Update Frequencies

This guide helps you plan polling and caching against your request quota. Each feed has a time-to-live (TTL): how long a response is cached, and a data update cadence: how often the underlying data actually changes. The two are not the same: a short TTL on slowly-changing data does not mean you should poll fast. Given your request budget (see API Basics), drive your polling from the Recommended pull columns, not the TTL.

TTL values below were measured from live responses; each response carries its own cache-control header, which is always the authority for the payload in hand.

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Frequency Chart

The Probabilities package (see Tracking Win Probabilities):

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The Change Feed Window

Sport Events Updated and Sport Events Created report a rolling 24-hour window, newest first, so any polling gap shorter than a day can be recovered without a full re-sync. Sport Events Removed lists games taken out of the system. See Monitoring Data Changes for how to consume all three.

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Live Update Cadence

Baseball scoring updates pitch by pitch for competitions with basic_play_by_play coverage, and score by score for the rest; a season's coverage block states which applies (see Fundamentals). Two settling behaviors matter for cadence planning:

• Statistics can settle for a few minutes after the final out; schedule one final Sport Event Summary pull a few minutes after a game moves to closed.
• Standings for post-coverage seasons (MLB among them) update after games finish, not during play; refreshing them mid-game returns the same table.

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Reading TTL from Responses

Every response carries standard HTTP caching headers stating how long it may be served from cache; the values in the chart were read from those headers on live responses. Check the header on the responses you receive rather than assuming a fixed value, and use the change feeds to detect updates as they land; see Monitoring Data Changes.

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Best Practices

• Drive polling from the Recommended pull columns; never poll faster than a feed's TTL, and rarely as fast
• Use the live columns only while games are in the live window; off-slate, drop to the non-live cadence and let Sport Events Updated trigger refreshes
• Prefer the delta feed for steady-state play-by-play polling, re-synchronizing from the full timeline after any gap
• Treat the discovery feeds (Competitions, Seasons, Season Info) as weekly feeds whatever their TTL says
• Remember Daily Summaries dates are UTC; a US evening slate spans two UTC dates, so a scores page polls both