Okay, so today I decided to mess around with some baseball data, specifically about Mike Redmond. I’ve always been a fan of catchers, and Redmond was a solid one back in the day. So, I wanted to see if I could pull up some of his career stats and maybe do some simple analysis.
First, I fired up my trusty web browser. I wasn’t sure where to start, just knew I wanted some raw data. I did some generic searching, you know, “Mike Redmond baseball stats” kind of stuff.
I landed on a few different sites. Some were kind of clunky and hard to navigate. But I did find the data finally!
Digging Through the Data
Okay, now I had the data. It had his yearly stats: games played, at-bats, hits, home runs, that sort of thing. I copied and pasted everything into a plain text file. Basic, I know, but it gets the job done.
- Year: All years played
- Games: Number of games
- At-Bats: Number of times at bat
- Hits:Number of hits
I wanted to do some basic calculations. Like, what was his career batting average? How many total games did he play? Nothing fancy, just some simple stuff to get a better feel for his career.
So, I opened up a spreadsheet program. I pasted the data from my text file into the spreadsheet. It took a little bit of cleanup. I had to delete some header rows and make sure the numbers were formatted correctly.
Then, I used some simple formulas in the spreadsheet. You know, SUM to add up his total games played, and a simple division to calculate his batting average (hits divided by at-bats). It’s basic math, not rocket science.
It was cool to see the numbers all laid out. It’s one thing to know a player was around for a while, but it’s another to see the actual numbers. It gave me a little more appreciation for Redmond’s career. He wasn’t a superstar, but he was a reliable, consistent player for many years.
This was a fun little exercise. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was a nice way to spend a bit of time combining my interest in baseball with some very basic data handling. Maybe next time I’ll try to do something a little more complicated, but for today, this was perfect.
