MLB Graphical Standings Email Tool by Jordan PorterMLB Graphical Standings Email Tool by Jordan Porter

MLB Graphical Standings Email Tool

Jordan Porter

Data Analyst

Data Visualizer

Software Engineer

Python

Sports

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Posted Jul 26, 2025

Gets current MLB standings, generates line charts to display the standings per division, uses OpenAI API to generate captions, and emails me the content.

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MLB-GRAPHICAL-STANDINGS

Setup

Mailtrap account

This project uses Mailtrap to send the emails. You can use their smtp servers to send emails to yourself.

Get an API token somewhere here

Create a .env in ~/.config/mlb-graphical-standings using .env.sample

Put 'Domain Admin' token as MAILTRAP_API_TOKEN.

Set TARGET_EMAIL in .env file to be your email address that you used to sign up for Mailtrap.

Set FROM_EMAIL in .env to be the email address you want to send from. We only want to send emails to ourself so just use demo@demomailtrap.com. Otherwise, provide your own email in the mailtrap.io web ui.

OpenAI account

Captions are generated using GPT model from OpenAI. Create a new project there and generate an API key for it.

Set OPENAI_API_KEY in .env to be your OpenAI Project API key dedicated to this venture.

Pay $5 to set up a free paid account. Set monthly budget to $5.

Cost per run: should be negligible.

Usage

python -m mlb_graphical_standings.graphical_standings

usage: graphical_standings [-h] [-s SEASON] [-p PROMPT]

sends you emails of mlb graphics.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s SEASON, --season SEASON
                        Which season to choose. Defaults to current. Older seasons may not work.
  -p PROMPT, --prompt PROMPT
                        Path to prompt to use for ChatGPT-generated captions.

Here is the default prompt:

Attached is information regarding the games behind of each team in an MLB division.Generate a caption that will be attached to lineplots displaying the trend of the games behind as time passes. Be completely whacko. Go crazy and have fun. Babble like a madman from the cartoon Adventure Time.

If you don't like it, then you can change it by specifying the path to a .txt file containing the desired prompt. I recommend putting it in ~/.config/mlb-graphical-standings/prompt.txt. You can even have multiple prompts and have some script choose one at random. Just have fun with it.

Developing

Build

chuy build

Test

chuy build test

What to Expect

This program grabs current division standings in the MLB and creates a report with a captioned lineplot representing the progression of the season to date. It then emails the report to a myself.

In sample_files you will find a basic shell script and some prompts that are selected based on the day of the week.

TODO

Some of the teams are mixed up in the standings... Also some player references are incorrect (for example, in 2025 ChatGPT is stating that Ohtani is on LAA and currently on the IL).