Use lapply and show variable names - r

Question

I am fairly new to R, though I've programmed in Python and Java a lot. I have searched these questions about using a for loop to run through a list of variables and everyone keeps mentioning to use lapply. I have done that, and my code works in the sense that it gives me the answers, but it doesn't work in the sense that the answers hide important details. Here's my code and some of the output.
> bat <- read.csv(file="mlbTeam2016-B.csv", header=TRUE)
> varlist <- names(bat)[6:32]
> varlist
[1] "AB.B" "R.B" "H.B" "X2B.B" "X3B.B" "HR.B" "RBI.B"
[8] "BB.B" "SO.B" "SB.B" "CS.B" "AVG.B" "OBP.B" "SLG.B"
[15] "OPS.B" "IBB.B" "HBP.B" "SAC.B" "SF.B" "TB.B" "XBH.B"
[22] "GDP.B" "GO.B" "AO.B" "GO_AO.B" "NP.B" "PA.B"
> lapply(varlist, function(i){
+ var <- eval(parse(text=paste("bat$",i)))
+ cor.test(bat$W, var, alternative="two.sided", method="pearson")
+ })
[[1]]
Pearson's product-moment correlation
data: bat$W and var
t = 0.35067, df = 28, p-value = 0.7285
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-0.3013221 0.4164731
sample estimates:
cor
0.06612551
etc
The problem is that each output says data: bat$W and var without telling me which variable it is testing in this step. This is fine, except I have to go back and look up to see what variable this corresponds to. That is better than typing this code in dozens of times, but not ideal. I also know that using eval(parse( is bad, but I can't figure out another way to handle that line.
This is my desired output:
[[1]]
Pearson's product-moment correlation
data: bat$W and bat$AB.B
t = 0.35067, df = 28, p-value = 0.7285
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-0.3013221 0.4164731
sample estimates:
cor
0.06612551

Answer 1

I would suggest creating a correlation matrix rather than doing this using lapply.
This link will walk you through how to do that
http://www.sthda.com/english/wiki/correlation-matrix-a-quick-start-guide-to-analyze-format-and-visualize-a-correlation-matrix-using-r-software
You can select the variables you want using dplyr:
select(bat, one_of(varlist))
This should be a bit easier than the approach you are using.