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The Game Plan
Inspiration
When choosing the Houston Astros project, Johan and I were intrigued with the concept that teams could potentially play significantly worse when travelling compared to playing in their home stadium. We both are enthusiasts of other sports, so we took this track as an opportunity to learn more about baseball and how professional teams envision change for the improvement of their players.
What it does
Our project analyzes geographical distance between MLB stadiums and measures the comparison as teams travel these distances. This was accomplished through key statistics such as stadium latitude, longitude, time zone, and city. The key metric predicted is the batting average, which is a standard and well known statistic in the realm of baseball.
How we built it
With the help of supplemental datasets about stadium geography, we merged geographical data to each baseball game played. This allowed us to track the distance between the home stadium and the away stadium, as well as the distance between the home stadium and the previous stadium that the away team played at. Likewise, changes in time zones were measured. This was taken across the 23 seasons that the data reported.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many minor challenges while cleaning data. During the timeframe covered by the data, ne team changed their name and official abbreviation while another was completely bought over by a different city. Navigating through those were not difficult, but they were initially hard to spot without any context. Additionally, merging the given dataset with supplemental datasets gave us a bit of trouble due to different naming conventions and organization.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are thoroughly pleased with the data cleaning and wrangling processes we worked through, as well as the planning stage. As shown in the image uploaded, we spent a good amount of time brainstorming ideas to tackle the problem and it was definitely fruitful. Hearing the message that supplemental material was allowed additionally gave us inspiration to dig deep and explore potential solutions. We believe this stage gave us a boost on creativity and productivity, allowing us greater success with additional stages.
What we learned
This event is actually both of our first datathons (and hackathons in general). Going in, we had open minds and had little expectations, but we already saw potential for growth through the numerous tracks and opportunities. The largest concept we learned was that data is not confined to events such as these. In fact, the dataset for the Houston Astros is publicly available for anyone to use!
What's next for Oh, the Places You'll Go!
I think I speak for both of us when I write that this event has inspired us to continue exploring with data. With the vast amount of resources available to us through the internet and the advent of AI software, there is so much opportunity in all directions. We hope to continue tinkering with the data we encounter and learning how to have a positive impact on the world through it.
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