As a Nationals fan, it’s been a tough season. After entering with high expectations, the team has had a disappointing run of things, losing start pitchers to injury, hitters to slumps, and close games to hungrier teams.

To cap it all off, they began to finally execute a painful but necessary rebuild, trading away two of our best players in exchange for desperately needed young prospects.

To make myself feel better about the whole thing, I thought it might be nice to enjoy a little schadenfreude on behalf of some of the other teams which are on the outside of the playoff picture (I’m looking at you, Mets), and celebrate some of this season’s surprise contenders.

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The eternal cat and mouse game between pitchers and hitters took another turn this past month, as Major League Baseball made the decision to start enforcing its long-dormant prohibitions against use of foreign substances by pitchers.

First announced to owners and teams at the start of the month, and then officially revealed to the public on June 15th, umpires now perform a series of mandatory spot-checks over the course of each game to ensure that pitchers are not using illegal foreign substances.

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Data recently released by LA County shines a light on some fascinating (and troubling) trends in terms of who in the county has been vaccinated.

Nearly 5 million doses have already been administered in total through April 9th, across the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which is certainly an impressive accomplishment from a public-health perspective, and will only continue to rise once the entire adult population becomes eligible for the vaccine on April 15th.

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On March 2nd, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas lifted the state’s mask mandate, and removed all capacity restrictions on restaurants and businesses. Precisely a week later, the Texas Rangers announced that they would be taking full advantage of the Governor’s new rules, and they would be utilizing the entire 40,518 person capacity at Globe Life Field to open their season.

One of my favorite sports websites, The Athletic, covered the Ranger’s situation in a bit more detail earlier this week, comparing their laissez-faire attendance policy to what other MLB teams around the country have chosen to open the year with - which seems to be about one-quarter capacity on average.

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After years of hype and not-quite-living-up-to-his-potential, it seems that things are finally clicking for Joel Embiid. Anthony Davis, LeBron, and the Lakers figured out just how difficult the big man can be to stop this past Wednesday night as they lost their first road game since last season - a performance that also opened my eyes to exactly how well Embiid has been playing.

Coming off that performance, I thought it might be fun to do a mini-dive into some different offense metrics, and see if, in Joel’s case, the numbers back up the eye-test - and what other players have also popped to open the 2021 season!

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From 1999 to 2014, the Bowl Championship Series (better now as the BCS) administered a series of season-ending bowl games in an effort to determine the National Champion of Division I College Football. Rankings for these games, which would ultimately determine who would participate in the National Championship game, was done by fusing results of the AP Rankings, Coaches Poll rankings, and six different computer ranking systems.

This system, while well-intentioned, was ultimately doomed to a lifetime of controversy. Fusing the results of the different ranking systems created perpetual debate around the subjectivity of the results, and hosting just a single National Championship game made it difficult to compare a number of highly qualified teams against each other.

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Building maps that are rich in data and also easy to interpret is an incredibly hard task. The map-maker must keep in mind the needs of their audience and cater the projection, coloration, shading, labeling, and more so that the map can be grasped intuitively.

If you’re anything like me, you probably got a full year’s dosage of maps thrown up on big touchscreens at the start of this month as part of the 2020 Presidential Election. Unfortunately for us all, the most common map we were all looking at is objectively, with all due respect, a pretty bad map. You know, this guy?

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Earlier this summer, before the kickoff of the Major League Baseball season, I wrote an article which sought to predict the odds that any hitters might end the shortened 2020 season with a 0.400 batting average. Through a series of Monte Carlo simulations, I found that over an 81 game half-season, the odds that any one batter might hit 0.400 was about 6% - a possibility I found very exciting!

Now, with the season well underway and nearing its ‘midpoint’ (thanks to a 60, rather than 81, game regular season), I thought it would be fun to re-investigate these chances, focusing on one particular man with the best chance of doing the dang thing: Charlie Blackmon.

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What is it about human nature which always pulls us towards what we can’t have? While I’ve been marooned at home due to Coronavirus, my travel wanderlust has been running rampant. I don’t know if it’s the work-from-home in particular, or if taking international travel off the table makes it that much more alluring, but the bottom line is that I can’t shake a desire to just go somewhere.

One of the ways this wanderlust has manifested itself has been me spending a lot of time reading about the airline industry, which is going through some pretty significant changes right now. I won’t necessarily get into all the details, but it’s fair to say that airlines will need to work through a lot of thorny structural problems over the next few months and years. Rapid adoption of videoconferencing as a legitimate alternative to business travel and decreased desire for high-density tourist activities like Disneyland present huge problems on the demand side, and on the supply-side, airlines will need to figure out what to do with a surplus supply of expensive planes and the thousands of pilots, flight attendants, and other employees which kept those planes running.

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In 1997, the National Defense Authorization Act legalized the transfer of military hardware from the Department of Defense (DoD) to all law enforcement agencies for “bona fide law enforcement purposes” as part of the 1033 Program, operated through the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO). For years, the Program transferred small amounts of material, consisting of both assorted benign tools and weapons, to local law enforcement agencies. Things began to change in 2010, however, when the value of equipment transferred began to skyrocket towards a 2014 peak of $391 Million of material transferred from the DoD to local law enforcement agencies. Since 2014, transfers to local law enforcement have continued to sit in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

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