@pipeworx/historical-baseball

Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp — every tool in the catalog, including @pipeworx/historical-baseball’s. Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 5

Historical MLB statistics: career batting/pitching lines, team-season records, per-game box-score summaries, and season leaderboards, back to 1871. Fleet #2976 — the live mlb-stats pack only covers the current MLB Stats API; this pack is the historical record underneath it.

Tools

• baseball_player_history(player) — year-by-year batting and/or pitching stats for one player’s whole career. Pass a name (“Babe Ruth”) or an exact Lahman player_id (“ruthba01”). An ambiguous name returns a candidate list (with player_id) instead of guessing.
• baseball_team_season(team, year) — one team’s full-season record for one year: wins/losses, division/league/World Series result, team batting and pitching totals, park and attendance. Pass a code (“NYA”) or common name (“Yankees”).
• baseball_game_log(date, team) — box-score-level summary of the game(s) one team played on one date (an array, so doubleheaders return two games): final score, winning/losing/save pitcher, managers, and each side’s AB/H/2B/3B/HR/RBI/BB/SO/errors. Covers regular season plus All-Star, Division Series, League Championship Series, Wild Card and World Series games (game_type: R/A/D/L/C/W).
• baseball_season_leaders(year, stat, league?, limit?) — top-N leaderboard for one batting or pitching stat in one season. Batting: HR, AVG, RBI, R, H, SB, BB, SO, 2B, 3B. Pitching: W, ERA, SO_P, SV, L, WHIP. AVG/ERA/ WHIP apply a simple qualifying floor (AB>=100 / IPouts>=100), not MLB’s official plate-appearance/innings qualifying rule.
• baseball_coverage() — the loaded Retrosheet date range, latest Lahman season year, and when it was last refreshed. Call this if a date/year you expect to exist comes back not-found.

Team codes changed for several relocated/renamed franchises (e.g. the Athletics’ Retrosheet code changed for the 2025 move to Sacramento); both the old and new codes exist in the data where applicable, and a handful of common names and well-known defunct franchises resolve automatically (see TEAM_ALIASES in src/store.ts). An unrecognized team/year/date/stat is refused with a clear error, never an empty success.

Auth

Keyless. The tools answer only through the Pipeworx gateway, which holds the data; a standalone npm install has no data to read, and every tool throws a clear “not bound in this runtime” error there instead of returning an empty list.

Data sources

• Retrosheet (retrosheet.org/gamelogs) — one row per game, 1871-2025. Free with a required attribution notice, reproduced verbatim in every baseball_game_log response:

  The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at “www.retrosheet.org”.

• SABR Lahman Baseball Database (sabr.org/lahman-database) — season batting/pitching/team tables and player bios, 1871-2025 (now including Negro Leagues statistics licensed from Seamheads.com), maintained by SABR from Sean Lahman’s original donation. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike):

  This database is copyright 1996-2025 by SABR, via generous donation from Sean Lahman. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For details see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Neither source publishes a live query API — both ship bulk files only — so this pack builds a copy rather than proxying (CLAUDE.md “BUILD THE COPY”). Scope: season and game AGGREGATES only. Retrosheet’s play-by-play EVENT files are never loaded; game logs are already one row per game and Lahman’s tables are already one row per player-team-season, so unlike a raw-flight or raw-delivery source, neither needed an aggregation step here.

Licensing and ShareAlike compliance

The Lahman tables (people, batting_season, pitching_season, teams_season) are built from SABR’s bulk files rather than answered by calling SABR live per request — and CC BY-SA 3.0’s ShareAlike term applies to that kind of build, not to calling an upstream live. Concretely, that means:

• Attribution (BY): every response from a Lahman-backed tool carries source (SABR/Sean Lahman), source_url (sabr.org/lahman-database) and the full license text in license, and this README states it again.
• ShareAlike: because we hold and redistribute a derivative of these specific four tables (via the tool responses above), that derivative is itself licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 — same as the source, not more restrictively. If you build a product on data returned by baseball_player_history, baseball_team_season or the batting/pitching side of baseball_season_leaders, your own adaptation of that data carries the same CC BY-SA 3.0 obligation: credit SABR/Sean Lahman, and license your own redistribution of it under CC BY-SA 3.0 or a compatible license.
• This does not extend to the Retrosheet-backed baseball_game_log data, which carries only Retrosheet’s own attribution requirement (quoted above), no ShareAlike term.
• It does not restrict anything else in the Pipeworx catalog — ShareAlike “infects” only the specific copied/adapted work, not an unrelated codebase that happens to also call this gateway (the same reasoning as the symmap precedent in CLAUDE.md, applied to a license that actually requires it rather than one that was waived).

Refreshing or extending the data

node scripts/historical-baseball/load-data.mjs
# Retrosheet only (skip re-downloading/parsing Lahman's local CSVs):
node scripts/historical-baseball/load-data.mjs --skip-lahman
# Lahman only, once new CSVs are in place:
node scripts/historical-baseball/load-data.mjs --skip-retrosheet

Retrosheet is fully automated. The loader downloads https://www.retrosheet.org/gamelogs/gl1871_2025.zip (a stable combined bulk file covering 1871-2025 plus All-Star/postseason game logs) directly — no manual step. Re-run once Retrosheet publishes the following season’s combined zip (check https://www.retrosheet.org/gamelogs/ for a newer gl1871_20XX.zip, or a standalone gl20XX.zip before the combined file is updated).

Lahman is NOT automated and needs a one-time manual download. SABR distributes the comma-delimited release through signed per-file Box.com links (sabr.box.com/s/<share-id>/file/<id>) minted by Box’s web app — there is no stable, curlable URL for the CSVs themselves (unlike Retrosheet’s zip). To refresh:

1. Open https://sabr.org/lahman-database/ and follow the “Comma-delimited version” link (currently sabr.box.com/s/...) under “Download latest version”.
2. Download Teams.csv, People.csv, Batting.csv and Pitching.csv from that Box folder into a local directory.
3. Run the loader with --lahman-dir <that directory> (defaults to ../lahman-csv relative to this repo’s root, i.e. a sibling of the pipeworx checkout).

Each run replaces every table (DROP + reload), because SABR republishes corrected editions of the whole file rather than publishing incremental diffs, so a clean reload is the only way to avoid stale rows from a previously-corrected season lingering alongside the new data.

Needs wrangler logged in to the Pipeworx Cloudflare account for either source.

Tools

• baseball_player_history — Career year-by-year batting/pitching lines for one MLB player.
• baseball_team_season — One team’s season record, standings result and team stats for one year.
• baseball_game_log — Per-game box-score summary for one team on one date (handles doubleheaders).
• baseball_season_leaders — Top-N leaderboard for one batting or pitching stat in one MLB season.
• baseball_coverage — Loaded date/year ranges and when they were last refreshed.