Tons of Consequence

The unofficial ranking of every Test cricket century, scored by a weighted model across six criteria (Match Impact, Clutchness, Narrative, Conditions & Opposition, Historical Weight, Perceived Greatness). Readers put the six in order of importance; every innings is re-ranked their way.

Live at tonsofconsequence.com.

How it's built

Next.js 14 (app router), deployed on Vercel from main. There is no database: the data lives in the repo and a deploy publishes it.

• src/data/sample.js is the dataset, one row per innings (4,600+). The original rows came from public cricket records; newer rows come from Cricsheet or are written by hand.
• src/data/player-names.js maps the dataset's initials-style names ("JE Root") to the names fans use ("Joe Root"). Add a player there and all their innings update.
• src/lib/scoring.js is the scoring model. A weighting is an order of the six criteria (30, 22, 18, 14, 10, 6 percent), which is why it fits in a link (?o=na,hi,mi,...). The five presets (Default, Purist, Analyst, Patriot, Romantic) live there too. The Patriot is the Default order plus the Australian bonus (+5 for any Australian innings, +3 more for 1989 to 2007), carried in links as &bonus=au and always shown on screen. A test keeps every pair of presets clearly different.
• src/lib/dataset.js prepares the data: display names, permalinks, rankings, filters.
• src/lib/ask.js answers plain-English questions ("who has the better hundred, Ponting or Smith?", "best centuries by India since 2010") with no server or AI service: a small parser turns the question into a comparison or a filtered ranking and always reports how it understood it.
• src/lib/ball.js draws the cricket-ball mark once, for the header, favicon and share images.
• Pages: / rankings (and the front door for first-time readers), /search ask a question by typing or speaking (the browser's own speech recognition; the microphone hides itself where unsupported), /compare pick any two innings for a verdict, or switch to Career presets to compare whole careers (The Big Four to start), /innings/<id>-<name>-<runs>-<year> one innings with its own link and social preview image, /quiz the Pub Test (eight questions, four answers each, one per persona; each persona hands you into a preset), /about. When the weighting is not Default, rows show ▲ and ▼ for how far each innings has moved from its Default rank.

Featuring an innings

The "Latest century" card shows the row with featured: true (at most one; a test enforces it). Its spotlight field holds the card text. An innings that is still being played carries matchResult: "live", shown as "In progress".

Career comparisons

src/data/compare-sets.js lists the preset career comparisons on the Compare page (so far The Big Four: Smith, Kohli, Root, Williamson). The dataset holds only centuries, so the figures that need every innings (average, strike rate, fifties, how often a fifty becomes a hundred) are worked out from Cricsheet's ball-by-ball archive by node scripts/build-careers.mjs and saved to src/data/careers.js. The script refuses to save if a player's hundreds in the archive disagree with the centuries in the dataset, and the monthly update re-runs it. To add a comparison, add an entry (players are matched by name and team code, and by their Cricsheet ID) and run the script.

Videos

src/data/videos.js links an innings to a video, keyed by innings id. Each link was checked against YouTube (it exists; whether the uploader allows embedding). kind is innings (about this innings) or match (highlights of the whole Test). The player is click-to-play and uses the no-cookie embed, so nothing from YouTube loads until a reader presses play; a video that cannot be embedded links out instead. The top 50 innings were done first, and no innings gets a video unless one was found and checked. Many from before the 1950s have no footage. Check for dead links with node scripts/check-videos.mjs.

Share cards and the ToCs leaderboard (added 20 Oct 2026)

• /card/compare?a=ID&b=ID[&o=..&bonus=au], /card/batter/<slug> and /card/leaders?sort=tons|share|peak|wins&min=8 return designed PNG cards (format=portrait 1080x1350 by default, format=wide 1200x630 for link previews, download=1 to save). Shared look in src/lib/cards.js; the Share buttons are src/components/CardButtons.js (shares the image itself where the phone allows it). /compare?a=&b= and batter pages set these as their link-preview image.
• The ToCs page lists every batter (src/components/TocBoard.js, rows from src/lib/batterBoard.js, sorting in src/lib/boardSort.js), shows the latest hundreds, and each batter page says why a hundred is not measured (notMeasuredReason in src/lib/consequence.js).
• docs/drafts/season-update.yml is the weekly (Tuesday, Oct to Mar) season workflow, now switched on at .github/workflows/season-update.yml; the monthly update covers the rest of the year. docs/MOBILE-APP-SCOPE.md scopes a mobile app.

Keeping the data up to date

New centuries come from Cricsheet's open ball-by-ball data.

• Automatically: .github/workflows/monthly-update.yml runs on the 2nd of each month, adds new centuries, settles any finished "live" matches, runs the tests and the build, and commits the result. A deploy follows. It can also be run by hand from the GitHub Actions tab.

• By hand:

  node scripts/add-new-centuries.mjs            # preview
  node scripts/add-new-centuries.mjs --write    # add them
  

• Cricsheet publishes a match a few days after it finishes, so a very recent innings (like one from a Test still under way) has to be added by hand, with its match notes checked against reports.

• scripts/backfill-results.mjs fills in match results for older rows where Cricsheet can match them.

• Monthly cleanup: the same workflow compares the dataset with the ball-by-ball archive (scripts/audit-archive.mjs) and files or refreshes one GitHub issue labelled data-audit listing what needs a person: names spelled differently in the two sources, centuries that look missing, and match results that disagree. It closes the issue when the list is empty. It never blocks the update. A scheduled Claude task works through the issue on a branch each month (it never pushes). Cricsheet withholds Afghanistan men's Tests by policy, so new Afghan centuries have to be added by hand. See docs/drafts/data-cleanup.md.

A refresh only ever covers new games. It looks back over the last couple of months, adds centuries from games the site does not have yet, and settles the result of any game that was still being played. It never reworks historical innings. (add-new-centuries.mjs refuses a start date before the original data ends.) Cleaning up older rows, such as backfill-results.mjs, is a separate one-off job and is not part of a refresh.

New rows get automatic estimates for the six criteria (src/lib/heuristics.js). They are placeholders until someone scores them properly.

Development

npm install
npm run dev
npm test        # scoring, links, and data integrity (duplicates, ranges, names)
npm run lint

Claude connector and plugin

The site serves a read-only connector for Claude at /mcp (tools in src/lib/mcp.js, route in src/app/mcp/route.js), built on the same data, scoring and question engine as the pages. Anyone with a Claude account can add it by URL; the /connect page has the steps. The Claude Code plugin in claude-plugin/ is a thin wrapper that points at it. This repo is also its own plugin marketplace (.claude-plugin/marketplace.json):

/plugin marketplace add benlucas27/tons-of-consequence
/plugin install tons-of-consequence@tons-of-consequence-marketplace

Check a running copy with node scripts/test-mcp.mjs [url]. See claude-plugin/README.md and ADR-0006.

Decisions

Architecture decisions are recorded in docs/adr/, and the project's vocabulary in CONTEXT.md.

Known follow-ups

• No custom domain yet (tonsofconsequence.com was never connected in Vercel).
• Next.js is on the last 14.2 patch. A move to a newer major version is worth doing deliberately.
• Vercel still holds three unused environment variables (CRON_SECRET and the two NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_* ones) from the retired database setup. They can be deleted.
• Full names cover the 294 most prolific players. Others still show initials.