Baseball History Application Design
An idea that I've had for a series here on LiveJournal is to take each of the baseball games I've ever attended and examine the box score to see what notable things happened at that game. While I certainly know the big highlight items already, it might be kind of fun to dig in and identify things like "Hall of Famers seen", "MLB Debuts seen" (I know I saw Victor Martinez's debut), milestone hits and the like.
While I might enjoy writing such a series, it would take a lot of effort and digging for each game I considered. It would be so much easier if this could be automated. Unfortunately, the application I need does not appear to exist, but here's how it would work.
1. Each user would be able to select the games that they had attended. Since the complete list of all games every played is documented extensively (for example, here's V-Marts debut) it would be easy enough to put together a manual interface for that. If built into the MLB Application that they use for tickets, you could automatically add it to the user's the list when the ticket was scanned for entry. For people who have old ticket stubs, you could probably figure out how to let the phone scan the bar code and find it, and if not they could look it up in the manual interface.
2. The administrators would identify a list of notable items that someone might care about having seen, and mine the baseball box scores to find those notable items. For example, it should be pretty easy to create a list of each Hall of Famer that the user ever saw in a game (for me, I'm pretty sure Jim Thome is the one I saw play the most). Similarly, you could pull up:
- A list of all MVPs the user saw during their MVP season. Ditto for Cy Young winners and other major awards like the Rookie of the Year.
- A list of major milestone events the user was present for: 500th home run, first career hit, first career home run, 1000 wins as manager, whatever.
- A list of events both likely and unlikely that the user saw: a walk-off, a no hitter or perfect game, hitting for the cycle, a four home run game, etc.
- A game the user saw where a record was broken: Aaron hits 715, Rickey is the greatest, etc.
- It would be trivial to create a list of all parks the user had been to, or the records of each time during the games the user saw them play.
If you think of a new category, it's pretty easy to re-run the data and update user lists accordingly ("Hey, we just added all games where the starter struck out 15+" or "the starter had a game score >= 100" or whatever).
Of course, this data would change over time. I don't know if Jose Ramirez is bound for Cooperstown as I'm writing this (although he sure looks like one!), so you re-run the HoF data after every election and update people's lists. Ditto for end of season awards. Other categories get updated nightly or weekly, whatever seems feasible.
3- As you'd expect, the user's list gets compared to the data pulled for the categories, and the user gets a nice display showing all the most memorable things that they were fortunate enough to have seen.
Of course, this doesn't guarantee you saw it. If you left the game early, or had the bad luck to be in the bathroom when the moment in question happened, this just tells you that it you missed it.
An application like this would seem incredibly appropriate for baseball, which more than any other major sport relies on its history as a major factor in its popularity. I know I would love it, although my love of lists and personal history is well documented. All the data is out there on Baseball Reference. The hardest part would be data mining out events, but a lot of that mining would be a one-time expense of combing through the data and pulling out the results to a data lake, with refreshes having a smaller data to work against. It's entirely possible that data is already in Baseball Reference somewhere, which would make it even easier to write an application like this.
Heck, turn events into points, and all of a sudden you can turn this into a pokemon style game, although given the degree of randomness in accruing points, I don't think it would be a very fun game. Also, you'd have to have someone built into the MLB app to ensure nobody was cheating, so it really wouldn't work well. I assume Vin Scully would be the all-time champion if someone did make such a game.
Anyway, if I had copious free time this is a development project I might consider taking on. I'm kind of amazed that it doesn't already exist, honestly. I couldn't find one though, and if it did, I'm assuming somebody would have mentioned it at least on FanGraphs or one of the other baseball sites I follow.
While I might enjoy writing such a series, it would take a lot of effort and digging for each game I considered. It would be so much easier if this could be automated. Unfortunately, the application I need does not appear to exist, but here's how it would work.
1. Each user would be able to select the games that they had attended. Since the complete list of all games every played is documented extensively (for example, here's V-Marts debut) it would be easy enough to put together a manual interface for that. If built into the MLB Application that they use for tickets, you could automatically add it to the user's the list when the ticket was scanned for entry. For people who have old ticket stubs, you could probably figure out how to let the phone scan the bar code and find it, and if not they could look it up in the manual interface.
2. The administrators would identify a list of notable items that someone might care about having seen, and mine the baseball box scores to find those notable items. For example, it should be pretty easy to create a list of each Hall of Famer that the user ever saw in a game (for me, I'm pretty sure Jim Thome is the one I saw play the most). Similarly, you could pull up:
- A list of all MVPs the user saw during their MVP season. Ditto for Cy Young winners and other major awards like the Rookie of the Year.
- A list of major milestone events the user was present for: 500th home run, first career hit, first career home run, 1000 wins as manager, whatever.
- A list of events both likely and unlikely that the user saw: a walk-off, a no hitter or perfect game, hitting for the cycle, a four home run game, etc.
- A game the user saw where a record was broken: Aaron hits 715, Rickey is the greatest, etc.
- It would be trivial to create a list of all parks the user had been to, or the records of each time during the games the user saw them play.
If you think of a new category, it's pretty easy to re-run the data and update user lists accordingly ("Hey, we just added all games where the starter struck out 15+" or "the starter had a game score >= 100" or whatever).
Of course, this data would change over time. I don't know if Jose Ramirez is bound for Cooperstown as I'm writing this (although he sure looks like one!), so you re-run the HoF data after every election and update people's lists. Ditto for end of season awards. Other categories get updated nightly or weekly, whatever seems feasible.
3- As you'd expect, the user's list gets compared to the data pulled for the categories, and the user gets a nice display showing all the most memorable things that they were fortunate enough to have seen.
Of course, this doesn't guarantee you saw it. If you left the game early, or had the bad luck to be in the bathroom when the moment in question happened, this just tells you that it you missed it.
An application like this would seem incredibly appropriate for baseball, which more than any other major sport relies on its history as a major factor in its popularity. I know I would love it, although my love of lists and personal history is well documented. All the data is out there on Baseball Reference. The hardest part would be data mining out events, but a lot of that mining would be a one-time expense of combing through the data and pulling out the results to a data lake, with refreshes having a smaller data to work against. It's entirely possible that data is already in Baseball Reference somewhere, which would make it even easier to write an application like this.
Heck, turn events into points, and all of a sudden you can turn this into a pokemon style game, although given the degree of randomness in accruing points, I don't think it would be a very fun game. Also, you'd have to have someone built into the MLB app to ensure nobody was cheating, so it really wouldn't work well. I assume Vin Scully would be the all-time champion if someone did make such a game.
Anyway, if I had copious free time this is a development project I might consider taking on. I'm kind of amazed that it doesn't already exist, honestly. I couldn't find one though, and if it did, I'm assuming somebody would have mentioned it at least on FanGraphs or one of the other baseball sites I follow.