Add invocation for sports scores

mileswwatkins commented 2 years ago

This feels like a big quality-of-life feature for users. But it's also a big domain. Probably worth focusing on whichever professional sports have the bulk of their season during North American backpacking months, or perhaps whichever sports have their playoffs during that time.

Also unclear what the cost to serve up this data will be, which is worth investigating on whichever API we use.

Also also, will these scores be live, or just after-the-fact? Will it just be a box score, or will there be any prose attached to it?

mileswwatkins commented 2 years ago

Interface design/goal:

> scores
Include which league you want scores for, eg `scores mlb`. Available leagues: mlb, nba, nfl, college football.

> scores mlb
Include a team name to see their recent games, eg `scores mlb florida` or `scores mlb giants`

> scores mlb red sox
Oct 22 @ HOU, top 3rd
BOS  0 0 0 - - - - - -  |  0 1 1
HOU  1 0 - - - - - - -  |  1 2 0

Oct 20 @ BOS
HOU  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0  |  0 2 0
BOS  1 0 0 0 0 1 0 3 •  |  5 10 0

> scores nfl lions
Dec 26 @ ATL
DET  3 7 3 3  |  16
ATL  0 10 3 7  |  20

> scores nba thunder
Jan 24 @ OKC, final
CHI  35 23 34 19  |  111
OKC  27 21 30 32  |  110

Jan 22 @ CLE
OKC  24 22 37 24  |  107
CLE  32 24 29 17  |  102

Difficulties:

How do we deal with leagues that might have over 100 games on a single day (eg, NCAA Division 1 football)? This makes listing all games for a specific day infeasible (to a certain extent even if just top-25 games are listed). Should we just not deal with NCAA sports, at least to start with?
Do we use a different, but specialized, API for each sport/league? Or a centralized API (like API-SPORTS or MySportsFeeds) that serves all sports but not as well/neatly?
For games that are happening today, we must include final or which inning/quarter/half they're in, to contextualize potentially-incomplete scores.

mileswwatkins commented 2 years ago

An alternative would be to skip box scores and specific teams (too hard to handle synonyms/nicknames/spelling?) and just do the most recent scores. Basically, the information that ESPN'd be showing in their ticker at the bottom of their programming, eg:

> scores mlb
ARI 3 COL 2, btm 5
BOS 9 NYY 1
LAA 0 OAK 1
…

> scores college football
UNC 58 WAKE 55, Q4
PITT 54 DUKE 29
OHIOST 26 NEB 17
UGA 43 MIZZOU 6
...

Easier. But OTOH realistically a user generally cares about a single team, or maybe at most a single division (eg, MLB AL East) or conference (eg, NCAA football Big 10), so maybe the interface should focus on that?

mileswwatkins commented 2 years ago

Could try taking inspiration from https://plaintextsports.com

mileswwatkins / Mouse

Add invocation for sports scores #2