Frequently Asked Questions

Where does Screwball's real-time MLB data come from?

Screwball gets real-time data from Sportradar, the official real-time stat provider of MLB. All team, boxscore and play-by-play data from the 2025 season and onwards comes from Sportradar. Screwball is constantly updating with events as they happen in live games, which may take anywhere from 1-2 minutes to show up in the search results.

For completed games with a stat correction, it may take up to 24 hours for Screwball to update it's results.

What are the limitations of Screwball's historical MLB data?

Since Screwball's historical data primarily comes from Retrosheet, whatever limitations their data has, our site has.

Different types of queries are processed differently, and thus have different limitations. Generally every query will be answered with whatever method will give you the most accuracy while ensuring we have the granularity to answer your question. The 3 main types of data we use are:

• Game data: Includes every AL/NL game from 1901 onwards, with most games between 1885-1990 for currently active franchises. No leagues other than the AL or NL are included.
• Box score data: Accurate after 1912, with mostly complete data between 1901-1911
• Play-by-play data: Accurate after 1969, with some incomplete data between 1912-1968, with the later years more complete than the early years
• Pitch sequence data: The ordering of balls and strikes in every at-bat is fully accurate after 2000, with mostly complete data from 1988-1999 and very spotty before that.

When viewing known-incomplete box score data, that data is highlighted like this, so you know data is missing. You can see that on a query like which pitcher had the most strikeouts before 1910?.

The final limitation, specific to Screwball, is that we only count MLB stats from 1901 and later. The reason for this is that every query is answered from the ground up by searching through every box score or play in MLB history, and the minimum granularity of that data is game-level. So even though we know Cy Young had 115 Ks in 321.1 IP in 1900, because we don't know when those strikeouts occured during the season, they aren't included in our search. So if you search for something like how make strikeouts did cy young have?, you will get an incomplete answer. But for any player whose career started on or after 1901, you should get mostly complete data, and fully complete data for any player whose career started in 1912 or later.