Scorecard Generator

Hey there - 

  If you care about baseball half as much as I do, this might be interesting to you - if not, well I'm sorry...

  Assuming you do give a rat's behind about baseball, odds are you've scored a game or two...  I've been living abroad for a good long while - and the truth is that folks where I am are clueless about baseball... their loss.  Anyway, here's an app I worked out with green Shoes and timothyf's gameday_api to generate html scorecards so I can check out the games the next day in a way that's sensible (to me at least...) even if i can't actually talk to anyone about it ;)

INSTALL:

**  note **  for version 0.0.3 I've removed the `hpricot` runtime dependency from the gemspec, as it was causing install problems with some Windows versions - if you don't already have the hpricot gem installed, make sure to install it first (gem install hpricot) and then...

gem install baseball_scorecard

RUN (in terminal):

scorecard

  Installation of the gem might take a while - it's dependent on a few other gems that may need to be installed as well.  Once the thing is installed, type `scorecard` into your terminal or command line or whatever, press return or enter or whatever, and away you go!

  Select a team and date from the window that pops up, and click 'find games.'  If games for the given team and date are found, a box where you can select the game time (if there's a double header that day,) and a 'build scorecards' button will appear.  Click 'build scorecards,' and give the thing a little while to cook....  it's got a bunch of data to get and crunch!

  Everyone scores games a little differently, so here are some notes about my notation:

  Balls and strikes are shown in the upper left hand corner of each at bat cell, fielding or hit location in the lower left.  Rbi's are shown in the upper right corner, and outs in the lower right.

  Base hits are shown as a darkened path to the base, runners with darkened bases.

  The result of each at bat is shown in the center, and is noted as follows:

  1B - Single
  2B - Double
  3B - Triple
  HR - Home Run
  BB - Walk
  IBB - Intentional Walk
  HBP - Hit by Pitch
  GR - Ground Rule
  K - Strikeout Swinging
  KC - Strikeout Looking (Called)
  F - Fly Out
  P - Pop Out
  L - Line Out
  G - Ground Out
  FO - Force Out
  FC - Fielder's Choice
  DP - Double Play
  TP - Triple Play
  SB - Stolen Base
  SAC - Sacrifice Play
  E - Error

  If a batter had more than one at bat in an inning, '+AB' is shown below the at bat result.

  Take a look at the `atbat_example.png` file for more info.

  Hovering over a particular at bat cell will show the description of the at bat.  Hovering over a batter will show their season and career stats.

  I've noticed that this works best for recent games, as not all of the data necessary to generate the scorecards is available for older games - for example, I tried creating cards for the 2004 ALCS game 7 for the screenshot (being a Red Sox fan,) and it didn't work :(  - Had to go back a couple of weeks to find a game that we won instead!

  So I guess that's about it...  I've still got some work to do on the thing, but hopefully it'll mostly work!

  Go Shoes...
  Go Sox!!!

  - j

  *** PLEASE READ THE 'gameday_copyright.txt' FILE