Ball Ranks API Review 2026

Ball Ranks builds fantasy football and fantasy basketball rankings with its own models, and the site says it tests them against 15 completed seasons per sport. The API hands you the output: ranked boards and player projections, as JSON or through MCP tools an AI client can call.

It is a fantasy product. You get projected fantasy points and projected stat lines, not box scores, odds or game data. The site states it runs no contests and takes no wagers.

There are two models. Model Zero is free. Model One, the one the site leads with, needs a Premium account. We tested Model Zero with no key on 23 October 2026; we have not called Model One.

Four GET endpoints sit under https://ballranks.com/api/v1, and every response names the model and the data version in a meta block:

• /rankings/weekly ranks one football position (QB, RB, WR, TE, K or DST) for one week, in standard, half PPR or PPR scoring. Our week 7 call came back with data published the day before.
• /rankings/season returns the season board for either sport. The football board ranked 700 players, each with an overall rank, a position rank and projected points.
• /players/{player}/rankings returns one player's season rank, by id or slug.
• /players/{player}/projections returns a season projection, or a weekly one for football. Our basketball call returned games, minutes, and the nine category stats from points to turnovers.

The ids are worth noting if you join this to other data. Football players carry ids in the NFL's 00-0039139 format, and basketball players use NBA.com ids, so a join to an nflverse or NBA stats table needs no name matching.

Lists page with limit and offset, up to 100 rows a call. An OpenAPI 3.1 file and a Postman collection are on the docs page.

The MCP server lives at https://ballranks.com/api/mcp. It is stateless Streamable HTTP, every tool is read-only, and it works with no key. A tools/list call returned four tools that mirror the REST endpoints: get_week_rankings, get_season_rankings, get_player_rankings and get_player_projections.

Send the same Bearer key as REST to get your account's limits or Model One. REST and MCP calls draw on one daily allowance. The docs also point to an agent skill you can install from GitHub with the same key.

• No key: $0, 10 requests a day per IP, Model Zero.
• Free account: $0, 8 requests a minute and 80 a day, Model Zero.
• Premium: $39.99 a year, 60 requests a minute and 1,000 a day, Model Zero and Model One for both sports.

Premium is a personal membership for fantasy players, and the API limits come with it. Over the cap you get a 429 with Retry-After and X-RateLimit-Remaining headers, and the error code tells you whether a free account or Premium lifts it.

• Other sports. Football and basketball only. Basketball has season rankings and season projections, no weekly data.
• Past seasons. The API serves the season it is publishing now. For history, see our free sports datasets.
• Odds and props. No sportsbook prices. Pair it with an NFL odds API or an NBA odds API if you want to set projections against lines.
• Game data. No live scores, box scores, schedules or rosters. The sports data API guide covers those.

• Fantasy tools and Discord bots that need a ranked start/sit list by position and scoring format.
• Draft and trade helpers that want a full season board with projected points.
• AI agents that answer fantasy questions and need an MCP server with no credentials to manage.
• Prop researchers who want an independent projected stat line to compare with a book's number.

The API is small and clean: four endpoints, one key for REST and MCP, a versioned path, and errors with stable codes. You can try the whole thing with curl before you make an account. The 10-call anonymous cap is tight for anything past a demo, so make the free account early.

Start with the season board, then pull a week of rankings for the position you care about. The docs fit on one page.

Last updated: 23 October 2026 · How providers get listed