Player Stats Breakdown: Rockies Face Off Against Yankees

Okay, so yesterday I was messing around, trying to pull player stats from a Colorado Rockies vs. Yankees game. Seemed simple enough, right? Boy, was I wrong!

First, I started by trying to find a reliable API. Searched around Google for a while – you know, the usual “baseball stats API” kind of search. Found a few options, some free, some paid. I figured I’d start with the free ones. Why not, right?

Tried one that looked promising. Signed up, got an API key, and started hammering away at it with Python and the requests library. Super basic stuff. But guess what? The data was super patchy. Like, some players had stats, others didn’t. And the game I wanted – Rockies vs. Yankees – was missing entirely! Strike one.

Next, I tried another “free” API. This one was a complete joke. It said “free,” but then you had to pay for almost all the data. What’s the point? I just skipped right over that one.

So, after wasting a couple of hours on those duds, I decided to go old-school. Web scraping! Yeah, I know, it’s a bit clunky, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I chose a popular sports stats website – I won’t name names – and started inspecting the HTML. Ugh. Tables within tables within divs… It was a mess.

Fired up BeautifulSoup and started picking apart the HTML. It took a while to figure out the right selectors to grab the player names, stats, and all that jazz. Got it working… sort of. The data was there, but it was all jumbled up and required a lot of cleaning. Like, a lot.

I spent the next few hours writing code to parse the data, clean it up, and get it into a nice, usable format. I used regular expressions to extract the numbers from the strings (because of course, they weren’t just numbers), and Pandas to organize everything into a DataFrame.

Finally, after a whole afternoon of wrestling with APIs and HTML, I had my player stats. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked! I got the batting averages, RBIs, home runs, all that good stuff. It felt good to finally have something to show for all that effort.

Lessons learned? Free APIs are often not worth the hassle. Web scraping can be a pain, but sometimes it’s the only way to get the data you need. And always, always expect to spend way more time cleaning data than you think you will.