📝 The Week That Was (July 1-5, 2024)

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

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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.

(Quick note: Since I’ll be traveling for the first half of next week, both posts and ranking/forecast/stat updates might be spotty until midweek — but we will try to avoid interruptions in content!)

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.

• 🎙️ House of Strauss: Neil Paine - I was on House of Strauss! It was fun to talk with

  Ethan Strauss
  about a variety of different topics, including why metrics don’t love Caitlin Clark, if we can spot a weak NBA Draft, what made Tom Brady great and whether clutch players —or chokers — truly exist.

• 🏀 Paul George Makes the Sixers Serious NBA Title Contenders, If History Is a Guide - With Philadelphia signing George to join forces with Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey, the Sixers now have a sufficiently star-studded Big Three. But does that matter anymore?

• ⚾ Was Banning the Shift Ever Going to Help Batting Averages? - MLB’s new 2023 rules were supposed to help offense. But leaguewide batting averages on balls in play are lower now than they were before shifts were outlawed — and maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised.

• ⚾ The Strange Case of Ketel Marte’s Fluctuating MVP-Caliber Form - Arizona second baseman Ketel Marte has one of the weirdest career paths in baseball history. That’s why I made a special club for him: the Ketel Marte Association for Rejuvenated Talent, or KMART.

• ⚾ The Padres Didn’t Get Better without Juan Soto and Blake Snell. But They Did Get Luckier. - The 2023 San Diego Padres were one of the unluckiest teams in MLB history — then lost many of their stars over the offseason. Yet, the 2024 Padres may make the playoff trip that their predecessors couldn’t.

• 🏁 Extra innings: How NASCAR’s overtime policy would look through other sports’ lenses - For NASCAR.com, I wrote a somewhat silly column about what OT rules racing might borrow from other major sports leagues.

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

• Another pair of related items lead the way:
  
  🏀 Fuck the Modern NBA by Freddie deBoer
  
  🏀🎙️ House of Strauss: Freddie deBoer on His "Modern NBA" Essay by

  Ethan Strauss
  
  
  (Note: The whole conversation is really interesting about how a more analytically sound NBA meta has changed — and, arguably, damaged — the aesthetic quality of the sport, even as the media cheerleads those changes. It’s something I’ve been guilty of as well… but once the Pandora’s box of hacking a sport has been opened, can it ever be closed? Should it?)

• 🏀 The statistical argument for letting Klay Thompson leave by Nami Sumida/San Francisco Chronicle (Note: I was interviewed for this one!)

• ⚾️ Sammy Sosa Did Nothing Wrong* by Foolish Baseball

• ⚽ The U.S. Still Don't Soccer Good by

  Michael Hendricks

• 🏒 Can you spot future stars in net? NHL teams no longer think so by

  Ben Wylie

• ⚾️🏈 BILL JAMES VS COMPUTER GUYS by

  Kevin Cole

• 🏀 Easy Money SNIPR: Taking A Look At This Past Season's Long-Range Shooters by

  Jacob Sutton

• 🏀 NBA Free Agency: Winners & Losers & More by

  🏀 5x5 | Royce Webb

• 🏈 The 8 Kinds of Dynasties in EA Sports College Football 25 by

  Alex Kirshner

• 🏀 The Caitlin Clark Effect by

  The Pudding

• 🏀 Are NBA Players Too Rich? by

  Quinn Everts

• ⚾️ Breaking Down WAR: How Traditional Stats Explain Baseball's Most All-Encompassing Statistic by

  Sean Beney

• ⚽ Control: Pep Guardiola's War on Randomness by

  Alex Varghese

• 🌭 America’s favorite Fourth of July tradition, the hot dog eating contest, in 3 charts by Alex Leeds Matthews and Annette Choi
  (Note: Annette was one of our interns at FiveThirtyEight back in the day! Check out the story we did together on where you might be in danger of being hit by a foul ball.)

• ⚾️ Why Role Players Will Win You a World Series by Smartr Baseball

• 🏀 The NBA has an audience problem by

  Ben Krauss

• 🏀 A May December NBA Spinoff Just Dropped by

  Madeline Hill

• 🏒 Comparing the Avs' Three Hart-Winning Seasons by

  Pat Salvas

• 🏀 One Year Later... Celebrating JSuttHoops' 1 Year Substackiversarry by

  Jacob Sutton

• 🎵 Why Do People Hate Nickelback So Much? A Statistical Analysis by

  Daniel Parris
  (Note: How did I miss this the first time around??)

• 👀 Identity Politics Have Undercut Kamala Harris by

  Jeff Maurer

• 🎮 Cheating, Controversy, and Desperation - The MLB 2k Million Dollar Challenge by GameDay (Note: GameDay is a great YouTube channel about sports video games — I’d definitely recommend subscribing to him.)

• 🎥 The Olson Problem by Jack Saint

(Note: I also want to plug the wonderful Grace Hughes’ graphic design business… she is very talented!)

Old YouTube game of the week

Every Goal from the Four Straight Finals Sweeps of the '90s (1995-98)

Music to play us out

The Muppets - “Mr. Blue Sky”

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

1. I’m at neil[dot]paine[at]gmail[dot]com.