Okay, so today I’m gonna yap about something I was messing with yesterday: Tsitsipas’ ranking. Not like, his personality ranking, haha, but his ATP ranking. I was bored, alright? Don’t judge.
First things first, I started by hitting up the official ATP website. You know, gotta get the data straight from the horse’s mouth. I was hoping for a nice, clean API or something, but no such luck. Ended up having to scrape the darn thing. It was messy, I tell ya.
I fired up Python, because, well, Python’s my go-to for this kind of stuff. Used `requests` to grab the HTML, and then `BeautifulSoup` to wrestle it into something manageable. The HTML was a nightmare – tables inside tables, divs all over the place. Took me a solid hour just to figure out the right selectors to get his ranking number and points.
Here’s where it got interesting. I wanted to see how his ranking had changed over time. The ATP website only shows the current ranking, of course. So, I had to dig deeper. Thankfully, the Wayback Machine came to the rescue! I spent another hour or so trawling through old snapshots of the ATP rankings page, from like, the past year. Copy-pasted the data into a CSV file. Yeah, I know, super old-school, but it worked.
Then, back to Python. Loaded up the CSV into a Pandas DataFrame. Cleaned up the data a bit – removed some weird characters, converted the ranking to an integer. Nothing too fancy.
- Imported pandas, datetime, and *
- Loaded the CSV data
- Converted the date column to datetime objects.
- Sorted the data by date.
- Created a plot of Tsitsipas’ ranking over time.
Finally, I plotted his ranking over time using Matplotlib. It wasn’t the prettiest graph, but it showed the story. You could see the ups and downs, the big jumps after winning tournaments, the slow slides after losing early. It was actually kinda cool to visualize his journey like that.
Learnings and Annoyances
Honestly, this was more of a time-waster than anything else. But hey, I learned a few things:
- Web scraping is still a pain in the butt, even with BeautifulSoup.
- The Wayback Machine is a lifesaver for historical data.
- Pandas makes data cleaning a lot easier.
And the annoyances?
- ATP, please just give us an API!
- HTML tables are the devil.
So yeah, that’s my Tsitsipas ranking adventure. Nothing earth-shattering, but it kept me entertained for an afternoon. Maybe I’ll do Nadal next time… or maybe not. We’ll see what I’m in the mood for. Peace out!
