r/mlbdata

Ever since I was about 8 years old I’ve kept a manual ledger of every MLB Homer. It’s obviously silly and unnecessary, but as I’ve gotten older realized that it in a way was a strange baseball mindfulness exercise that grounded my mind.

Last year I turned it into an app where you have to manually tap and “acknowledge” the home run from every box score. Since then I’ve been building and building on it, and basically turned it into a personal replacement for the MLB app.

Realized in the last couple weeks that it was becoming pretty polished and that I’ve spent way too much time working on this for it to just be something me and a couple friends use. So I’m here now asking for you all to check it out and tell me what you think!

It’s a PWA mobile app that can be found at this link: Mentaculus.app

Would love to get some feedback on this, so please if you have any time take a look and comment down below!

Was built mostly on MLB stats api with some additional sourcing from the Chadwick ID database, Fangraphs, Baseball Reference, and with lots of assistance from pybaseball.

I’ve been working for some time on trying to build an app similar to FotMob for baseball, having live baseball scores for leagues across the globe. Today the server I host the backend on to make the API calls to the MLB Stats API got blocked, I get nonstop 406 errors.

Over the course of debugging I discovered in the GET requests this statement:

> The accounts, descriptions, data and presention in the referring page (the "Materials") are proprietary content of MLB Advanced Media, L.P ("MLBAM"). Only individual, non-commercial, non-bulk use of the Materials is permitted and any other use of the Materials is prohibited without prior written authorization from MLBAM. Authorized users of the Materials are prohibited from using the Materials in any commercial manner other than as expressly authorized by MLBAM.

To me this reads like unless I get express authorization from MLB, I can’t use the API for bulk use (aka an app for others to use).

I’m not a lawyer and this was a fun personal project I was doing for free, so I’m in no spot to drop money to consult an attorney. I can’t imagine if I email MLB they’ll just give me written authorization, and even if they did I can’t imagine that I’ll be able to get around this 406 errors anyways.

Is my project dead in the water?

I turned my childhood habit of hand logging ever MLB home run into an app

I’m trying to build a good baseball score app similar to FotMob, am I not able to use the MLB API?