Okay, so today I was messing around with some golf data, specifically from the Masters. I had this question in my head: how many pars are usually made at the Masters? Sounds simple, right? But it turned out to be a bit of a rabbit hole.
First, I started googling around, trying to find some solid stats on this. I found a few articles and some old forum posts, but nothing that really gave me a clear, straightforward answer. I thought, “No big deal, I’ll just dig into some historical data myself.”
Find the Data
So, I went on a hunt for some detailed Masters results. I checked out the official Masters website, but it wasn’t as easy to grab the data as I hoped. Then I stumbled upon some sports data websites. They had a bunch of stuff, but not exactly what I needed, in the format I could easily use.
Getting Hands Dirty
After a bit more digging, I found a website that seemed promising. It had records of each round, player by player, hole by hole. Perfect! But here comes the fun part – the data was all nicely presented on web pages, not in a downloadable format. So, I rolled up my sleeves and decided to scrape it.
I whipped up a quick script using Python. Nothing fancy, just some basic web scraping stuff using a library called Beautiful Soup. I basically told the script to go to each page, grab the scores from the tables, and save them into a file I could work with.
Cleaning and Crunching
Once I had all the data, it was time to clean it up. There were a few inconsistencies and some missing data points, so I spent some time fixing those. After that, it was just a matter of writing another simple script to count the pars. I filtered the data to only include the rounds from the Masters, then iterated through each player’s scorecard, counting the number of times they scored par on a hole.
The Result
Finally, I got my answer. It was interesting to see how the number of pars varied from year to year and how different players contributed. I compiled all the numbers, made some simple charts to visualize the data, and boom – I had my analysis.
- Total Pars: There are a bunch of pars each year!
- Average Pars per Round: It’s pretty consistent, but some years are higher than others.
- Top Par Makers: Some players are just par machines!
It was a fun little project. I started with a simple question, went down a bit of a data adventure, and ended up with some cool insights. Plus, I got to play around with some web scraping and data cleaning, which is always a good time. That’s the beauty of these little data explorations – you never know where they’ll take you!
