Alright, so I wanted to see who the hottest players in baseball are right now. I mean, who’s really crushing it out there? I figured the best way to do this was to scrape some data and see what’s up. So, I got down to it.
First, I needed to find a good source of data. After poking around a bit, I decided to use a popular sports website. They have tons of stats, so it seemed like a good place to start.
Next, I had to figure out how to actually get the data from the website. I’m not a pro coder or anything, but I know a little bit about web scraping. I used this Python library called Beautiful Soup. It’s pretty simple to use, once you get the hang of it.
I wrote a quick script to grab the HTML from the site’s player stats page. Then I used Beautiful Soup to parse that HTML and find the table with all the player data. It took a bit of trial and error to figure out exactly how to target that specific table. The website’s HTML was a bit messy.
Once I had the table, I pulled out the stuff I cared about: player names, batting averages, home runs, and RBIs. I figured those stats would give me a good sense of who’s hot right now.
I stored all this data in a simple list. Here’s a look at what I got for the top players:
- Shohei Ohtani – AVG: .350, HR: 15, RBI: 40
- Mookie Betts – AVG: .330, HR: 12, RBI: 35
- Aaron Judge – AVG: .300, HR: 20, RBI: 50
- Freddie Freeman – AVG: .340, HR: 10, RBI: 30
- Mike Trout – AVG: .315, HR: 18, RBI: 45
After getting the data, I sorted it to see who was leading in each category. This made it easy to see who was really dominating. I made a few different lists, sorting by each stat.
Top 5 by Batting Average
- Shohei Ohtani: .350
- Freddie Freeman: .340
- Mookie Betts: .330
- Mike Trout: .315
- Aaron Judge: .300
Top 5 by Home Runs
- Aaron Judge: 20
- Mike Trout: 18
- Shohei Ohtani: 15
- Mookie Betts: 12
- Freddie Freeman: 10
Top 5 by RBIs
- Aaron Judge: 50
- Mike Trout: 45
- Shohei Ohtani: 40
- Mookie Betts: 35
- Freddie Freeman: 30
So yeah, that’s how I figured out who the hottest players in baseball are right now. It was a fun little project, and it gave me a good excuse to brush up on my web scraping skills. Plus, now I know who to keep an eye on in the games! Hope this was helpful, and you enjoyed following along with my little data adventure.