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Comment by flannelcatering | Hacker News Reader

Sports statistics. NFL, MLB, NBA, etc.

I work for a sports data integration company, so you can get this data easily. Oh, you mean for free? Yeah, that's not gonna happen any time soon. Someone has to pay people to collect those statistics and then make them available.

A lot of people really enjoy keeping track of sports stats. Maybe some sort of a wiki would work well for this purpose?

You know how sportscasters always have some sort of weird statistic to pull out of their ass, like "Brett Favre has never lost a game, at home, with the temperature less than 34 degrees"? Is there some sort of API or query system so someone at the networks can throw this shit together out of the raw data in real time?

Realtime (i.e. in game stats) or just up to date player, team, league stats.

I think the leagues fight hard to disallow this although they have recently lost a couple high profile lawsuits.

In 2007, MLB even tried to claim copyright on player's names and statistics.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/06/mlb-tries-to...

Again, the company I work for offers this kind of data but you have to pay for it. We have lots of clients who run fantasy baseball web sites and make use of our real-time stats feeds to update their games.

Link?

Sure. http://www.xmlteam.com

We offer stuff ranging from simple on-demand calls to our web service (you purchase credits, docs cost you X credits per access) to a Perl-based app that captures an XML feed and parses and inserts the data into a DB for you to use as you will at your end, usually MySQL but we support MS-SQL too.

We've got some pretty big clients: ESPN, USA Today are amongst them. We supplied Google with Olympic content during the Beijing Olympics.

Fascinating. Can I drop you an email? Didn't see it in your profile. I'm shafqat at newscred dot com.

Do you ever have any issues with leagues about using their data? I figured something like this would be a good idea, to format stats etc, but thought I might get in trouble for using "their" stats inappropriately or whatever.

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