Greenmonster

Greenmonster is a toolkit for baseball stat enthusiasts or sabermetricians to build a database of play-by-play stats from MLB's Gameday XML data.

The provides three tools:

• Spidering of MLB/MiLB games
• Parsing of Gameday XML
• Mixin methods you can use to extend your own classes

Usage

Spider

If you don't want to specify a download location every time you run the spider, you can set a default games folder location using Greenmonster.set_games_location:

# Set games folder location
Greenmonster.set_games_folder('/Users/geoff/games/')

The spider utility has three public class methods: Spider.pull_game, Spider.pull_day, and Spider.pull_days.

Spider.pull_game takes a game_id (the folder name of the game on the Gameday server) and a hash of options as arguments. If for some reason the game does not fall in the expected folder for the game's date or sport code, you can add those options to the arguments hash. Other options include :games_folder and :print_games (if false, game IDs are not printed to screen).

# Pulls MLB's 7/4/2011 Toronto @ Boston game
Greenmonster::Spider.pull_game('gid_2011_07_04_tormlb_bosmlb_1', {:print_games => false})

Spider.pull_day takes an hash of options as an argument. Greenmonster will create subfolders by MLB "sport_code" (MLB games fall under 'mlb', various minor league games and non-MLB/MiLB games fall under other sport code designations), and then children folders for years, months, days, and specific games. Sport code can be a string or an array of sport code strings.

# Pulls all MLB games for today
Greenmonster::Spider.pull_day({:date => Date.today, :games_folder => './home/geoff/games'})

# Pulls all rookie league games for today
Greenmonster::Spider.pull_day({:sport_code => 'rok', :date => Date.today, :games_folder => './home/geoff/games'})

# Pulls all games in all sport codes for today
Greenmonster::Spider.pull_day({:all_sport_codes => true, :date => Date.today, :games_folder => './home/geoff/games'})

# Pulls all games in rookie and winter league games for January 2nd, 2010
Greenmonster::Spider.pull_day({:sport_code => ['rok','win'], :date => Date.new(2012,1,2), :games_folder => './home/geoff/games'})

Spider.pull_days takes a range of dates to process as an argument, plus a hash of arguments to pass to Spider.pull.

# Pulls all MLB games for in April, 2012
Greenmonster::Spider.pull_days((Date.new(2012,4,1)..Date.new(2012,4,30)), {:games_folder => './home/geoff/games'})

Mixins (ALPHA)

(Under development.)

As of version 0.4.0, Greenmonster provides the Greenmonster::Player module which can be used to extend any Ruby class you use that represents players. Include the module in your class to get Greenmonster-specific functionality like parsing players out of games.

class MlbPlayer < ActiveRecord::Base
   include Greenmonster::Player
end

>> MlbPlayer.create_from_gameday_xml_game('gid_2011_07_04_tormlb_bosmlb_1')

Migrations (ALPHA)

WARNING: THIS FEATURE IS UNDER DEVELOPMENT. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. ANOTHER WARNING: Using migrations on alpha/beta/pre versions of Greenmonster may not be compatible with formal releases that come later.

If you use ActiveRecord, Greenmonster provides a generator that can generate tables for Greenmonster data. Add Greenmonster to your Gemfile:

gem 'greenmonster', '~> 0.4.0'

After you pull the gem in with Bundler, you will have access to Greenmonster generators. The Install generator attempts to install a set of standard name tables that correspond to Greenmonster data.

Requirements

• Ruby 1.9
• Bundler
• Nokogiri
• HTTParty
• ActiveRecord (if you want to use migration generators or any mixins that involve AR saves)

Testing

The test suite downloads a few days of data, so it is not fast to execute.

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright © Geoff Harcourt 2012

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.