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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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...

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?)

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