Alright, so check it, today I’m gonna walk you through this little side project I messed around with: Jim Thome Minnesota Twins. Sounds random, right? Well, it kinda is, but bear with me.
It all started with me digging through some old baseball cards. Found this beat-up Jim Thome card from when he was with the Twins. It got me thinking, “Man, I wonder how he actually did with them?” You know, just a random thought.
First thing I did, obviously, was hop online. I hit up *. That site’s a goldmine for stats, you know? I looked up Thome’s page, scrolled down to his Minnesota Twins years (2010-2011). Okay, so far so good. I saw some numbers, RBIs, Homers, etc…But wanted to store those numbers somewhere.
Next, I needed something to put this data into. I fired up Excel. Yeah, old school. Sometimes the simplest tools are the best. I made columns for Year, Games Played, At Bats, Runs, Hits, Doubles, Triples, Home Runs, RBIs, Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage. The whole shebang.
Then I started plugging in the numbers from Baseball-Reference. It’s tedious, I won’t lie. But I’m a bit of a stickler for getting it right. Had to double-check everything to make sure I wasn’t screwing it up. Like, did he have 25 or 26 doubles in 2010? Stuff like that.
Okay, so now I had the raw numbers. But I didn’t want to just stare at a spreadsheet. I wanted to see something…more visual. So I played around with Excel’s charting tools. Made a line graph showing his home run totals over those two seasons. Not a ton of homers, but whatever. Also, a bar graph comparing his batting average each year. Actually, not bad. It was cool to see it visualized.
Then, I thought, “Why stop here?” I wanted to see how his Twins performance stacked up against his entire career. Back to *. More data entry. Added career average for all his stats.
Finally, got all that into the spreadsheet. Made some more comparison charts. Now that was interesting! You could see where he was still hitting for power, even late in his career, and where he started to fall off a little. It wasn’t his prime, of course, but he still contributed.
So, end of the day, was it some earth-shattering analysis? Nah. Just a fun little project. I started with a beat up card, ended up learning something new and making some cool charts. And that’s about it.