MLB Scoreboards

9 Aug 2026

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§ Motivation

As of writing, the MLB website displays the scoreboards of the day's games as a ribbon along the top of the page.

This is extremely inconvenient, and something that has annoyed me for years.

Just trying to find scores or game times for your favorite team is difficult, especially because not all games will fit on the tiny ribbon and you have to go scrolling to find your team. Even after you've found a game, you don't get much info so you end up having to go to the MLB Gameday page to get more.

I got tired of this, so I designed a scoreboard page that has nothing but game scoreboards with the relevant information.

§ Scoreboard Design

My goals were to create an MLB scoreboard list that contains more info, uses only one MLB Stats API call, and is still relatively compact.

While the only one API call is somewhat arbitrary, but it's possible due to the API allowing us to specify hydrations to include more information from the schedule end-point. Hydration enables us to query for information that is normally left out, like the linescores which includes info such as basic at-bat and inning-by-inning scoring. Unfortunately, hydration won't let us get all the info we'd like, stats like ERA or BA are still unobtainable through this end-point.

§ Pre-game

First are the designs for scheduled games and games in the warm-up phase. Pretty much the only information available from the schedule end-point are projected starters. It would be nice to be able to retrieve some of their stats such as ERA or splits like career W/L vs opp., but those would require other API calls.

§ Games In-Progress

Because I'm not trying to squeeze in as many scoreboards onto a line, I took the liberty of adding runs, hits, and errors onto the scoreboard. As per usual, the scoreboards have a visual indicator of base occupancy, number of outs, and the count of the current AB. At the bottom, we have the match up in the current AB.

I would like to add a couple pieces of information, namely the batter line-up position and the pitch count. In the schedule API response you can get the batter's batting order, but since there's no official API documentation I'm unable to determine how it works, it goes from 1-9 as you'd expect but spuriously someone's batting order is 10 so I decided to omit that info for now. For the pitch counts, it is unfortunately not available from the schedule end-point.

If a game is in a delay for any reason, it gets a striped background and the pitcher-batter matchup is replaced with the delay reason.

§ Completed Games

Completed game scoreboards basically the same information as games in-progress, however, the at-bat match-up is replaced with the pitching decisions.