NPB Game Results by Date

Purpose

Given a calendar date, return every NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball / 日本プロ野球) regular-season and pre-season game on that date — final score, both teams (with team IDs), venue, winning / losing / save pitchers, game status, and the canonical game_id that links to Yahoo's game-detail page. Source is Yahoo Japan's Sportsnavi weekly schedule (baseball.yahoo.co.jp/npb/schedule/). Read-only — never posts, comments, or interacts with users.

When to Use

• Building a daily NPB results digest / RSS / Slack bot.
• Backfilling a season database with scores, pitchers of record, and venues from any single date.
• Discovering the game_id for downstream skills that scrape box scores, play-by-play, or stats (e.g. /npb/game/{game_id}/score, /npb/game/{game_id}/stats).
• Pulling tomorrow's matchups + probable starters (the same page shows pre-game rows with announced pitchers prefixed with (予)).

Workflow

The site is a server-rendered Vue page with no anti-bot, no auth, no cookies, no rate-limit gate. Every game-row data point (teams, score, pitcher tags, venue, game-id) is in the initial HTML — browse cloud fetch returns 200 with the full markup in ~400 ms. Lead with the fetch path; the rendered browser path is a strict-equivalent fallback that pays a ~50× cost premium for zero added information.

1. Fetch the weekly schedule page

GET https://baseball.yahoo.co.jp/npb/schedule/?date=YYYY-MM-DD

• The date= query param positions the page to the week containing that date (Mon–Sun, e.g. ?date=2026-05-19 returns the row block 5月18日（月） 〜 5月24日（日）). Confirm via the <li class="bb-scheduleNavi__item"> element.
• Equivalent (verified identical body): https://baseball.yahoo.co.jp/npb/schedule/first/all?date=YYYY-MM-DD. The og:url canonicalizes both to /npb/schedule/?date=….
• Farm-league (2軍 / minor-league) schedule lives at /npb/schedule/farm/all?date=… — same HTML shape, different teams.
• No --proxies, no --verified, no special headers required. Plain curl works; browse cloud fetch <url> is the cleanest entry point inside the agent.

2. Parse rows from the schedule table

Each game is one <tr class="bb-scheduleTable__row"> (the row also gets bb-scheduleTable__row--today for the day that matches the server's current date — informational only, do not key on it). Capture these per row:

Pitcher tag enum (the character inside the leading parens of each <li class="bb-scheduleTable__player">):

Tags only appear on rows with status 試合終了. Pre-game rows show (予)山野 style placeholders; cancelled rows show neither score nor pitchers.

Status enum (text inside the bb-scheduleTable__status link):

3. Filter by the requested date

The HTTP response is week-scoped, not day-scoped, even when ?date= names a specific day. Carry the inherited <th class="bb-scheduleTable__head"> value forward through subsequent rows in that date block, then filter the parsed games[] array to entries whose date matches the requested day (format: M月D日（曜）, e.g. 5月19日（火）). The page also has a <h2 class="bb-head01__title">5月19日（火）</h2> showing the focused day in Japanese — useful for sanity-checking your filter key.

4. (Optional) Hydrate game details

For each game_id, the canonical detail entry point is:

https://baseball.yahoo.co.jp/npb/game/{game_id}/index

which auto-redirects to /top once the game has started. Sibling paths under the same id: /score (box score), /stats (player stats), /live (play-by-play), /preview (lineups + probables), /text (text-cast log). These are out of scope for this skill — fetch them only when downstream callers explicitly need more than the schedule-page row.

Browser fallback

If the fetch path is ever blocked (it isn't today), open the same URL in a browse cloud sessions create session — no --verified / --proxies needed — then browse get html body and apply the same regex set. browse snapshot / browse get text body also work but are noisier than the raw HTML because the table renders inside layout chrome.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• (Ｓ) = Save uses full-width Ｓ (U+FF33), not ASCII S. A naïve tag === 'S' check silently drops every save pitcher. Match /[ＳS]/ or compare codepoints. Verified across iter-1 (2026-05-19, 5 games with saves: 大勢, 岩崎, ハーン, etc.).
• ?date= is week-scoped. The response always contains the full Mon–Sun block surrounding the requested date — never just that single day. Always filter the parsed rows by the date header before returning. Cross-week ranges require multiple fetches stepping by 7 days.
• Date headers use Japanese formatting with rowspan inheritance. The <th class="bb-scheduleTable__head"> appears once per date and rowspans over the day's game rows. Subsequent rows in the same date block omit the <th> entirely — you must carry forward the most recently-seen date label as you iterate. Filtering by date requires the Japanese key (5月19日（火）), not an ISO string; build a Japanese-formatter helper or regex-extract (\d+)月(\d+)日 and compare numerically.
• Out-of-season dates fall back, they don't 404. ?date=2025-06-15 (a past-but-not-current-season date in our 2026-server-time world) returns the closest in-range week (2月2日 〜 2月8日) with statusCode=200. Always verify the returned week header matches the requested date before parsing.
• Rakuten's team_id is 376, not in the 1–12 sequence. All other NPB clubs map cleanly to ids 1–12 (1=巨人, 2=ヤクルト, 3=DeNA, 4=中日, 5=阪神, 6=広島, 7=西武, 8=日本ハム, 9=ロッテ, 11=オリックス, 12=ソフトバンク), but Rakuten Eagles is 376. Don't validate-with-a-range-check; trust the /npb/teams/{id}/index URL as the source of truth.
• Cancelled-game rows have a slightly different DOM. 試合中止 rows use bb-scheduleTable__home--preGame / bb-scheduleTable__away--preGame classes (with the --preGame suffix) instead of the plain bb-scheduleTable__home / bb-scheduleTable__away, omit the pitcher <ul>s entirely, and have an empty <p class="bb-scheduleTable__score">. A regex that requires bb-scheduleTable__homeName (substring, not exact-class) still catches them because the team-name child div retains its non-suffixed class. Match on homeName / awayName, not on the parent's exact class string.
• bb-scheduleTable__row--today is a UI hint, not a filter. It marks the day the server considers "today" (which may differ from your ?date= target). Do not use it to filter — use the date header text. (Observed during 2026-05-20 fetch: today-row was 5/21, not 5/20; the page rolls over before midnight JST.)
• /npb/schedule/, /npb/schedule/first/all, and /npb/schedule/? all serve identical first-team (1軍) data. The canonical form (per og:url) is /npb/schedule/?date=…. Use that to dedup if you cache.
• Farm league is at /npb/schedule/farm/all?date=… with the same HTML shape but Eastern + Western League teams. Out of scope for the default first-team skill unless the caller explicitly asks.
• (予)NAME pitcher entries are projections, not facts. Once the game's status flips to 試合終了, the (予) rows are replaced by actual (勝)/(敗)/(Ｓ)/(H) tags. Do not emit (予) pitchers in the final-results payload — they are pre-game noise.
• No structured JSON endpoint observed. The Sportsnavi mobile / app API (sportsnavi-app-category Vary header) is gated by Yahoo Japan app credentials and not callable from a browser session. The HTML page is the canonical public source.

Expected Output

{
  "requested_date": "2026-05-19",
  "week_range_ja": "5月18日（月） 〜 5月24日（日）",
  "league": "first",
  "games": [
    {
      "date_ja": "5月19日（火）",
      "date_iso": "2026-05-19",
      "game_id": "2021038878",
      "game_url": "https://baseball.yahoo.co.jp/npb/game/2021038878/index",
      "status": "試合終了",
      "status_en": "final",
      "start_time_local": null,
      "venue": "いわき",
      "home": {
        "team_id": "2",
        "name": "ヤクルト",
        "score": 0,
        "pitchers": [{ "tag": "敗", "name": "高橋" }]
      },
      "away": {
        "team_id": "1",
        "name": "巨人",
        "score": 2,
        "pitchers": [
          { "tag": "勝", "name": "戸郷" },
          { "tag": "Ｓ", "name": "大勢" }
        ]
      },
      "winning_pitcher": "戸郷",
      "losing_pitcher": "高橋",
      "save_pitcher": "大勢",
      "hold_pitchers": []
    }
  ]
}

Additional outcome shapes the parser must handle without throwing:

// Cancelled / rained-out game — both scores null, no pitchers.
{
  "date_ja": "4月15日（水）", "game_id": "2021038717",
  "status": "試合中止", "status_en": "cancelled", "venue": "甲子園",
  "home": { "team_id": "5", "name": "阪神",   "score": null, "pitchers": [] },
  "away": { "team_id": "1", "name": "巨人",   "score": null, "pitchers": [] },
  "winning_pitcher": null, "losing_pitcher": null, "save_pitcher": null
}

// Pre-game (今日 or future date) — score null, start_time set, pitchers are projections.
{
  "date_ja": "5月21日（木）", "game_id": "2021038889",
  "status": "見どころ", "status_en": "preview",
  "start_time_local": "18:00", "venue": "神宮",
  "home": { "team_id": "2", "name": "ヤクルト", "score": null, "pitchers": [{ "tag": "予", "name": "山野" }] },
  "away": { "team_id": "1", "name": "巨人",     "score": null, "pitchers": [{ "tag": "予", "name": "田中将" }] },
  "winning_pitcher": null, "losing_pitcher": null, "save_pitcher": null
}

// No-game day (e.g. Monday off-day) — game array filtered to []; week_range_ja still populated.
{
  "requested_date": "2026-05-18",
  "week_range_ja": "5月18日（月） 〜 5月24日（日）",
  "games": []
}