Alright, so, let’s talk about this MLB rain delay thing. I wanted to figure out how to keep track of rain delays in baseball games, because, you know, it can really mess up your plans if you’re heading to the ballpark or betting or whatever.
First thing I did was to try and find some data. I figured there had to be some websites out there that track this kind of stuff. I poked around, checked out some sports news sites and stuff. I thought about the official MLB website, but it was kind of a pain to navigate, honestly.
Then, I had this idea to scrape the data. Web scraping, it’s called. Basically, it’s like automatically grabbing the information from a website. I’m not a coder or anything, but I’ve dabbled a bit. I found some tutorials online and decided to give it a shot. I used this tool, I think it was called Python, with some libraries, I don’t really remember their names, whatever, to pull the data from some websites.
After that, I started experimenting. I tried to write a script that would automatically check for updates on rain delays. It was messy, a lot of trial and error. I spent a whole afternoon on it, just trying different things, getting error messages, fixing the code, you know the drill.
Eventually, I got something that worked, kind of. It wasn’t perfect, but it could pull the latest updates on rain delays from a couple of different sites. I had to manually clean up the data a bit, though. It wasn’t pretty, but hey, it was something.
So, I set up a little system to run this script every so often, like every hour or something. It would grab the info and then I could see if there were any delays. I thought about making a simple interface for it, like a basic website or something, but I got lazy and never got around to it. To be completely honest, I lost interest.
I used it for a while, and it was helpful a few times. I even shared it with a buddy who’s also into baseball. He thought it was cool, but he didn’t really use it that much either, I think.
In the end, I kind of abandoned the project. It was a fun little experiment, though. I learned a bit about web scraping and stuff. Maybe I’ll pick it up again sometime, but for now, it’s just sitting there on my computer, gathering virtual dust.
Takeaways
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Finding data for rain delays isn’t as easy as it sounds.
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Web scraping can be a pain, but it’s doable, even for a non-expert.
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Building something that works takes time and effort, even if it’s a simple project.
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It’s easy to lose interest in a project, even if it’s something you were excited about at first.
Anyway, that’s my story about trying to track MLB rain delays. It wasn’t a huge success, but it was a good learning experience. If anyone else has tried something like this, I’d love to hear about it.
