What is Pennant?
Pennant is an interactive history of baseball like none other seen before. Using Pennant's rich interface fans can browse and view data from over 115,000 games that have taken place from 1950 to 2010. Seasons, games and events are graphically represented in a clear, easy to interpret manner that takes them beyond the numbers.
Pennant allows you to:
Pennant allows you to:
- View your any team's complete overall history (since 1950), showing the rise and fall of each team over time.
- Compare any team's season to the rest of the league and see how they matched up in numerous pitching and hitting categories
- View the result of every game within a season, showing the rise and fall of the team's league and division ranking.
- Show every event within any selected game, complete with updated score and event text.
- Replay each event within a game in a timeline, allowing you to relive each play.
How can I get it?
Pennant is currently available for the Apple iPad and the HP Touchpad. You can purchase Pennant by clicking the appropriate link at the bottom of this page or on the Purchase page.
Where does the data come from?
The data that drives Pennant is a combination of acquired and custom-built databases that have been combined for use with this application. The play-by-play data is primarily obtained from the open-source records available at Retrosheet. It is then parsed into a usable database format. A small amount of data is also being used from The Baseball Databank which conveniently offers their data as a downloadable MySQL file.
How does it work?
Short (non-technical) Answer:
I am storing a lot of information on the internet and the program grabs it and displays it in real time.
Long Answer:
The acquired data is run through custom software that runs intense calculations. This creates the new, unique dataset that is exclusive to Pennant. This data is uploaded to the Pennant server. A custom API formats the data, generates play-by-play statements in English and returns it in a usable format (JSON or XML). The data is then parsed and displayed in real time.
I am storing a lot of information on the internet and the program grabs it and displays it in real time.
Long Answer:
The acquired data is run through custom software that runs intense calculations. This creates the new, unique dataset that is exclusive to Pennant. This data is uploaded to the Pennant server. A custom API formats the data, generates play-by-play statements in English and returns it in a usable format (JSON or XML). The data is then parsed and displayed in real time.
Is the data publicly available?
As of now the Pennant API is not publicly available, but I am hoping to make it available in the future. The biggest issue with making it available is the cost of server traffic. If you'd like to see an API or are interested in the data please send an email to info [at] pennant.cc.
Acknowledgements
As mentioned earlier, Pennant could not exist without the hard work of the people at both Retrosheet and The Baseball Databank.
The custom graphics in Pennant were created using openFrameworks, an open-source library for desktop and mobile graphics.
The custom graphics in Pennant were created using openFrameworks, an open-source library for desktop and mobile graphics.
