📝 The Week That Was (Jul. 29-Aug. 2, 2024)

A roundup of what I wrote, read, watched, etc. over the past week.

Aug 03, 2024

In this space on Saturdays, I 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!1), 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, popularity and/or current relevance.

🏈 Where Does 2024 Rank among the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Greatest Defensive Classes Ever? - This story weirdly didn’t get much engagement, so I’m listing it first here… 😛 The football HOF class that gets inducted later today — featuring Julius Peppers, Steve McMichael, Patrick Willis, Randy Gradishar and Dwight Freeney, among others — is one of the most impressive group of defensive players to ever go into Canton at the same time.
⚾ Lots of MLB trade deadline coverage at the ol’ Substack this week, including:
- Let’s Track Who’s Adding (And Subtracting) the Most at the 2024 MLB Trade Deadline - Just like it sounds, I kept a running tally of all the WAR talent that teams added or subtracted at the deadline.
- 2024 MLB Trade Deadline Debrief - After the deadline, I broke down my biggest takeaways from all the many moves (using my WAR tracker for a lot of it).
- The Rays Are Trading Away Everything That Isn’t Nailed Down - During the lead-up to the deadline, I wrote about the Tampa Bay Rays’ big — and uncharacteristic — sale, which ended up making them a major outlier relative to other teams who bought with similar (low) playoff odds.
- The Best Players on the Market at the 2024 MLB Trade Deadline — And Who Needs to Deal for Them - At the start of Deadline Week, I sorted all of the pending free agents from the next few offseasons by position and WAR, to rank the best players who might be available on the market.
🏀 On Steve Kerr’s Aging Team USA, Experience Trumps Ability - There’s a lot of drama around playing time on the men’s U.S. Olympic basketball team in Paris right now, and one of the reasons why is this bizarre chart in which age is correlated with playing more… and NBA performance is correlated with playing less: