Alright, let me tell you about this little project I did. It was all about digging into some baseball stats – Colorado Rockies versus Chicago Cubs matches, you know, the good stuff. Here’s how it went down.
First off, I started with the data. I knew I needed some game results. So, I hit up some sports stats sites. Scraped some data tables – nothing too fancy, just the basics like dates, scores, and maybe a few key player stats if I could snag ’em easily. It was a bit of a pain to clean up, lots of weird formatting and missing values, but hey, that’s data, right?
Next, I dumped all that cleaned-up data into a spreadsheet. Yeah, old-school. I like seeing it all laid out in front of me. I then imported this spreadsheet into Python, using Pandas, because that’s just the easiest way to wrangle data in my book.
Then came the fun part – analyzing. I started with some basic stuff: Who won the most games overall? What’s the average score in these matchups? Anything jump out? I just poked around, looking for interesting patterns.
I wanted to see if home field advantage was a real thing in these games. So, I calculated the win percentage for each team when they played at home versus when they played away. It was kinda cool to see that there was a slight edge for the home team, but nothing groundbreaking.
After the basic analysis, I got a little fancier. I tried to see if there were any scoring trends. Like, did one team tend to start strong and then fade, or vice versa? For that, I looked at run differentials in different innings. This part was a bit trickier – lots of grouping and summing involved. Still, it was worth it because I found some interesting tendencies.
I used Matplotlib and Seaborn to throw together some quick charts. Bar graphs, scatter plots, you name it. Visualizing the data made it easier to spot trends and also made it easier to explain what I found.
Finally, I wrapped it all up by writing down my findings. Just a simple summary of what I learned from the data. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was a fun way to spend an afternoon and learn something new. I may revisit this and see if I can dig into other teams, maybe create a little program for future matchups.
