apple and Peacock count the same as broadcasts on ESPN, FS1, or TBS: national broadcasts available behind a paywall.

I'd happily pay ~300/yr for a streaming subscription that gets me all those games though...

If you can get along with audio only, Sirius has a subscription that includes every MLB game.

Eh, I can just read the text for that, and Sirius is definitely in the company of those I don’t want to do business with!

AFAIK, the MLB.tv subscription includes full audio for every game, including in-market games.

My understanding of the issue is that MLB sold off the TV rights to local games years ago to the RSN (Regional Sports Networks) and the contracts have yet to expire. Rumor has it that around 2028 or so, they will try to rein them back in.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5933299/2024/11/19/mlb-plan...

They're already doing so. There are a number of teams (six, eight? something like that) that already have local coverage packages with MLB, and Seattle is joining the crowd next year.

Yeah the out-of-market-only rules of the national sports subscriptions is really goofy. I guess they’re trying to protect the Comcasts of the world who own a lot of those regional sports networks where the baseball games are shown, because they pay a lot for those deals and would probably refuse to pay as much if MLB let MLB.tv have them. But it still sucks.

MLB.tv with a vpn. Works for the postseason too :)

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.

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 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

Root Sports in Seattle started streaming this year at $20 a month. We haven't been watching baseball in recent years because we don't have cable or OTA TV. Root Sports Streaming at $20/mo was a bargain, and it turned out everyone in the family (Mom, Dad, two adult sons) was totally onboard. And of course it was a great year to catch all the games.

And now the Mariners are closing down Root Sports and putting their TV on MLBTV next season. I hope they don't price us right out of baseball again.

You won't be priced out if you were already fine with paying $20/mo. You will be blacked out. The MLB package doesn't include local markets. All of WA and OR are "local" for the Mariners. I think ID and MT are as well.

A terrible way to run a sport. Fortunately, the Tigers are my favored team but it would have been nice to see some Mariners games this year too.

You have no idea what you're talking about. RSNs (which ROOT was) are the reason for the blackouts. With ROOT Sports dissolving and MLB taking over distribution there's nothing to blackout for, so Mariners won't be subject to blackouts going forward.

https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-to-distribute-mariners-games-st...

>Cable subscribers will still be able to view games through a specific channel, and streamers will be able to watch through MLB.TV with no blackouts.

Mlb.tv is comparable to $20/month if not cheaper, but they sell by the season, not the month. Also, MLB has had an ongoing promotion with T-Mobile so one week every year every T-Mobile subscriber can sign up for a season of MLB.tv for free through the T-Mobile Tuesdays app. Non-baseball T-Mobile subscribers often sell their subscription for like $10 at that time on sites like Slickdeals. MLB also starts running 50% off deals starting around May (that's one month into the season).

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.

I love plaintextsports for baseball already. Baseball is a game that serializes to text very well (and radio) vs other sports. Bringing it to the terminal is cool too.

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's a standardized way to express what is happening in the game too- you'll often hear on the radio and television broadcasts the play that just happened using numbered positions on the field. 1 is pitcher, 2 is catcher, 3 is first baseman, 4 is second, 5 is third, 6 is shortstop, etc. so you'll hear something like "6-4-3 double play" which means the ball was fielded by the shortstop (6), thrown to the second baseman (4) for the first out, then to the first baseman (3) for the second one.

Makes it easy to visualize the game if listening on the radio.

When I coach my youth teams, I always list their positions by number. I derive some minor benefit from doing that, but I'm also hoping that by having them learn the position numbers, it will make it easier for them to enjoy audio broadcasts of baseball games. There's a special kind of fun in listening to those.

I think we are saying the same thing. This is the same as scoring the game they are just saying it out loud. Maybe my example didnt pick the most illustrative details.

How do you differentiate a swinging strike-out from a looking strike-out when you can't turn the K upside down?

Unicode FTW: "𝼃"

By upside down you mean backwards, yea?

So... ꓘ

Yes it's a 180 degree rotation.

I suppose you could do K(S) or K(L) pretty easily and without any specially coded characters. Or Unicode as another poster suggested.

As non-MLB watcher, I have only a passing knowledge of the game why does it matter if the strike-out is swinging or not?

To use a Cricket analogy you don't differentiate if or what the stroke was at the time they were LBW, stumped, bowled caught out.

It doesn't really matter. But it's a datapoint that, say a batter has a lot of strike outs looking, they may have a poor sense of the strike zone. Or if a batter has a high swinging strike out rate then it says that their pitches are deceptive and have a lot of movement.

It doesn't matter any more or less than if an out was a line-out, fly out, or ground-ball thrown to first.

While away, I thought of an example.

In baseball, the baserunners are allowed to advance to the next base at any time the ball is "in play" which includes when the pitcher (vaguely similar to bowler in cricket) is holding the ball.

When a baserunner tries to advance without the ball ever being hit, this is called a "steal."

When the baserunner and batter are coordinating so that the batter will try to hit the ball during a steal, this is called a "hit and run." The idea is that the infielders will be getting in position to get the runner out, so won't be in good position to play a ground-ball hit by the batter.

So consider a play where a batter strikes out, then the baserunner is thrown out trying to advance (a strike-out throw-out double play). If it's a swinging strike, that might be a failed hit and run, but if it's a strikeout looking, then it's almost certainly a failed attempt at a steal (with the minority of the time it being the batter missing the signal for a hit and run).

I should acknowledge that 2 strikes with fewer than 2 outs is not considered a good count to try a hit and run; unless a poor batsman is up next you are often better off having a fresh count with the next batter. On the other hand a hit and run is really only effective when it's a surprise.

In baseball you DO differentiate between whether you struck out swinging or looking.

It matters for the pitcher because if you can disguise your pitch well enough that it looks like a ball coming in but is actually a strike, so that the hitter doesn't even try to hit it, that is a great signal.

As a batter, you typically* want to swing at strikes, so you want to know if you are letting hittable pitches go by. From the time baseball players are like 10 years old, you'll hear coaches and parents yelling "be a hitter, don't strike out looking!".

* there are always situations you probably don't want to swing, like if you have 3 balls and no strikes, you usually want to not swing, and assume you'll get another ball and will get walked to get on base. There are a lot of other situations where you do or don't swing, and the strikeout looking vs swinging measures that.

Retrosheet is a project which reconstructs historical baseball games from old newspaper accounts, scorescards purchased at estate sales, and other means. They actually have an ASCII scorecard format:

https://www.retrosheet.org/eventfile.htm

Originally to parse these out people used MS-DOS utilities written by the guy who made the Diamond Mind Baseball game. There's a more modern set of utilities called Chadwick now so you don't have to use DOS.

This is nice. MLB has a surprisingly nice API for accessing things like this.

(I misinterpreted "watch" completely different (post history will reflect why))

Now that is an understatement.

> I misinterpreted "watch" completely different

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

Say no more.

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

Neat. I always envision that fans of a particular sports franchise use these text descriptions to reconstruct the game in their minds in the same way that people who play blindfold chess [1] do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindfold_chess

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

For others interested in the space there are a couple of other MLB TUI programs out there.

mlbt: https://github.com/mlb-rs/mlbt gomlb (self plug): https://github.com/AxBolduc/gomlb

I also know of NBA CLI (https://github.com/dylantientcheu/nbacli) for the NBA but last I checked it was having issues with changes to the NBA API.

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

Playball: Watch MLB games from the comfort of your own terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37591070 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)

Playball: Watch MLB games from the comfort of your own terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21653981 - Nov 2019 (42 comments)

"Your Web browser is Ronald Reagan."

-- Neal Stephenson

<https://www.azquotes.com/quote/783529>

<https://hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-command-l...> (PDF)

(Play-by-play...)

One word:

Cricket

One of the many standout features of a sport that already includes:

- being famous for taking five days to play and often ending in a drawer;

- where a major component of play is the nature and timing of the ball falling apart; and

- where regular fielding positions have names like silly mid on, third man, cow corner, and square leg,

…is that since time immemorial cricket has had a symbiotic relationship with another deeply weird pastime, the art of cricket scoring, namely the erudite process of keeping track of the score:

https://preview.redd.it/englands-first-innings-scoresheet-v0...

This is great! Thanks!

Years ago, I wrote something based on this same premise, mostly just to experiment with Golang: https://github.com/jimt1234/mlbcli

this is so cool! was it hard building a tui? i see you're even using react in there

this is pretty cool, though I wish it were for football... or animated in ascii art. Maybe like the old intellivision baseball game.

I wonder if the datasource is ok with being polled directly like that. I hope they don't start trying to stop it.

If this interests you, then maybe you will find undercut-f1 interesting too. https://github.com/JustAman62/undercut-f1

This is great. I’m working on something similar for tracking college football games from the terminal. Right now it just shows a List of active games with minimal navigation. lots of great inspiration.

Very cool. I may just cancel my Fubo subscription and switch to this (Fubo has the glitchiest, buggiest, slowest video player I've ever seen)!

This is awesome. One of the great outcomes of the datafication of baseball is the timely availability/accessibility of game info.

I fully expected this to play sports streams in terminal with the pixels converted to ASCII kind of like passing ffmpeg thru caca lol

Beautiful.

Does something similar exist for f1? Or soccer?

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...

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

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.

This is both really awesome and a perfect explanation for why I find baseball so incredibly boring to watch

I wonder how easy it would be to adapt this to work for NPB/Japanese Baseball.

I love this, it feels like something that should have always existed. great job

This is really cool! Would it be possible to fork this and do it for the NBA?

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

Would love to see this as a Telnet or SSH service so I don't have to install npm for something I might only use once.

EDIT: Nevermind, I found one downthread: https://github.com/mlb-rs/mlbt

That's awesome, now if it would integrate with Plex somehow...

The lock file is 12 times larger than the entire source.

  git clone -q https://github.com/paaatrick/playball.git
  cd playball
  echo $(du -bs package-lock.json | cut -f1) / $(du -bs src | cut -f1) | bc -l

Title: "Read MLB games from a terminal"

'Watch' isn't the correct word.

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

This might be how I get my dad into computers

How can we extend this to NFL or NBA?

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).

They have this (with a slight delay) on NFL.com and ESPN. Not sure if there's a public API for it tho.

I think a browser extension could be used to pull the content from the live stats stream as a good starting point.

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

This is very cool. I like it.

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

Of course, the obvious step after that is for MLB to shit a brick and shut down the API.

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”.

> 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.

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

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...

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.

That is an interesting idea. And that sounds quite doable.

Not sure about TOS but would be a natural fit as a twitch channel.

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.

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?

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

- Everyone's favorite chaotician

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