Sports scores, especially Major league Baseball

This has been a common request for Web gadgets, and the same problems apply to Sidebar gadgets. Namely, sports score feeds are generally not freely available. Some sites do offer news feeds that ocassionally have sports scores interspersed with other news, but they never contain much information (certainly nothing like baseball box scores, like you'd want to see if you care about scores and stats). So, unless you're Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports Network, another big-time company specializing in sports scores, or you're willing to shell out real amounts of money to get access, the average gadget developer is not going to be able to scratch this itch.

Now Sidebar gadgets do have one option that Web gadgets don't -- they can retrieve HTML, which means you could write a gadget around screen-scraping sports scores from some site. However you need to be very careful if you're going to do this because:

1. screen-scraping is very prone to failure. If a site changes its layout, your gadget breaks. Not to mention HTML is not a data representation language (despite the best efforts of the semantic web guys), so scraping the right data is a major chore even if the site doesn't change its layout or presentation.
2. screen-scraping is often against the terms of use of websites, especially the kinds you'd want to scrape to get sports information. You might find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

If you're willing to take the risk, good luck.

Iguana775 wrote:

I'm really surprised that some sites like ESPN dont have this in a RSS feed yet. I would love to have a gadget like this too but seems pretty hard at the moment to do and has risks. A group of sports fans just need to get a site together that does just this. I'm sure they could make some money off of it.

Why would they have it in a feed Sports scores are big money. If you can get them in your feed reader without advertising, ESPN would've just lost a huge amount of advertising dollars. Instead, they hold onto them tightly and make you go to their web site or TV channel to find the scores, thus exposing you to advertising in the process (or maybe even requiring a subscription to get the data). They're making money off of the sports scores right now. They'd be making less if they just gave them away.

It's sad, but that's the state of "Big Sports" these days. You might be able to find cricket, World Cup, or NHL scores in free feeds, but good luck finding MLB, NFL, or NBA scores with sufficient data to make them useful and without having to pay an arm and a leg for a license.

why they could charge for it.