Okay, so I was messing around with some data visualization stuff the other day, and I got this idea to map out every MLB stadium. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, it turned out to be a bit more involved than I initially thought, but I got it done, and I’m pretty stoked about how it turned out.
First off, I had to get a list of all the MLB teams. Turns out, there’s 30 of them. I just found a list of them online, nothing fancy.
Next, I needed the location of each stadium. This is where it got a little tricky. I started by searching online for each stadium’s address, one by one. I found some websites that had most of them listed, which saved me some time. For the rest, I just did some good old-fashioned searching for each team’s official website and dug around until I found the address. I saved all of that in a spreadsheet because who wants to do that more than once?
Getting the coordinates was the next hurdle. I mean, you can’t really plot a location on a map with just an address, you know? You need those latitude and longitude thingamajigs. So, I used a free online tool to convert the addresses to coordinates. It was a bit tedious, copying and pasting each address, but it got the job done. Some tools let you upload a whole spreadsheet, which would have been way easier. I’ll try that next time.
- Find all MLB teams
- Get stadium addresses for each team
- Convert addresses to geographic coordinates
- Choose a mapping tool
- Plot the coordinates on the map
- Customize the map markers and add labels
With all the coordinates in hand, I moved on to the fun part – actually making the map! There are tons of tools out there for this, and I’ve played around with a few of them before. I ended up using one that I’m pretty comfortable with. It’s user-friendly and has all the features I needed.
I imported my spreadsheet of coordinates into the mapping tool, and boom! There were all the stadiums, plotted out on the map. It was pretty cool to see it all come together. I spent some time customizing the map markers, changing the colors, and adding labels with the team names and stadium names. Made it look all nice and professional, you know?
The Final Result
The finished map looks awesome, if I do say so myself. It’s a clean, easy-to-read visualization of all the MLB stadiums across the country. It was a fun little project, and I learned a few things along the way. Plus, now I have this cool map to show off. Maybe next time, I’ll try to find a way to automate more of the process. There’s gotta be some tools out there that can scrape all this data for you. That would save a ton of time and manual work. Anyway, it’s a reminder that even simple ideas can turn into fun little adventures in data and visualization. And hey, maybe it’ll inspire someone else to map out their favorite sports venues, too!
