Playball – Watch MLB games from a terminal (github.com)

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

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

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.

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

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

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

'Watch' isn't the correct word.

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

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.

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.

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I read that part of baseball's decline from the premiere American sport was due to its outdated revenue model (strict reliance on ticket sales).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

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 very cool. I like it.

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.

"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...)

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

How can we extend this to NFL or NBA?

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.

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

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)!

Related:

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)

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

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?