Okay, so I was messing around with baseball stats today, and I got curious about Barry Bonds’ insane 2004 season. You know, the one where he was basically walked every other time he came up to bat? I wanted to see just how many intentional walks he really had.
First, I poked around, and the search results looked promising.
Then I got to digging. I needed the actual numbers. I found a place with play-by-play data from the entire 2004 MLB season.
- I started with the entire dataset.
- I looked for all the times Barry Bonds was at bat.
- Then, out of those at-bats, I filtered to only find the instances where the play-by-play description specifically said “intentional walk”.
It took a little bit of finagling with the data, filtering, and making sure I was looking at the right stuff, but I’m confident in my findings.
It’s a good reminder that you can’t just make up numbers. You gotta dig and be persistent.
