Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I wrestled with getting some stats on Tommy White. Yeah, the baseball player. It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought, lemme tell ya.
First off, I just googled “tommy white stats.” Duh, right? But the problem was, I was getting a bunch of scattered info from different sources. ESPN had some stuff, the official college site had others, and some random sports blogs had bits and pieces. It was a mess.
Step one: Consolidation. I started copying and pasting everything into a Google Sheet. Yeah, real basic. I made columns for things like batting average, home runs, RBIs, games played, all that jazz. Tedious? Absolutely. Necessary? Yep.
Then I realized that some sites had different numbers. Like, one site said he had 24 home runs one season, and another said 27. What the heck? So I had to dig deeper. I tried to find official box scores or game summaries to verify the numbers. This meant clicking through a LOT of links.
- Tip #1: Look for official sources first. Like the college’s athletic website. They’re usually the most accurate.
- Tip #2: Cross-reference everything. If you see a number that seems off, check other sources.
Next, I ran into the problem of different seasons. Tommy White has played for different teams, so I had to separate his stats by year and by team. This meant adding more columns to my spreadsheet and meticulously sorting everything.
Major hurdle: I wanted to calculate some advanced stats, like his On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS). This meant I needed to find even MORE data, like his on-base percentage and slugging percentage, which weren’t always readily available. I ended up having to use some formulas in Google Sheets to calculate those based on the raw data I had.
After hours of digging, copying, pasting, and calculating, I finally had a somewhat decent spreadsheet with Tommy White’s stats. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot more organized and accurate than what I started with.
Lessons learned:
- Gathering sports stats can be a pain in the butt.
- Spreadsheets are your friend.
- Don’t trust everything you read online.
So, yeah, that’s how I spent my afternoon. It wasn’t glamorous, but hey, now I have a pretty good understanding of Tommy White’s performance. Was it worth it? Maybe. Depends on what you consider a good time, I guess.
Final thought: Next time, I might just pay someone to do this for me. Just kidding… mostly.
