MLB Standings: When RSS is not an option
In the past few weeks, my friend Mike started a sports blog about the Cleveland Indians called Tribe Opinion. In it, he writes about the team and speculates on possible trades and moves in the lineup. Cleveland sports fans should definitely read his posts; often times, Mike goes into greater detail than the Plain Dealer writers (see Mike’s post on Andy Marte for proof).
For his blog, Mike wanted to have a widget that displayed the standings of the Cleveland Indians as well as their opponents in the Central Division. Naturally, I assumed that this information would be readily available on MLB.com as an RSS feed that I could then quickly integrate into a widget. After a thorough search, however, I found that an RSS feed would be unavailable. This wasn’t that surprising considering the fact that Major League Baseball thinks that they own its player’s statistics and are very strict about their information.
In order to get the standings, I used Snoopy to grab a daily copy of ESPN.com’s MLB standings page, scrape out the information I wanted, place the information into a JavaScript file, and embed the widget onto BlogSpot. You can see the results on Tribe Opinion as well as on the right sidebar of my blog.
3 years ago