Today I figured I should check the Japan B League standings ’cause someone asked about it yesterday. Woke up thinking this should be easy, right? Pulled up what I thought was a reliable site first thing in the morning. Total mess. Layout was worse than scrambled eggs – ads popping up everywhere, tables overlapping like a clown show. Tried zooming in and out on my phone, nearly threw the damn thing against the wall.
The Manual Disaster
Alright, plan B: good old copy-paste. Opened Excel, started highlighting team names one by one:
- Tokyo Hachioji
- Ryukyu Golden Kings
- Utsunomiya Brex
- And like 20 more holy crap
Got carpal tunnel halfway through. Then realized win-loss records were in tiny font that looked like ant footprints. Squinted so hard I saw spots. Messed up three separate times typing numbers – accidentally gave Kyoto 50 losses instead of 15. Would’ve started World War 3 if I posted that.
Python Hail Mary
Remembered I had this scraping script from last year’s baseball project. Fired up VS Code praying it would work. Installed BeautifulSoup again ’cause I forgot the syntax. Wasted an hour trying to remember how loops worked. Finally got it running… and the site blocked my IP. Got that stupid captcha page with traffic lights and storefronts. Decided coding was more painful than manual entry.
Spreadsheet Torture
Went back to Excel manually checking teams against three different sites:
- Official B League site had Japanese characters I couldn’t read
- One English site last updated last Tuesday
- Another showed scores from 2022 season somehow
Triple-checked Chiba Jets’ stats after catching myself mixing up their wins and losses twice. Took three coffees and a melted protein bar to finish. Finalized the table, saved it as PDF just in case Excel decided to crash like it loves to do. Posted the standings with shaky hands hoping I didn’t screw up Okinawa’s position.
Biggest lesson? League websites need to stop being hot garbage. If one more page autoplays highlights while I’m trying to see numbers, I might become a monk. Tomorrow’s project: finding better sources before my eyesight gives out.
