Claim Check
"Best 36 games ever." "First since 1920." The hosts repeat stats like these every week. Claim Check runs each one against the full record and grades it.
Builds on Answers for Coach
- Team-seasons
- 3,087
- Seasons
- 1901–2026
- Game stretches
- 30/36/50
Coach questions it could answer
The playbook →- Are team hot and cold streaks more than coin-flip noise?
The Red Sox's 31–5 is the prototype. Answers for Coach checked "best 36 games ever" and found six AL/NL teams with a better run, but no team that went 31–5 from that far below .500. Claim Check makes that a repeatable process.
- Where do the on-air milestone and leaderboard claims actually land?
Turn each claim into a query over every team-season or player-season since 1901, then show where the claim really ranks, the near-misses, and the fine print that makes it true or false.
Data it uses
The data lake →Could use later: Negro Leagues, Take ledger
The question
Ten times on the question list, the hosts heard a stat on air and wondered whether it was real. A “best ever” claim can hide a cherry-picked window, a change of era, or a technicality, and the more interesting true stat is often sitting right next to it.
How it would work
- Each claim becomes a structured query: the stat, the window (36 games, a season, a career), the group it’s compared against, and the time span.
- The check runs it against every qualifying team-season or player-season and returns the real rank, ties and near-misses.
- A grade: true, close (true with a caveat), or not quite, with the better stat when there is one.
First version: live now
Check a claim → Pick a 30-, 36- or 50-game stretch, enter a record, and it’s graded against every team-season since 1901, with the full leaderboard. It’s built on the Answers for Coach best-stretch data and reproduces that study’s answer: at 31–5 over 36 games, the 2026 Red Sox had six AL/NL team-seasons ahead of them.
Next versions
- Any stretch length, not just 30, 36 and 50 games, and worst runs too.
- Records from a given point in a season, and winning and losing streaks.
- A page per checked claim, with the grade and the fine print.
The data
MLB Stats API game results for every regular-season game since 1901, already cached and validated against official standings by Answers for Coach.
What it needs
- Careful definitions. Whether the Negro Leagues, the 1981 and 2020 seasons, or tiebreaker games count changes many answers; each check has to say which rules it used.
- Player claims later. Player game logs need their own cache before player milestones can be checked.
Status
In progress. The first version handles team runs over 30, 36 and 50 games.