Comment by nonethewiser 17 hours ago
Yeah Im just now realizing how the baseball scoring conventions are basically a DSL for a baseball game. There is a standardized way for expressing what happens in a game. I wonder if this has been leveraged in any interesting programs.
here is an example inning:
K | 6-3 | BB | 2B (RBI, R1-H) | F8
When I coach my youth teams, I always list their positions by number. I derive some minor benefit from doing that, but I'm also hoping that by having them learn the position numbers, it will make it easier for them to enjoy audio broadcasts of baseball games. There's a special kind of fun in listening to those.
I think we are saying the same thing. This is the same as scoring the game they are just saying it out loud. Maybe my example didnt pick the most illustrative details.
Retrosheet is a project which reconstructs historical baseball games from old newspaper accounts, scorescards purchased at estate sales, and other means. They actually have an ASCII scorecard format:
https://www.retrosheet.org/eventfile.htm
Originally to parse these out people used MS-DOS utilities written by the guy who made the Diamond Mind Baseball game. There's a more modern set of utilities called Chadwick now so you don't have to use DOS.
There's a standardized way to express what is happening in the game too- you'll often hear on the radio and television broadcasts the play that just happened using numbered positions on the field. 1 is pitcher, 2 is catcher, 3 is first baseman, 4 is second, 5 is third, 6 is shortstop, etc. so you'll hear something like "6-4-3 double play" which means the ball was fielded by the shortstop (6), thrown to the second baseman (4) for the first out, then to the first baseman (3) for the second one.
Makes it easy to visualize the game if listening on the radio.