Ugh, Juan Soto. It almost broke my heart when the Nationals traded him last fall. Looking back on the deal, I’m happy with the package of prospects we got back from the Padres, with CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore as immediate starters with All-Star upside, and James Wood and Robert Hassell hopefully both future every-day contributors. But still - it’s terribly bittersweet to see my favorite player hitting for a different club.
About a month ago, I wrote a post highlighting the new MLB pitch clock. In it, we were able to see that the implementation of the timer seems to have driven a half-hour decrease in game runtimes - for most fans, a huge improvement.
Game runtimes weren’t the only perceived issue that the MLB tried to address in the offseason - they also sought to create more action on the basepaths. This was done through a few different mechanisms:
If you tuned into Opening Day last season, you might have been curious where the baseball was! Between the endless batting glove adjustments by hitters and the incredibly slow working pace of many pitchers, games sometimes felt interminable - especially if Pedro Baez was on the mound:
The pace-of-play problem had gotten so bad that the Major League Baseball, a legendarily change-resistant and slow-moving organization, implemented significant reforms for the 2023 season. While I might be forgetting a minor tweak or two, the key changes to the game are as follows:
Growing up on the East Coast, I never thought much about water. And why would anyone? With abundant rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, water is cheap and easy to access.
Since moving out West, it’s been interesting to see a world in which the baseline is almost fully opposite: water is increasingly rare, expensive, and difficult to acquire.
While this winter’s parade of rain and snow storms should provide a brief respite from the drought conditions plaguing the region, I have no doubt that the overarching trend of aridification in the West will resume and potentially even intensify over the coming decades.
Last week, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) dropped a bombshell set of data: reviews by thirteen hundred active NFL players, of their own teams. Players graded their teams from A+ to F- on the following dimensions of player experience:
The NFLPA’s website is interactive and offers some entertaining anecdotes - such as the fact that the Arizona Cardinals charge their players for meals at the team facility!
This Christmas, I received a Tidbyt smart display as a gift. The Tidbyt, for those who were not successfully targeted with Instagram adds like me, is a 64x32 pixel display, housed inside a sleek walnut case, with a suite of simple apps immediately available for use. If you’re looking for an attractive small display to passively flash information like weather, word clocks, surf forecasts, etc. - I can’t recommend it enough.
Last year, I wrote a post quantifying the cost of home EV charging across the US. Given the low prices of home electricity, it’s no surprise that EV owners choose to slowly top up their batteries each night at home, and avoid more expensive public chargers.
However, it’s a safe bet that nearly all EV owners will eventually find themselves in need of a public fast-charger! And when that happens, they’ll almost certainly be looking to charge their vehicles as quickly as possible, and get back on the road.
Years ago, I set up a Pi-hole at my house to serve as a network-level adblocker for all my devices. It’s been a terrific setup - the Pi-hole is quietly super effective at removing advertisements from different services, to the point where it can be surprising to load a website away from home and see how many ads are layered on the page!
A few days ago, I got curious to see if I could get any quantitative metrics on the performance of the Pi-hole, to augment my qualitative judgement.
On November 30th, OpenAI released ChatGPT into the world for public use - changing, with the press of a button, the lives of high school students forever 😂
While the OpenAI blog post explains the mechanics of the model better than I ever could, the important thing for readers here to understand is that ChatGPT essentially functions as a more knowledgeable Google - one you can make written requests to and receive back fully fleshed-out answers, which can then be follow-up on conversationally. To that point - Google has allegedly held internal meetings describing ChatGPT to be a “code red” for their search business, with executives concerned that the interactivity and simplicity of ChatGPT could replace many of the queries (and therefore, ad impressions) currently run on Google Search.
Earlier this week, I kicked off a two-part post by describing how the NBA’s multiplier-based luxury tax functions and has been designed to strongly disincentivize teams from spending significantly over the luxury tax threshold. Following up on that post, I wanted to share the example that brought this all to mind - the 2022-2023 Golden State Warriors!
The Warriors are set to spend $190 million on their 2022-2023 roster, a figure that exceeds the $150 million luxury tax threshold by a whopping $40 million. Data from Sportrac helps us visualize how those funds are allocated across the roster…