Introduction

Last year’s weekly rollups took a lot of work. I would spend an hour on Sunday revising the active lineups of the ten teams in my league, and a further hour on Monday manually entering stats into a Numbers spreadsheet. I also attempted to do all of this while making the largest life-change I have ever made, moving from Minneapolis to San Francisco for a new job. I am glad that I titled my publications as “weekly-ish”, because I only ended up getting about 80% of them sent out. I knew that if I were to continue sending such publications in 2023, the data ingest would have to be automatic and I would have to focus my energy only on writing.

To this end, I did some searching for existing APIs that could accomplish the task, and was overjoyed when I found this one. It is absolutely the most well-documented, widely-referenced API that I could find for ESPN stats, and amazingly it goes beyond football. My sincere thanks go to Christian Wendt, an absolute icon, for setting up this API. Better yet, it’s all written in Python, my preferred language for data analysis. Let’s get it on.

I’ll be going through the nitty-gritty of the data ingest and sharing a few code snippets in the following sections, but I promise not to be offended if you want to skip to the good stuff.