Okay, so I wanted to figure out how many pars were made in the 2022 Masters. I thought it would be a fun little data project, and honestly, I was just curious.
My Process
First, I gotta find the data, right? So, I started with a simple search. I just typed in something like “2022 Masters scores” or “2022 Masters results”.
I browsed some of the results, looking for an official-looking source. I wanted something reliable, not just some random blog post. Finally, I found it on the official Masters website. They had detailed stats, perfect!
Now that I had the webpage, I needed to figure out how to pull the data from the table. I needed all the scores, round by round, for every player.
So, I thought, I will use a simple online tool to scrape the data. I found one pretty easily just by Googling “web scraping tool.” I pasted in the URL for the results page.
The Scrape and Clean
The scraper did its thing, and it pulled out all the table data. It wasn’t super pretty at first, it’s just raw data after all. I downloaded it as a CSV file, which is basically just a spreadsheet.
Next, I opened the CSV in a spreadsheet program. Then, I started the long-ish process of cleaning the data.
- I removed any extra columns I didn’t need, like maybe player rankings or something that wasn’t relevant to just counting pars.
- I made sure the scores were all formatted the same way, as simple numbers.
After cleaning, I had a nice, neat spreadsheet with each player’s score for each hole, for each round. Now the real fun starts!
Counting those Pars
With the data all cleaned, I got to the main event: counting the pars. This was pretty simple. A par is just the expected score for a hole, right? So, on a par 4, a score of 4 is a par, for example.
I basically went through each round and counted the number of times a score was a par on their course and for each hole.
After summing up all the pars from all the rounds, I finally had my total number of pars made in the 2022 Masters!
It was cool to see the number come together. This little project was satisfying because I got to use some practical data skills to answer a question I was genuinely curious about. It’s not groundbreaking research, but it was fun for me!
