in reply to question about LWP and mysterious skipping over of pages
Do you see a line "Player\tSport\tSeason\t..." in STATS2 for the skipped loop? If not, that means @sports doesn't get populated as you expect. Either cause the page you downloaded wasn't as you expected it, or because it wasn't downloaded at all. Try checking if $page is defined (and turning on warnings). If that's the problem, you could retry a download that failed.
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Seekers of Perl Wisdom