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.
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".
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 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I read that part of baseball's decline from the premiere American sport was due to its outdated revenue model (strict reliance on ticket sales).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 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 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.
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'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 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...
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
[+] [-] nonethewiser|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] re|5 months ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] VWWHFSfQ|5 months ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|5 months ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] charliebwrites|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] op00to|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] n1b0m|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jackconsidine|5 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] spike021|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thaack|5 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] basisword|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cyrialize|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jen20|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dfxm12|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] naet|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|5 months ago|reply
here is an example inning:
K | 6-3 | BB | 2B (RBI, R1-H) | F8
[+] [-] joshmn|5 months ago|reply
(I misinterpreted "watch" completely different (post history will reflect why))
[+] [-] throwaway314155|5 months ago|reply
(profile bio) > I’m Josh; from Minnesota
Say no more.
[+] [-] hbcondo714|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vunderba|5 months ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindfold_chess
[+] [-] vmilner|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] axbolduc|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kleinmatic|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|5 months ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] dredmorbius|5 months ago|reply
-- Neal Stephenson
<https://www.azquotes.com/quote/783529>
<https://hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-command-l...> (PDF)
(Play-by-play...)
[+] [-] gorgoiler|5 months ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] jimt1234|5 months ago|reply
Years ago, I wrote something based on this same premise, mostly just to experiment with Golang: https://github.com/jimt1234/mlbcli
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|5 months ago|reply
I wonder if the datasource is ok with being polled directly like that. I hope they don't start trying to stop it.
[+] [-] sixothree|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmu|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alargemoose|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stack_framer|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] some_guy_nobel|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] maxlin|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] canthonytucci|5 months ago|reply
Does something similar exist for f1? Or soccer?
[+] [-] empath75|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pfych|5 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] striking|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Whatarethese|5 months ago|reply