PRISM

PRISM is a free, open ecosystem of datasets and APIs for resolving player identities across sports data providers. Every provider assigns their own internal IDs — MLBAM, FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, and others all use different identifiers for the same player. Joining on player names is error-prone. PRISM gives every player a stable prism_id that ties all those identifiers together.

Currently covers MLB (~1,700 players), with NFL and NBA planned.

Components

Crosswalk Identifier mapping only — look up a player by any known ID and get back all the others.

Registry Enriches the crosswalk with metadata: names, birthdates, position, handedness, and roster status.

Quick example

Resolve Shohei Ohtani’s MLBAM ID to all other namespaces:

GET https://crosswalk.prism.statsvine.com/mlb/players/by_id/mlbam/660271.json

{
  "prism_id": "pr2r5vzrqm",
  "mlbam_id": "660271",
  "fangraphs_id": "19755",
  "bbref_id": "ohtansh01",
  "sfbb_id": "ohtansh01",
  "yahoo_id": "10835",
  "nfbc_id": "9810"
}

Built to last

Open data

Source CSV is public on GitHub and licensed ODC-By 1.0. Fork it, file a PR, or consume the raw exports directly.

Validated daily

Automated checks against MLB rosters, the Chadwick Bureau, FanGraphs, and SFBB surface stale or missing mappings before they reach you.

Stable schema

Field names and file paths are treated as a public contract. Downstream systems can build on PRISM without watching for silent breakage.

Multiple formats

JSON, CSV, NDJSON, and gzipped variants — plus flat by_id lookup files for fast joins without a server.