Okay, so I’ve been digging into the 1988 Orioles lately. Man, what a wild ride that season was! I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and chart their infamous losing streak. Here’s how I went about it.
Getting Started
First, I needed the data. Just raw game results. I figured there must be some website out there that keeps track of this stuff. I did some poking around, you know, just typed in “1988 Orioles game results” and boom, found a few sites that seemed to have what I needed. I picked one that looked pretty straightforward – just a simple table with dates, opponents, and scores.
Wrangling the Data
The data was there, but not exactly how I wanted it. Copy and pasted the whole thing into a spreadsheet. You know, columns for date, opponent, whether it was a home or away game, our score, their score, and then a simple “W” or “L” column. It was a bit messy at first, so I had to clean it up. Getting rid of extra rows, formatting the dates correctly, that sort of thing. Took a little bit of time, but nothing too crazy.
Tracking the Streak
Once I had the spreadsheet all set up, I started looking for that losing streak. I knew it was at the beginning of the season, so I just scrolled down, looking for a long string of “L”s. And wow, there it was. It just kept going and going! I highlighted all those losses, just to make it really stand out.
I used that to count up the losses, one by one. It’s one thing to hear “21 game losing streak”, but it is another thing to see all lose together.
- loss 1
- loss 2
- loss 3
The Final Result
So, there it is. The whole thing. It took an afternoon to sort of piece together. It really makes you think. I mean, imagine being a fan back then! It must have been brutal. But, you know, it’s also kind of fascinating. A part of baseball history. And now I’ve got my own little record of it, all thanks to some digging around and a little spreadsheet magic.
