Alright, let me tell you about this little experiment I did the other day – I titled it “babe ruth is dead” because, well, you’ll see why.
It all started with me wanting to mess around with some data and see what kind of weird stuff I could dig up. First, I grabbed a dataset – nothing too fancy, just some public data I found online about baseball players. I spent a good hour just cleaning the damn thing up. Missing values, wrong formats, you name it, I had to fix it.
Next, I loaded the clean data into my Python environment. I mainly used Pandas, because that’s my go-to tool for data wrangling. I wanted to see if there was any kind of interesting relationship between a player’s name and their performance stats. Dumb, I know, but I was curious.
So, I started grouping players by their first names. Then, I calculated the average batting average for each name. Yeah, super basic stuff. Then, I ran a quick script to find any names that had a statistically significant drop in batting average over a certain period. My thinking was, maybe something happened to players with a particular name. Again, kinda dumb.
The output showed some weird stuff. The name with the most notable drop was “Ruth”. Then I did a google search and it shows Babe Ruth, the baseball player, is dead. So I made the title “babe ruth is dead”.
Now, obviously, this is a total joke. The number of players named “Ruth” is small to begin with, and correlation doesn’t equal causation. Plus, old-timey baseball players names are likely to not be popular in current times. But it was a fun little experiment to see how easily you can misinterpret data if you don’t think critically about it.
After that, I just played around with some more visualizations. I made a couple of scatter plots to see if there were any obvious clusters, and a heatmap to visualize the correlation matrix of different stats. Nothing earth-shattering, but it looked cool.
In the end, the whole thing was a bit of a goofy exercise. I didn’t discover anything groundbreaking, but I did get some practice with data cleaning and analysis. Plus, I got a good chuckle out of the “babe ruth is dead” connection.
So yeah, that’s the story of how I “proved” Babe Ruth is dead using baseball data. Don’t take it too seriously, and remember to always think critically about your data!
