Alright, so, today I’m gonna walk you through this little side project I tackled: that Minute Maid Park player crossword thing. It was a fun way to kill some time and kinda flex those coding muscles, ya know?
Where to Begin
First things first, I started by scraping the Houston Astros roster data. I figured the team’s official website would be the best place to get a clean list of player names. So, I whipped up a quick Python script using Beautiful Soup to grab all the names off the roster page. It was pretty straightforward – find the right HTML tags, extract the text, and bam, I had a list.
Crossword Puzzle Design
Now for the crossword part. I decided to use a Python library called `puzzlegenerator`. I tinkered with the settings to customize the puzzle’s size and density. The goal was to create something that wasn’t too easy but also wasn’t impossible for the average baseball fan. I fed the list of player names into the library, and it started generating possible layouts. It took a few tries to get a layout I liked – some of them were just plain ugly, with too many short words or weird overlaps.
Clue Creation
This was the tricky part. I couldn’t just use the player names as clues. I needed to come up with interesting, baseball-related clues for each player. I spent a good chunk of time Googling stats, fun facts, and nicknames for each player. For example, for Jose Altuve, I might use a clue like “Astros’ second baseman known as ‘Gametime’.” It was kinda fun digging up all this trivia.
The Code
Here’s a rough idea of what the Python code looked like (simplified, of course):
- `import requests, bs4, puzzlegenerator`
- `# Web scraping to get player names`
- `roster_url = ‘…’`
- `response = *(roster_url)`
- `soup = *(*, ‘*’)`
- `player_names = […] # Extract names from the soup`
- `# Puzzle generation`
- `puzzle = *(player_names, size=(15, 15))`
- `# Clue creation (this was mostly manual)`
- `clues = {player_name: ‘…’} # Dictionary of player names and clues`
- `# Output the puzzle and clues`
- `*_puzzle()`
- `*_clues(clues)`
Fine-Tuning and Tweaks
After the basic puzzle was generated, I had to do some manual tweaking. Some of the clue/answer pairings just didn’t feel right. I swapped out a few clues, adjusted the puzzle size slightly, and made sure everything looked presentable. It was a lot of back and forth, but it was worth it.
Showtime
Finally, I had a decent-looking Minute Maid Park player crossword. I printed it out and shared it with some buddies. They actually enjoyed it, which was a good sign. Overall, this was a fun little project that combined web scraping, puzzle generation, and a whole lot of baseball trivia. I learned a few things along the way, and it kept me entertained for a weekend. Not bad, right?
