Okay, so, the other day I was trying to get some data on Cubs games, specifically looking at rain delays. I’m a huge baseball fan, and, well, weather and baseball don’t always mix. Here’s how I went about it.
First, I needed to find a good source of data. I’m no programmer, so I was hoping for something I could easily grab and, like, mess around with in a spreadsheet. I spent a bit of time poking around the internet.
Finding the Data
After a bit of searching, I realized, “Hey, Major League Baseball probably has this stuff!” Turns out they do, but it wasn’t exactly laid out in a nice, neat package. I did stumble on some websites that collect baseball statistics, but they were a little confusing to use.
Getting My Hands Dirty (Sort Of)
I decided to keep things simple. I mean, really simple. I figured I’d start with a single season and manually look at box scores for Cubs games. I know, I know, it sounds tedious, but I wanted to get a feel for the data first.
So, I opened up a spreadsheet. One column for the date, one for the opponent, and another for notes about the game. Specifically, any mentions of a rain delay. I started going through game summaries one by one. It was a bit slow, yeah, but it wasn’t rocket science.
What I Noticed
- Not Every Delay is Obvious: Some games just had a note saying “delayed start” without explicitly mentioning rain. I had to do a bit of extra digging for those.
- Duration Varies Wildly: Some delays were super short, like under an hour. Others dragged on for what felt like forever.
- Home vs. Away: I hadn’t thought about this much initially, but checking for delays at Wrigley Field (the Cubs’ home) was way easier than figuring out what happened at away games.
Next Steps (If I Get REALLY Motivated)
Honestly, manually checking box scores isn’t going to cut it long-term. If I wanted to do this for multiple seasons, I’d have to find a better way. I think there are some sports data APIs out there, but that’s a whole other can of worms. Maybe I’ll learn some basic coding one of these days. For now, I’ve got a decent little spreadsheet for one season, and that’s good enough for my curiosity.
It was a surprisingly manual process, but hey, I learned a thing or two about how baseball tracks this stuff. Plus, it gave me a good excuse to look at a bunch of old game summaries!
