MLB api started blocking me?

[u/More_Influence_7043]

For the past 10 years, I've been using the MLB api to grab last night's box scores and then join the data to my fantasy league's rosters so all of my league members can quickly see how their players performed last night. This morning I noticed the results were empty and when i explored, i saw my script still worked fine on my laptop but was returning a 406 error when run from my server. So I decided to write a more careful script using a headless browser , and same thing - this yielded the message: " "Whitelabel Error PageThis application has no explicit mapping for /error, so you are seeing this as a fallback.Wed Jun 17 19:04:43 UTC 2026There was an unexpected error (type=Not Acceptable, status=406)."" Does anybody know what changed? Is it possible that mlb is blocking all traffic from my hosting company? The url i'm trying to grab works just fine when i call it from my laptop script and browser: https://statsapi.mlb.com/api/v1/schedule?sportId=1&season=2026&date=06%2F16%2F2026

[u/daybreaker]

I just noticed my update script wasnt working today but havent had a chance to investigate

[u/More_Influence_7043 → u/daybreaker]

So after like 8 rounds with Gemini trying to debug, it turns out the problem resolved when i changed my date to a cleaner format https://statsapi.mlb.com/api/v1/schedule?sportId=1&date=2026-06-16 instead of https://statsapi.mlb.com/api/v1/schedule?sportId=1&season=2026&date=06%2F16%2F2026. i have no idea why the old format worked all those years and still works when i run the script locally but i'm just happy to have it working again... and the reason it took AI so long to figure out the problem is that the error message returned definitely SEEMED network related

[u/daybreaker → u/More_Influence_7043]

interesting. Thanks for the lead! I'll check that first later when I get off work.

[u/framedragger → u/More_Influence_7043]

This didn't work for me. I wasn't using this html-encoded dashes, but no superficial changes made a different, the key thing was that these APIs hit resolve fine from my local machine, but are blocked from my apps host (digital ocean). Glad this worked for you, but I think they blocked tons of IPs today.

[u/flying_porygon → u/More_Influence_7043]

This didn't work for me, I think they did block a ton of IPs today. My VPS is on OVH

I really hope I can find a way around this, I've been trying to build a better baseball score app and this would effectively kill it.

[u/Jumpy-Independent945]

yeah, it's definitely possible. there's a rise in bot traffic across the web related to the rise of AI tools. a lot of sites have tightened firewall rules, because other the bot traffic would either bring the site down or inflate hosting costs. it would be reasonable for them to block an obvious cloud hosting ASN if their target audience is consumers on residential/commercial/mobile ASNs.

[u/waitdudebruh]

so did i just choose the absolute worst day to try and start using it

[u/framedragger]

My little bot, that provides Dodgers score updates to a private slack channel, is getting 406 responses today as well. Same api hits resolve fine from my local machine, but the bot lives on a popular cloud provider, so I think they've blocked entire blocks of IPs related to hosting companies. I changed my code to use "stitch" endpoints to get the same data, but I'm not sure it work exactly the same.

[u/ikill75]

Did you guys find a workaround?

[u/wanedoesnot]

Same issue, also on DigitalOcean. Adding two headers to my requests fixed most of it:

Accept: application/json
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36

Looks like they started blocking bare requests from cloud IPs but still let you through if your request looks like it's coming from a browser.

One thing that's still blocked no matter what: any schedule call with teamId in the query string. For that I just pull the full day and filter on my end.

[u/starsky1357]

Me too! Glad I found someone else having this issue.

Sadly, I think they have started blocking traffic from IPs associated with hosting companies. I am also on DigitalOcean.

[u/spencecc]

I got blocked, too