Acquiring Baseball Stats from the NCAA with R

In the latest release of my baseballr package I’ve included a function that makes it easy for a user to pull data from the NCAA’s website for baseball teams across the three major divisions (I, II, III).

The function, ncaa_scrape, requires the user to pass the function three parameters:

school_id: Numerical code used by the NCAA for each school year: A four-digit year type: Whether to pull data for batters or pitchers

For the latter two, the inputs are easy. The issue for most will be knowing what the school_id is that the NCAA website uses for the school they are interested in. To help, I decided to include a massive lookup table in the package so a user could easily identify the necessary school_id.

I thought it would be helpful to walk through how I built that file and then show how to use the ncaa_scrape function to start acquiring actual statistics.

You can read the rest at The Hardball Times.