The Severed Cortex

By some luck of the gods, my fantasy football team has made it to the playoff finals and I have the chance to win $412.50. It's something that I like to consider 'a tidy sum'. Even if I lose this next week I still take home $150. For some reason, I think I'd prefer the $412.50, but I'm not sure why. The whole thing is pretty remarkable considering I hate fantasy football and I was goaded into fielding a team this year. My beef with fantasy football has always been that the whole thing hinges on whether you have a really good running back or not. More directly, your whole success depends on whether or not you lose one to an injury. If you do lose one, you can pretty much figure on your season being over. In fantasy baseball, one guy being injured doesn't necessarily kill your chances. Sure, it lessens them somewhat, but sometimes a replacement player you pick up does just as well. So despite my disdain for playing fantasy football and my several year hiatus from indulging in it, I agreed to 'share' a team with a friend last year. Really, about all I did was set the lineup on the even numbered weeks. My friend studied for the draft, drafted, and then basically told me which guys I should probably play. I think he went 8-1 during his weeks setting the lineup and I went 4-4 during my weeks. Obviously I suck to begin with too, which probably also explains why I'm not a real big fantasy football fan.

So this year at the last minute someone backs out and they ask me to field a team. Begrudgingly I said I would, despite the fact I thought Jerry Rice was still playing. That shows you what I know about the NFL. Luckily, a guy at work who is a nut about fantasy football gave me his draft sheet the day before our draft. I drafted a team and then something crazy happened. My team kicked ass. It not only kicked ass, it kicked ass in such a way that it was clear my team was way better than anyone else's. Way better. And then someone had my star running back's legs broken and my team started to suck. I managed to limp into the playoffs last week. Miraculously I got some flukey luck and upset the #1 team this week. Weird how that happens. If I really cared about this I'd have probably finished 4-10 and out of the playoffs.

... and all this week I was concentrating on the fantasy sport I'm obsessed about. Yes, I'm talking about my baseball addiction. I wanted to get 2007 hitting and pitching data and I didn't necessarily want to pay for it. I can get some statistics from our fantasy web site (CBSSportsline.com) and they give you the ability to export them to Excel easily, but they don't have all the stats I want. What can I say, I'm a junkie. (I can even tell you who Voros McCracken is.) Last year I pulled CBS stats and then manually cut and pasted all the other stats I wanted from ESPN. After that I had to merge the two sets together which was a total pain in the ass. All I had to match on was the name and anyone who works with databases knows how tenuous that can be.
This year I decided to just use the ESPN data, but pulling it by hand was way too painful and completely out of the question. Instead, I wrote this handy PHP script which goes out to ESPN's site, pulls the stats pages down one by one and then extracts out the pertinent information. As I'm pulling it from ESPN's site, I'm inserting it into my database. Pretty sweet huh! ... well, I think it's cool and I don't care what you think.