Okay, so let me tell you about this thing I did, digging into the Brewers roster from 2022. It was kinda fun, actually. Started with a simple question: “Who exactly was on that team?”
First thing I did was hit up the usual suspects online. Baseball Reference, MLB’s site, all that jazz. Just wanted to grab a list of names. Copied and pasted that into a spreadsheet. Nothing fancy, just a quick and dirty way to get the data in one place.
Then, I started cleaning it up. You know, getting rid of the extra columns, making sure the names were consistent, that sort of thing. It’s always a bit messier than you think it’s gonna be.
After I had a clean list of names, I wanted more info. Like, what positions did they play? How many games did they play? What were their stats? So, back to the websites I went. Had to manually look up each player and grab the info I needed. It was kinda tedious, but I was watching TV at the same time, so it wasn’t too bad.
I dumped all that data into my spreadsheet too, adding columns for position, games played, batting average, ERA for the pitchers, you get the idea. It was starting to look like a real database. A really basic one, but still.
Next, I wanted to see if I could find anything interesting in the data. I started sorting and filtering. Who played the most games? Who had the highest batting average? Who had the lowest ERA? Stuff like that.
Turns out, Willy Adames played a lot of games that year. And Corbin Burnes had a pretty amazing ERA. No huge surprises, but it was cool to see the numbers laid out like that.
I messed around with some charts and graphs in the spreadsheet, just to visualize the data a bit. Made a little bar chart showing the number of games each player played. A scatter plot of batting average versus games played. Nothing groundbreaking, but it helped me get a better sense of the team.
Finally, I wrote up a little summary of what I found. Just a few paragraphs highlighting the key players and stats. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was a nice little project. And now I know a whole lot more about the 2022 Brewers than I did before!
Key Takeaways:
- Data cleaning is always more work than you expect.
- Spreadsheets are your friend.
- There’s always something interesting to find in the data, even if it’s just a confirmation of what you already knew.
That’s pretty much it. A simple little data dive into the Brewers roster. Give it a shot sometime, it’s kinda fun!
