Okay, here’s my take on sharing my experience with the “cubs and sox score” thing, blog style.
## Cubs and Sox Score: My Little Project Dive
Alright folks, so I was messing around the other day and decided, hey, why not try pulling some baseball scores? Specifically, I wanted to get the scores for the Cubs and the White Sox. Just a simple project, right? Turns out, it was a little more involved than I initially thought, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?
First off, I figured I’d need some way to get the data. I started by looking for free APIs. There are tons out there, but finding one that was free and easy to use took a bit. I ended up settling on one that seemed relatively straightforward, but I won’t name it because it was a pain.
Next up, the coding. I decided to use Python because it’s my go-to for quick projects like this. I started by installing the `requests` library – gotta make those API calls somehow! I fired up my VS Code and started hammering out some code.
- I created a function to hit the API with the team names (“Chicago Cubs” and “Chicago White Sox”).
- Then, I had to parse the JSON response. This was where things got a little hairy. The API’s data structure wasn’t exactly what I expected, so I had to dig around a bit to find the actual score.
- After that, I extracted the scores and the dates the games were played. I had to do some string manipulation to get things into a nice, readable format.
Here’s where I messed up a bit. I didn’t handle errors very well at first. If the API was down or there was some kind of connection issue, my script would just crash. So, I had to add some error handling with `try…except` blocks. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. Gotta remember to improve that later.
Then, came the display part. I wanted something simple. I decided to just print the scores to the console, but I formatted them nicely. Something like:
Cubs: 5 - Sox: 3 (Played on: 2024-10-27)
Finally, I added a loop to fetch the scores for the last few games. I decided to make it configurable, so I could easily change how many games to fetch. This also required me to understand the API pagination of the data.
Overall, it was a fun little project. I learned a bit about working with APIs, parsing JSON data, and error handling. It’s not the most elegant code in the world, but it gets the job done. It shows me that even a small thing can take more time and effort than you might expect at the beginning. Now I can easily get the Cubs and Sox score without having to browse all over the internet!
