In 2011, the Balitmore Orioles started off at 6-1 and were in first place in the NL East. But by they All Star break, they were 36-52 and finished the season at 69-93. I wanted a graphic I could look at to see some success. This page is close, http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BAL/2011.shtml. What I wanted though was a chart of games behind over the entire season.
I also wanted to play with node.js some more, and received a beta account to http://nodejitsu.com. I have had an account on http://no.de for some time and one for http://nodester.com. Both are great services, but I never really did anything with them beyond proving I could deploy something. Nodejitus includes databases as well, and I wanted to learn some MongoDB.
So like most things, data is key here. I need stats for games behind for each time every day of the season. I searched through all the usual sources and didn't find anything. The closest I came was http://erikberg.com/mlb/standings.xml, but that is for the current day. I needed to grab that data everyday and store it somewhere. I decided to shove the xml into Mongo. Using node-cron, I can run a job every morning to do that. The next steps are to come up with a json respresentation of the data I want and then create graphs for each division.
If you want try this app yourself, you will need to copy the mongo.conf.sample to mongo.conf and fill it in with your MongoDB configuration info.
This app is current deployed to http://baseball-standings.jit.su. Nothing exciting yet, just gathering data in the background for a while until I get time to make it informative.