Where oh where can my MLB be?

April 9, 2007 7:21 PM

Are there MLB standings RSS feeds out there?

How can it be possible that I can't get an RSS feed of Major League Baseball standings? I can't find one anywhere. Can somebody either point me to one, or explain why this doesn't exist? I mean, this wouldn't be quite as useful as the existing Random Kitten feed, but it'd obviously be better than White House News. Please hope me.

posted by iguanapolitico to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I'm having trouble envisioning standings in RSS. Do you want updates as games are played? How would those updates be formatted? Would you get the whole chart everytime something changes? It doesn't really strike me as the kind of thing RSS is suited for.
posted by saraswati at 8:01 PM on April 9, 2007

If this is for a web project you might be able to do it another way. If you view the source on SCDB's link you'll notice that they basically post their results as javascript includes. For example, here's all the data for the AL East today, declared in a nice little array for you to use. I imagine the MLB might pull the plug on you if they noticed but if it's just a personal project it could work.
posted by saraswati at 8:19 PM on April 9, 2007

Response by poster: It'd be formatted just like tables are formatted. :) I have my stock portfolio quotes updated every 15 minutes in table format; why not baseball standings? It's just a table. Right? What am I missing here?

The reason why I don't want to visit the standings page every once in a while is because I already have all my daily stuff on my google home page. News, weather, e-mail, even MeFi, even Woot. We Have The Technology.

Admittedly, an abbreviated version would be best. Say, the first 4 columns. I'm mainly interested in W/L/Pct. I'm just surprised that not even a crappy version of this is offered anywhere. :) Updated once a day, even, so I can just see in the morning what happened last night.

(I was hoping that my google-fu was just off, but apparently my needs just don't jibe with everyone else's needs, which I've admittedly known for some time.)
posted by iguanapolitico at 9:15 PM on April 9, 2007

I'd like to see this too.
posted by tdischino at 9:29 PM on April 9, 2007

There are score feeds, but I'm not aware of any feed for standings. Since most games are played in a singe six-hour block at night, is there really a need for such a thing?
posted by Bezuhin at 6:59 AM on April 10, 2007

Response by poster: Sigh ... apparently not for anybody besides tdischino and myself. The point is to have All My Information in one place. RSS isn't only good for displaying stuff that changes all day long; it's good for consolidating information onto one page. Just like any of the daily horoscope, daily quote, etc, feeds.

But I've been reminded that all mefi members are sports haters, so never mind. ;)
posted by iguanapolitico at 12:45 PM on April 10, 2007

You can create your own feeds over at Feed43 (Feed For Free). The tutorials are pretty easy to follow (step by step process) and the site easy to navigate. You can make a simple feed for free, but it looks like you'd need a paid account to create set up a feed for MLB standings. The free account only allows 20 item elements, meaning the team name, record, percentage, etc. each counts as one element. If you take that and multiply it by 30 total teams and you see the numbers add up. The least expensive paid account is $29/year.
posted by captaindistracto at 11:01 PM on April 10, 2007