Publish a season wrap

A season wrap is a web page about one season, made to be sent to people rather than read in the app. It opens on a cover with the team and its record, then moves through the season's totals, the team slash line, every ball the side put in play on one chart, end-of-season awards, and a line for every player who batted. It is a tap-through story rather than a long scroll — you move a screen at a time with a tap or a swipe — and whoever you send it to needs no account, no app and no sign-in to read the whole thing.

The link is the whole mechanism, so be clear about what that means: anyone holding the link can open the wrap. There is nothing else guarding it — no password, no members-only check, no expiry. The address itself is the key, a long unguessable string the app mints when you publish, and the app says the consequence out loud before it makes one: "Anyone with the link can see every player's name and stats." It is not listed anywhere, and the page tells search engines not to index it, so nobody stumbles onto it. But a link in a group chat is a link anybody in that chat can forward, and once it is out you cannot un-send it. Treat a published wrap as public, because it is.

Turning it off is the one control you keep, and it is immediate: the link stops working for everybody, including the people who already have it, and nothing stale is left behind at the old address. So the honest way to think about it is a tap you can take back rather than a secret you are keeping.

There are two wraps, not one, and the app asks which before anything else — "Whose season?", with The team and Just me. The team wrap is the recap above: the record, the whole roster, the superlatives, everybody's line. Just me publishes a page about you instead — your slash line, your spray chart, your best game of the season and last season set against this one — with no roster and no won-lost record on it, because neither of those is about you. They are separate links, they can both be live at once, and each is turned off on its own.

Three things are true of your own wrap and not the team's. It counts only the games you played for that team, so if you play for two you publish two different pages rather than the same numbers under two crests. The year-over-year screen is simply missing when there is nothing honest to compare against — a first season, or a wrap covering all time — rather than showing a row of zeroes that would read as a collapse in form. And your best game is picked on total bases rather than hits, which is why a two-for-three with a home run in it beats a three-for-four of singles.

Publishing the same window twice does not make a second link — the app hands back the one that already exists. That is deliberate rather than lazy: two live links for one season would mean somebody turns off the one they can see while the other quietly keeps working. Every link you have made is listed in the same place, so "what of ours is public right now" is answerable in one screen, and your own wrap is marked Just me in that list while the team's carries no mark.

Nothing on the page is a snapshot. The app stores only which team, which dates and what the window is called — every number, every dot and every award is worked out again each time somebody opens the link. So a wrap cannot drift away from the team's real numbers, and fixing an at-bat a week later fixes the page you already sent.

Who can take a wrap down differs, on purpose. Any member of the team can turn off a team wrap, because everybody's name is on it and nobody should have to chase whoever published it. Your own wrap can only be turned off by you: a teammate cannot delete your keepsake, and cannot find out whether you published one in the first place.

Two refusals you may meet. A team with no games recorded has nothing to wrap and says so rather than minting an empty page. And if you keep score without batting yourself, Just me is refused — "You haven't recorded an at-bat for this team in that season yet." — which is the app declining to publish a permanent page with your name on it reading .000.

A wrap is a link, and that is what makes it the thing to send. The season has two other ways out, for the two jobs a link does badly: a stat card is a picture of one player's numbers, and the team export is the same season as a spreadsheet that will outlive the app.