Background’s Background

Growing up, baseball was on the TV a lot as background noise while I loafed around the house and backyard. In fact, I vividly remember witnessing Marcus Thames hitting a home run off The Big Unit in his MLB debut. In adulthood, I use baseball as white noise. The ambient ballpark sounds and unique cadence of baseball commentary relax me. Probably because they take me back in some way.

The ‘93 Fleer Ultra Cards were second in badass only to the ‘92 Marvel Masterpieces.

The Why

All digital broadcasts of MLB games are now behind paywalls. This is a good thing, but it is too pricey for casual fans looking for ambient sound.

(This is where at least one reader says out loud “just buy an old radio,” but c’mon, that’s not fun.)

Fortunately, someone had done a lot of work stitching together old broadcasts on archive.org. These did the trick, but they’d be even more ambient if they were played on something that wasn’t tied to the computer I was using.

Enter the Echo and the idea for a small project.

The What

The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) allows for streaming audio. So Nick and I knew that technically we could make an Echo skill that streamed those public domain broadcasts.

Cool, but all that reading about START and STOP and PLAYBACK and yadda yadda yadda.

However, neither Nick or I consider ourselves professional programmers, so we knew from the documentation that it was going to be a big ask for our skill set.

Fortunately, Amazon open sourced a template for audio streaming skills. This changed the project from being something that was technically possible, to something the two of us could actually do in a weekend.

Timeline

The project spanned a period of a few weeks, but the total working time ended up being a smidge over a weekend. About 2–3 full days each.

It really is that easy for anyone with a little bit of experience learning software. I’ve spent more time writing and editing these posts than we spent on the project itself.

Next Post: Part 2 —Development