I Asked 18 ESPN Scoreboards for 'Today' in the Same Second and Got Five Different Dates
I run a visa agency in Bali. The other half of my week goes into Apify Actors, and one of them reads ESPN's public data for 33 leagues: scores, schedules, standings, rosters, box scores and the DraftKings line, one flat row per game. No API key, no proxy, no browser — ESPN's own site loads plain JSON and that JSON is the whole product. The hard part of that Actor was never parsing. It was the…
A reporter queried 18 ESPN scoreboards for today's games at the same moment and received five different dates. The data source is ESPN's public JSON data for 33 leagues, including scores, schedules, standings, rosters, box scores, and the DraftKings line. The reporter discovered that ESPN's default date is not "today" but rather the slate a fan opening the page wants to see.
The dates vary depending on the league, with some leagues providing no date at all, only a week number. This inconsistency makes it unusable for a board, bot, or agent tool that relies on a single "today" date. To resolve this, the reporter's Actor always sends an explicit "dates" value for every league. The issue lies in the fact that ESPN's "now" is based on US Eastern time, not UTC.
When a bot requests "today" at 10am in Bali, it gets the next Eastern slate, missing three live games on its own screen. The reporter measured this drift by measuring the size of the date drift on the Actor's own scheduled run.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
