Up to now, Ballpark Genius was entirely a look-at-the-past site, projections and season stats, nothing about the game happening right now. Added a whole vertical for that: today.service polls the MLB Stats API every 5 minutes, imports today’s schedule, and for any game that’s gone Final since the last poll, pulls the boxscore and writes the batting/pitching lines. The MCP tool for boxscores hands back formatted text instead of JSON, so those get parsed and upserted under a synthesized retrosheet-style id, MLB{gamePk}, since MLB doesn’t have one yet for a game that just ended.

Four endpoints under /api/today, each cached 5 minutes, and search got a new intent detector, detectTodayIntent(), that recognizes four shapes of question: what games are on today, who’s leading today, how’d a specific player do today, how’d a specific team do today. It slots into the existing semantic search response as an optional field rather than a separate code path, so “what’s the score of the Yankees game” and “who’s on pace for 40 home runs” both come out of the same box.

On the frontend, a TodayBand widget on the homepage, a game rail plus tabs for home runs, strikeouts, and total bases, refetching itself every 5 minutes via react-query. It also seeds the plumbing for live in-progress linescores, which isn’t built yet, GameCardLive already accepts a linescore prop, there’s just nothing populating it. That’s its own ticket. Shipping the “today” layer without the “live, mid-game” layer felt like the right cut. One is a poll every 5 minutes against data MLB has already finalized. The other is a websocket-shaped problem I didn’t want to solve in the same afternoon.