It’s been too long since I last wrote here! So much has happened in the world that I’ve been a little distracted - my Nationals winning the World Series, the House launching impeachment proceeding over the Ukraine scandal, California wildfires - it’s a crazy time.

One undeniably positive development over the last couple weeks has been the return of the NBA, which is about 10 games into the season today. To celebrate the beginning of the season, and dip my toes back into a little sports data, I wanted to carve out some time to dig into the numbers and see what they might tell us about this first chunk of the season.

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While baseball’s overarching trends may be leaning the way of the batter, there’s still space for difference-making pitchers to put their own stamp on the game. This year, we’ve been blessed with a plethora of strong seasons from established aces and a number of less-than expected emergences.

Just in the past week, we’ve seen Justin Verlander throw his third career no-hitter, Gerrit Cole follow that up with 14 strikeouts, and Steven Strasburg rack up 14 of his own. Add to that the resurgent years from Lance Lynn and Charlie Morton, typical greatness from Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer, and a dominant performance from Hyun-Jin Ryu for most of the season (minus his last few outings), and you get a fantastic, totally impossible-to-guess race for the Cy Young in each league.

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Earlier today I was poking through FiveThirtyEight and read a super interesting article chronicling Elizabeth Warren’s rise in popularity since the first Democratic Presidential Debate. Warren, on the strength of particularly high favorable ratings and relatively low unfavorable ratings, currently leads all Democratic candidates in Net Favorability, with a +53 margin.

After reading through the table in the article for all 20 major candidates (which is super useful, to be fair), I got to thinking - I bet there’s a better way to show this data! Hence the chart above - a quick-and-dirty remix that makes understanding Net Favorability a little easier. That’s all I’ve got this time, but more 2020 coverage to come I’m sure!

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Two weekends ago, my Nationals lost a tough series to the New York Mets, largely due to clutch late-game hitting from the Mets and some poor relief pitching by the Nationals. What they did do right, however, was grind out tough at-bats against both Noah Syndergaard and Jacob DeGrom, two of the best starting pitchers in all of baseball. They gave DeGrom a hard time in particular, forcing him to throw 101 pitches over just 5 innings in a game the Nationals ended up winning 7-4.

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I’ve spent the weekend, and past day in particular, reflecting on the tragic shootings that have happened over the past week and a half in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton. My heart goes out to the families and friends who lost loved ones in these horrific acts of violence. For those who are leaving us, robbed of their chance to live, laugh, and love, my heart breaks at the injustice of your situation.

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While trawling through HackerNews on a recent afternoon, I stumbled upon an interesting dataset. Published by FirmAI on Kaggle, the data contained information on over five hundred startup founders, with nicely tagged and cleaned data detailing their past work and educational experiences.

With the recent rise in “unicorn” startups elevating many of their founders and chief executives to near-mythic levels in the startup/venture capital world, I thought it might be fun to use this data to de-mystify who these founders really are!

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With the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 trip to the Moon in the books last week, I thought it might be fun to turn a bit of attention to NASA’s current affairs.

If you haven’t heard, the President and Vice President have given the Agency a five year deadline to land a successful manned mission on the Moon - hoping to do so by the end of 2024 - coincident, I’m sure, with the end of a second Trump term in office. What’s particularly interesting to me is what the Administration hasn’t given NASA as they set out to achieve this audacious goal - more funding.

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The Cryptocurrency Market has Grown Significantly in 2019

The market capitalization of the top-15 cryptocurrencies has grown significantly over the start of 2019, peaking at over $325 Billion and dipping to roughly $260 Billion in late July - still more than double January’s $120 Billion cap. Trading volume has also grown tremendously thus far in 2019, and is sitting right around $60 Billion per day. This concurrent increase in asset values and trading volume implies elevated interest in the variety of coins which make up the most popular cryptocurrencies, as well as increased liquidity in the trading markets for buyers and sellers of currencies.

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Background

A few days ago at work, I had a fun conversation with a coworker discussing the price of cocktails in LA and how the “standard price” of a cocktail varies from city to city. It’s been my belief for a long time that New York will always set the upper limit on how much people are prepared to spend on their drinks, and over time, that price point slowly trickles down to other markets. However - without any information to back up my point, I was helpless to argue my point in the face of stern opposition from the San Francisco contingent, which likes to have the most expensive everything!

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More than any other post I’ve written in recent memory, this post was inspired directly by a moment in today’s Nationals - Braves game (crushing, by the way). In the telecast, one of the commentators mentioned that batters are hitting fewer singles today than ever before. “Is that really true?” I wondered to myself on the couch…

Luckily for me, baseball being baseball, there’s almost always an easy way to answer these kinds of questions, and next thing I knew, I was down a Baseball Reference rabbithole of historical hitting data. What I ended up finding was a fascinating picture of baseball’s evolution, crystallized into just a few charts that help answer our singles question, show just how significant the recent eruption in home runs has been, chronicle the growth of the “Three True Outcomes”, and finally, show the demise of small-ball in the modern game.

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