interesting-blaseball-games

interesting-blaseball-games is a command-line tool for finding interesting blaseball games.

Interesting blaseball games are defined as:

• games with large run differentials
• games where loser was shut out (scored zero runs)
• games where loser was shamed
• games won by the underdog

The user specifies different criteria (such as season, team, or type of interesting blaseball game) and the program prints out a series of tables containing game summaries.

Table of Contents

• Screenshots
• Installation
  • pip
  • source
• Quick Start
  • Command line flags
  • Configuration file
• Output formats
• Configuration Examples
• Data
• Software architecture
• Who is this tool for?
• Future work
• Libraries Used

Screenshots

The interesting-blaseball-games command line tool allows you to pick teams, leagues, or divisions, as well as seasons, and you can also filter on postseason games:

You can also include the winning or losing pitcher, or both:

The program gives you the ability to display team names in different formats: the full name, the nickname, or the emoji:

The command line flags support arguments with spaces, too:

An example of the full (long) name format:

Finally, information is organized in an intuitive and readable way:

Installation

pip

pip install git+https://github.com/ch4zm/blaseball-core-game-data.git#egg=blaseball_core_game_data
pip install git+https://github.com/ch4zm/interesting-blaseball-games.git#egg=interesting_blaseball_games

source

If installing from source, it is recommended you install the package into a virtual environment. For example:

virtualenv vp
source vp/bin/activate

To install the package, run

python setup.py build install

Now test that the tool is available on the command line, and try out a command to print some interesting games from season 3:

which interesting-blaseball-games
interesting-blaseball-games --season 3 --team Sunbeams

Quick Start

The way interesting-blaseball-games works is, it creates a data frame object, applies some filters to it based on command line flags provided by the user, then runs the data frame through a data viewer (which makes the nice tables). All command line flags can also be specified in a config file.

Command line flags

Command line flags are grouped into data options and view options.

Data options:

• Season: set season for game data using --season. For multiple seasons, repeat the flag: --season 1 --season 2
• Postseason: --postseason flag limits data shown to postseason games only
• Specify only one of the following:
  • Team: use the --team flag to specify the short name of your team (use --help to see valid choices). For multiple teams, use multiple --team flags.
  • Division: use the --division flag to specify the name of a division. Surround division name in quotes, e.g., --division "Lawful Evil"
  • League: use the --league flag to specify the Good/Evil league

View options:

• Reason: use the --reason specify a reason why a game is interesting (blowout, shutout, shame, underdog); defaults to all.
• Win-Loss or Home-Away: --win-loss and --home-away lays out the table data as winner (left)/loser (right), or as home (left)/away (right)
• Winning Pitcher and Losing Pitcher: --winning-pitcher and --losing-pitcher flags will include the name of the winning/losing pitcher in the table
• Output Format: Specify an output format for the tables:
  • Rich: add the --rich flag to print the tables formatted for the console using rich, a Python formatting library (this is the default behavior)
  • HTML: add the --html flag to output the tables as HTML tables
  • Markdown: add the --markdown flag to output the tables as Markdown tables
• Output file: (optional) use the --output flag to specify an output file when using --html or --markdown (if left out, HTML and Markdown are printed to the console)

Using a configuration file:

• Config file: use the -c or --config file to point to a configuration file (see next section).

Configuration file

(Note: several configuration file examples are provided in a section below.)

Every command line flag can be specified in a configuration file as well. To reproduce the following command line call,

interesting-blaseball-games --season 1 --season 2 --team Sunbeams --team Tigers --postseason --winning-pitcher

we could create a configuration file named config.ini with the contents:

season = [1, 2]
team = Sunbeams
team = Tigers
postseason
winning-pitcher

and run interesting-blaseball-games specifying that configuration file:

interesting-blaseball-games --config config.ini
# or
interesting-blaseball-games -c config.ini

This would produce identical output to the command with all the flags.

You can also use both a config file and command line flags; the command line flags will take precedence over config file options if a parameter is specified by both.

Output Formats

This command line utility enables output in three formats: tables formatted for the command line, html (to stdout or to a file), or markdown tables (to stdout or to a file).

By default, the tool will print tables formatted for the command line.

If the --html flag is added, the tool will dump out the tables in HTML format using the pandas DataFrame function to_html() under the hood. If the --output flag specifies a filename, the HTML for all the tables is in that file.

If the --markdown flag is added, the tool will dump out tables in a format suitable for Markdown documents. If the --output flag specifies a filename, the Markdown for the tables will be in that file.

Configuration Examples

See config.example.ini in the repo for an example config file.

Only show interesting games from seasons 1 and 2 involving the Sunbeams and the Tacos:

[data]
season = [1, 2]
team = [Tacos, Sunbeams]

Limit this to shutout games only:

[data]
season = [1, 2]
team = [Tacos, Sunbeams]

[view]
reason = shutout

Only show interesting games from the season 3 postseason:

[data]
season = 3
postseason = true

Show team names as emojis:

[data]
season = 3
postseason = true

[view]
name-style = emoji

Organize the results by winner/loser instead of home/away:

[data]
season = 3
postseason = true

[view]
name-style = emoji
win-loss = true

Show the 15 biggest blowout games in blaseball history, along with the name of the losing pitcher who blew it:

[view]
reason = blowout
n-results = 15
win-loss = true
losing-pitcher = true

Repeat the above command, but output the results as HTML to the file alltime_blowouts.html:

[view]
reason = blowout
n-results = 15
win-loss = true
losing-pitcher = true
html
output = alltime_blowouts.html

Repeat the above command, but output the results as Markdown to the file alltime_blowouts.md:

[view]
reason = blowout
n-results = 15
win-loss = true
losing-pitcher = true
markdown
output = alltime_blowouts.md

Data

The data set used by this tool comes from blaseball.com's /games API endpoint. The data set is imported from blaseball-core-game-data.

Software architecture

This software consists of three parts:

• The command line flag and config file parser (uses configargparse library)
• The GameData object that stores the game data in a Pandas data frame (uses pandas library)
• The View object that provides a presentation layer on top of the Pandas data frame (uses rich library)

Who is this tool for?

This tool is for the blaseball community. It will be useful to people interested in exploring game data, people who are brainstorming about lore for their team, and people who are looking for a starting point for developing their own blaseball tool.

Future work

• Add close games (1 run - sorted by score, low to hi or hi to low?)
  • maxedout - high-scoring, one-run games
  • defensive - low-scoring, one-run games

Libraries Used

This command line tool uses the following libraries under the hood:

• blaseball-core-game-data
• rich for formatting text and tables
• pandas for organizing/filtering data
• configarparse for handling CLI arguments