Reliving the 1982 Phillies Roster: Players & Stats

Okay, so I was messing around the other day, feeling kinda nostalgic, and I thought, “Hey, I wonder what the 1982 Phillies roster looked like?” Sounds random, right? But stick with me.

First things first, I hit up Google. Just typed in “1982 Phillies roster”. Easy peasy. A bunch of baseball reference sites popped up. I clicked on the one that looked the most legit – Baseball-Reference, I think it was.

Alright, the site loaded, and bam! There it was – the whole darn roster. Names I vaguely remembered, names I’d totally forgotten. It was like a little trip down memory lane.

Then I got to thinking, “This is just a list. Can I do anything with this list?” That’s when the idea hit me. I wanted to see if I could pull this roster data into a spreadsheet and maybe do some simple analysis. Like, what positions were most common, average age, that kind of stuff.

So, I started copying and pasting the names and positions. Tedious? Absolutely. But I’m a stubborn dude, and I wanted to see this through. I pasted everything into a Google Sheet. Cleaned up the formatting a bit – got rid of extra spaces, made the columns look nice.

Next, I wanted to get the players’ ages. Now, Baseball-Reference didn’t have the ages right there on the roster page. Bummer. But it did have links to each player’s individual page. So, guess what I did? Yep, clicked on each name, one by one, and found their birthdates. More copying and pasting. My fingers were starting to hurt at this point.

Once I had the birthdates in my spreadsheet, I used a formula to calculate each player’s age as of the end of the 1982 season. Google Sheets makes this pretty easy – there’s a `DATEDIF` function that does the trick.

Now for the fun part: analysis! I used the `AVERAGE` function to find the average age of the team. I also used the `COUNTIF` function to count how many players played each position. First base heavy, as I recall!

It was a small project, for sure, but it was kinda cool to take that raw roster data and turn it into something a little more interesting. Showed me how to extract specific information for different members of the team, and their age at the time. Nothing crazy, but a fun way to kill an afternoon and flex those data manipulation muscles.