The Week That Was (June 3-9, 2023)
A roundup of what I wrote, read, watched, played, etc. over the past week.
In this space on Saturday, I thought it might be a good idea to do a weekly round-up of sorts: Sifting through what I wrote that you might have missed during the week, what I’ve been reading and watching myself, and some other fun things that have been going on. Let me know what you think about the format in the comments (or email me!), and if there are running sections you’d like to see on a regular basis.
What I did this week
(Stealing a bit from Will Leitch’s newsletter format, here are the things I wrote or podcasted about during the previous week, sorted in descending order by quality and/or current relevance.)
⛳ Did Golf Just Avoid The Messiest Divorce In Sports? - I tried to make sense of the stunning PGA Tour-LIV merger news by comparing golf’s relatively quick reconciliation to a historical counterfactual: the long, bitter, drawn-out civil war that split American open-wheeling racing in the 1990s. The lesson from that divorce was that it derailed an entire sport’s progress the longer it went on. I know pretty much nobody feels good about golf’s merger, but it did probably save the sport from similar destruction in the long run.
⚽ Messi's Miami Move Continues A U.S. Soccer Tradition - Lionel Messi is coming to America! With the global soccer icon set to move on from PSG to Inter Miami of the MLS, I looked at the long tradition of older superstars coming to play in the U.S. late in their careers. Did you know that, including Messi, more than half of soccer’s 500-goal scorers whose careers spanned past 1968 have played in America at some point? Unsurprisingly, they’re about 88% done with their careers by then, on average — but Messi is still so great that he might move the needle here.
🏁 How Can Chase Elliott Make The Playoffs? - NASCAR’s most popular driver is off to a rocky season so far in 2023, between a broken leg and a suspension that sidelined him for seven total races. He’s coming back this weekend, and he probably needs a win to make the playoffs. So I crunched the numbers on his chances, based on his history of success at the various different track types coming up on the schedule.
🏀 Should You Make Nikola Jokić Beat You As A Scorer, Not A Passer? - After Denver lost Game 2 of the Finals with Nikola Jokić scoring 41 but with only 4 assists, the dominant narrative was that Miami is better off taking away the Joker’s passing — even if it means he scores a lot. I wasn’t expecting this, but if you look at the recent data for both Jokić and other big-time scorers, that idea might not be too far off the mark…
🏈 Dalvin Cook's Production Wasn't Enough - With the Minnesota Vikings reportedly releasing running back Dalvin Cook after his fourth consecutive 1,100+ yard season, I looked at the history of RBs changing teams after that kind of performance, and why they’re getting cut loose so much more now. It used to never happen; then it happened only due to injury or being in your 30s; nowadays, you can get dumped no matter how productive you were the previous year. Sad to see.
⚾ Twilight Of The Mets' Pitching Gods - It was a rough week for the once-promising World Series rotation of the 2015 Mets. Already scattered to the four corners of MLB, the ex-Mets quartet of Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Steven Matz and Noah Syndergaard are all either hurt, retired or pitching horribly right now. This wasn’t supposed to happen… but is it just the natural way of things when you bet on young pitchers?
🏀 The Nuggets' Offense Has No Bad Options - Denver currently has one of the best playoff offenses in history, which isn’t surprising given how well Jokić and Jamal Murray have been playing. But their supporting cast is also record-setting in how every single one of them is operating at an unheard-of level of efficiency this postseason.
⚾ Is MLB's Balanced Schedule Working? - I used Elo ratings to look at whether the shiny new balanced schedule — which swapped in more interleague games for divisional games — was actually narrowing the differences in opposing schedule strength for each team in MLB. The answer was complicated!
🏒 The Panthers Need Their Luck Back - Although the Florida Panthers found themselves down 2-0 in the Stanley Cup Final, were they really playing worse? Or were they just unlucky? (Or were they lucky to be there in the first place?) Many things can be true at once, but Florida definitely needed better luck at home — and they got it to a large degree in Game 3, an overtime victory that brought them closer in the series.
🏁 Guess what, NASCAR has a Forrest Gump - In this week’s episode of
, the NASCAR podcast I co-host with Tyler Lauletta, we broke down the exploding brake rotors of Gateway, paid tribute to the incredible career of Kevin Harvick, and we looked ahead to Chase Elliott’s return at the road course in Sonoma.🏒 A Couple Of Goons, Season 3 Episode 6 - On our “semi-annual” hockey podcast,
and I previewed the 2023 Stanley Cup Final by asking the most important question of all: which team’s season would make for a better anime main-character arc?
Some stories I didn’t post about this week
I only briefly
TweetedNoted about it, but Oklahoma’s three-peat national champion softball team is the unstoppable juggernaut the sports world needs. They were so much better than the competition, it’s scary:
On Friday, the scheduled torch-passing of men’s tennis was interrupted when Novak Djokovic defeated hobbled up-and-comer Carlos Alcaraz at Roland Garros. Djokovic can now break his tie with Rafael Nadal for the most men’s grand slam wins in history in Sunday’s French Open final against Casper Ruud.
A big thank-you
As I said in this note, I want to thank every single one of my subscribers for their support in helping this Substack grow — it’s really been amazing to receive so many well-wishes and go-get-em-tiger’s (or something like that, nobody quite used that phrase exactly, LOL) after I left FiveThirtyEight. Never did I feel that sense of gratitude more than this past week, when I was chosen as one of Substack’s featured publications — and none of it would be possible without the ongoing support from you, my friends and readers. Thank you!!! 🙏🙏🙏
Some cool things I read and watched this week
The Shift is Hitting the Ban: How baseball's new rules are inadvertently increasing strikeouts by Lewie Pollis, The Lewsletter
Ranking NFL roster cores: Stacking all 32 teams' top five players by Seth Walder, ESPN
Nobody Knows How to Market Nikola Jokić by Ethan Strauss, House of Strauss
The 2001 Texas CART Debacle by Demise90, YouTube
What I played this week
In this blurb, I’ll post either a video game/board game/etc. that I’ve been playing around with recently. This week’s selection is NBA Showdown — a short-lived early-2000s NBA-themed collectible card game (that was itself a spin-off of a short-lived early-2000s baseball game called MLB Showdown). My abiding love for MLB Showdown is well-documented, but the folks at The Greatest MLB Showdown Project blog have been making updated versions of the NBA cards with 2023 players and stats as well. Here, I printed out some very low-quality paper versions to play out the NBA Finals on my kitchen table:
Old YouTube game of the week
Red Sox vs. Padres, June 2007
Bet you didn’t know that…
Ryan Noda of the Oakland Athletics has an AL-best .415 on-base percentage, a 157 OPS+ and is on pace for 5.1 Wins Above Replacement this season. The A’s are a shameful dumpster fire on and off the field overall, but even the worst teams can still contain some quality players sometimes. Perhaps the most surprising one for Oakland is Noda — a 27-year-old who didn’t make his MLB debut until this year, but has run with the chance to be an everyday major league first baseman. Perhaps we should have seen this coming, though: Noda had a career .407 OBP and .894 OPS in five minor-league seasons going into 2023.
Music to play us out
“Big Noise New York” by Donald Fagen
Filed under: Weekly Round-up