Over Memorial Day weekend, I read a great article by The Athletic musing upon what might happen if Major League baseball decides to play a half season of 82 games. One section in particular caught my eye - “What if somebody hits .400?” The author does a great job of delving into what that might mean for baseball, and whether or not it might be feasible. The article also links to an amazing writeup from STATS, which gets even deeper into the numbers of it all, with lots of historical streaks to compare to.

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Two days ago, I published a new blog post where I broke down mobility data that Apple had generously made public to aid cities, researchers, and the public at large. One of the things I noted in my post was that while the granularity of Apple’s data trailed what Google had previously shared, Apple made their data easily accessible via CSV download, while Google’s data (though seemingly great) was locked up in PDF files.

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Earlier this week, Apple released a trove of mobility data, published to help cities and the public understand the real-world impacts of the COVID-19 disease on human movement across the world. This data comes a bit after Google’s publishing of Community Mobility Reports, which also seek to provide insight into behavior.

While Google’s data, due to their widespread tracking of Android device locations, is able drill into detailed points of interest such as grocery stores, transit stations, and workplaces, Apple’s data, which is based upon Apple Maps direction requests, shows a more narrow slice of user behavior. However, given the tremendous install base of iPhones globally, it’s definitely a great signal into what folks are up to, and better yet, it is accessible as a CSV, while Google’s data is locked up inside PDFs.

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As the COVID-19 coronavirus sweeps across the globe, it presents a public health crisis that is daunting to even the best-prepared communities. While most Western nations have resisted the strict quarantine regime that China first implemented in Wuhan, local and national governments are grappling with the best way to contain the spread of the virus, and will need to make critical decisions in the coming days and weeks.

For those who have not seen it, the Washington Post put together an excellent model on how infection spreads and the potential benefit of alternative approaches to quarantines, such as moderate and extensive “social distancing”. Social distancing, which is a nebulous term but tends to imply a self-driven withdrawal from public to avoid contact and transmission of the virus, may end up being the best option for many communities in the United States while the Trump administration struggles to put together a coherent response plan to the virus.

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When Kevin Garnett joined Paul Pierce and Ray Allen in Boston in 2007, the “Big Three” style of roster construction method came back to the forefront of modern team building. While the Spurs had long employed a Big Three of their own in Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobli, and Tony Parker, the rest of the NBA spent the rest of the decade catching up, to various degrees of success. LeBron, with his two stops in Miami and Cleveland, was the most prolific engineer of Big Threes, teaming up with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, and then Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love to win multiple championships. LeBron’s dominance, however, was cut short by the emergence of the Warriors, with Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green redefining, in many ways, how modern basketball should be played.

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Last year, James Harden was an offensive dynamo, averaging a hair over 36 points per game and powering the Rockets to the playoff despite losing Chris Paul and Clint Capela for extended periods of time. He was so impressive that I actually wrote about what an incredible performance he was having, right about this time last year. Hard to top that kind of season right? Well…

James Harden is currently averaging 38.5 points per game. Every game! That’s not only 7 points more than second place on the list (Giannis), but more than Jimmy Butler (20.4 PPG) and Khris Middleton (18.0 PPG) PUT TOGETHER! Those guys are pretty good!

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With the 2019-2020 fantasy football season coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to put together a brief retrospective, highlighting some particularly interesting trends and performances by players like Lamar Jackson and Christian McCaffrey. I’m not feeling particularly loquacious, so there won’t be a ton of analysis in this post, but I did throw together a few charts that I wanted to share!

Quarterback Performance

The rise of Lamar Jackson from Flacco fill-in to prospective league MVP has been the talk of the season, and rightfully so. While he was a great rushing quarterback during his playing time last season, his ability to power and sustain an elite passing attack over the course of this season has really differentiated his game, and makes it even easier to attack defenses on the ground.

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One of the most exciting elements of this NBA season is that both LA-based teams are championship contenders, with either LeBron James and Anthony Davis or Kawhi Leonard and Paul George rolling into the Staples Center nearly every night.

As a non-native Angeleno, it’s been super interesting to get a feel for the city’s fan landscape and rooting interests - for as good as the Clippers have been over the past decade, and despite the fact that they are the favorite to win the 2020 NBA Championship, LA is still very much a Laker town.

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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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