“Elevate to Celebrate”, an all-time great sports catchphrase, entered the baseball lexicon sometime in 2016 or 2017, giving shape to a trend that had been underway but nameless.

During those years, players like Jose Altuve, Jose Bautista, and Daniel Murphy underwent well-publicized and shockingly successful swing transformations which led them to career best seasons.

The key? Banishing the advice of Little League coaches around the country, imploring batters to “square the ball up”. Instead, these batters focused on pulling their swing path up slightly, imparting an upwards trajectory on the ball.

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Earlier today, a friend sent me a link I knew I had to turn into a quick blog post - an article published August 5th in the Santa Monica Next titled “SMPD Stats Show Shocking Drop in Traffic Enforcement”.

The piece shares traffic stop and crash data obtained from the City Manager’s office. It shows a large, sustained decline in the number of citations written by the Santa Monica Police Department (SMPD) starting with the onset of the COVID pandemic, and continuing through today.

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Keibert Ruiz is one the absolute best players in baseball at putting bat on ball - he’s in the 96th percentile for avoiding whiffs, and the 97th percentile at avoiding strikeouts. He’s also one of the least productive hitters in the game, with a Batting Run Value in the 7th percentile. What on earth is going on?

The Data

A quick note before we survey the data - I made all of the charts below using MLB’s awesome Statcast data, which continues to expand and now has incredibly rich data on batters’ swings, hit quality, and more. Here’s a Custom Leaderboard that I used to feed the many analyses below, and here is Keibert Ruiz’s individual Statcast page for reference.

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Humor me with a quick thought experiment - imagine an industry. A handful workers in this industry are extremely well paid, while vast majority earn almost nothing. Many workers feel they are underappreciated in their current roles, so they frequently hop between employers. There are few ethical standards, so both workers and employers push the boundaries of acceptable behavior in pursuit of money and opportunity.

Surely we’re talking about a difficult power-law industry, right? Maybe Hollywood or Wall Street?

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Earlier this week I read a great article from Car and Driver, which ran some controlled tests to try to understand how electric vehicle acceleration varies as a function of battery charge level. In their research, they found that the Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a remarkably flat performance curve, while the Lucid Air and especially the Rivian R1T see more performance degradation as their battery charge levels drop.

While I have no quibbles with their methodology or takeaways - I was disappointed to see that the graphics they published to visualize their findings were overblown and kind of unrealistic looking, in a very Microsoft WordArt kind of way.

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A few weeks ago I got back in the Tidbyt-app-making business, relaunching my Planes Overhead app with a new backend. With that success still fresh in my mind, I wanted to keep the momentum going and try to finish off a project I had started a number of times before without being able to actually finish off - building a “departure board” for LAX.

The Inspiration

A few years ago I flew back to the US from Sydney and was blown away by the beautiful departures board that was mounted along the wall by their lounge.

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In March, news broke that a French scientist had been denied entry into the United States after making critical comments about the Trump Administration’s research policies.

The story wasn’t a one-off — it seemed to hint at a broader trend. Increasingly, tourists and travelers are being denied entry into the country or even detained for days or weeks. And now, the chill is starting to show up in the numbers, as foreigners rethink their travel plans.

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Finally! The Washington Nationals seem to have realized that the game of baseball is a heckuva lot easier when you’re able to knock the ball out of the park!

After years of kvetching, I can’t say how pleased I am with this development, and the thought of how much better our offense might be this season… next to the Chicago White Sox isn’t where you want to be on any lists of team batting statistics, as we were in 2024:

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About six weeks ago, my Planes Overhead app for the Tidbyt smart display died.

This death wasn’t exactly a surprise - the founder of DHub.io, the backend service I was using which ceased operations, had reached out to give me a heads up - but it did mean that I would need to do some unplanned engineering work to get the app up and running.

I did the bulk of that work last week and tried to document my elegant (if I’m allowed to brag a little, it really is) serverless solution in a blog post.

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Last year I wrote a blog post outlining my use of DBHub.io as a serverless backend for typecode lookups in my Planes Overhead app. Unfortunately, DBHub.io ceased operations at the end of February, putting me back in the market for a new solution!

The Need

As a reminder, my Tidbyt app uses the OpenSky API to obtain the closest plane overhead and populate the display. The typecode detail on the middle-left was a late addition that leverages the unique icao24 identifier for a given plane, which is checked against a flat-file database to fetch the relevant aircraft model.

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