Daily Archives: 3/26/2007

Why is it so hard to find a file with the MLB schedule in it?

Baseball ScheduleShame on you Major League Baseball. I was hoping to find a file that contained the date and times for all the major league games that would occur in the 2007 season. It turns out that they make it damned difficult to actually get a complete and accurate schedule. Sure, if you are interested in a single team, you can surf to their official site, click on a link which indicates some variant of “Downloadable Schedule”, and get a comma-separated-values file that contains your teams games in it. Unless your the Yankees. Apparently the Yankees don’t care enough to actually supply one. Or the Pirates, who supply a link, but it’s broken. Or Atlanta, who alone of all the teams chooses to make their schedule only available in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.

Sigh.

But this didn’t deter me. I snarfed, I scraped, I spidered, and in the end, I prevailed. Here’s my resulting calendar file for the 2007 season. All the times are listed in PST/PDT, rather than the more common Eastern Time, but let’s face it, it’s for me and I live on the West Coast. If you don’t care for it, you could probably write a script to fix it, or you could wait a few days and maybe I produce a nicer, more generic CSV file for your consumption.

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Addendum: Oops.  I got the home/away reversed on the list.  I’ve fixed it on the copy linked above.  It should be better now.