📝 The Week That Was (July 22-26, 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.

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.

• ⚾ Are Second Basemen Finally Getting Their Due? What Drafting a 2B No. 1 Says About the Position’s Changing Value - After the Guardians took 2B Travis Bazzana with the No. 1 pick in the MLB draft, I looked into changing perceptions around one of baseball’s most interesting positions.

• 🏀 Is It Getting Harder for NBA Superteams to Win? - As a follow-up to my story about Paul George and the Sixers’ star power, I fact-checked myself on my own anecdotal claim that NBA superteams are having a tougher time winning titles recently.

• ⚾ Who Should Buy — And Sell — At the 2024 MLB Trade Deadline? - A revamped version of the Doyle Number makes its return to help sort each team into buyer or seller (or both!) status.

• 🥇 Who Are the 2024 Summer Olympics’ Biggest Favorites? - In a bit of service journalism™ (for others and myself, because I honestly don’t know who most of these athletes are!), I grabbed all of the pre-Olympics odds and converted them to probabilities, to see who the biggest — and smallest — favorites at the Paris games are.

• ⚾ How the 2004 Red Sox Were Built to End the Curse of the Bambino - I introduce my Team Timelines series — and celebrate the 20th anniversary of the A-Rod/Jason Varitek fight — with a deep dive into how the 2004 Red Sox came to be.

• 🏀 Projecting the best NBA players at the 2024 Paris Olympics - Using Estimated RAPTOR, I ranked the top NBA players of the Olympics based on who is projected to be rated highest during the 2024-25 season.

• 🏁 Handing out Cup Series awards at the Olympic break - At NASCAR.com, I wrote about which drivers and teams have impressed the most so far.

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

• 🥇 Olympians are approaching the limits of human performance by Adam Kilgore and Emily Giambalvo

• ⚾ The MLB Trade Deadline Could Be Dictated by One of the Worst Teams Ever by Ben Lindbergh

• 🏀 Showdown: Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson by

  Justin Kubatko

• 🏈 Will the new kickoff rule lead to more kickoff returns? and New NFL Kickoff Rule & Measuring Home-Field Advantage by

  Josh Hermsmeyer
  and
  Kevin Cole

• ⚾ Baseball, Spite, and Chewing Gum by

  Ryan Nanni

• 🥇 An American's Guide to Olympic Breaking by

  Rodger Sherman

• 🏈 George Taliaferro: Army Draftee, and NFL's First Black Draftee and Starting QB by

  Football Archaeology

• 🏀 How are NBA teams being built in 2024? by

  Jared Dubin

• 🏀 Are Three-Pointers Worth Too Much? by

  Joseph George

• 🏈 Are Georgia and Ohio State Really “Pick-em” With the College Football Field? by

  Jeff Fogle

• ⚽️ Will Spain's women's footballers open their Olympic account with gold? by

  Ben Wylie

• 🏀 HoS: Nate Jones on NBA vs. TNT Fight by

  Ethan Strauss
  and Nate Jones

• 🏈 Dead Letters, Nebraska: The Video (Welcome to Relaunch Week!) by

  Split Zone Duo

• 🏈 2024 CFB Consensus Preseason Power Ratings by

  CFBNumbers

• ⚾ Live from the National Card Convention! by

  Joe Posnanski

• 🏈 Culture Study Meets 'America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders' by

  Anne Helen Petersen

• ⚾ Three teams to watch in the second half by

  Matt Gerrity

• 🏒 Soundtrack Review: NHL 2004 by

  JFresh

• 📚 Do we really want more male vulnerability in fiction? by

  Andrew Boryga

• 🎮 ‘College Football 25,’ the State of Sports Gaming, and Our Top Five Sports Games by The Ringer/Button Mash

• 🏀 NBA Inside Stuff Review - The Truth About Allen Iverson by

  Chris Shorts

• 🎮 The average age of video game makers keeps going up by

  Stephen Totilo

• 🎮 Retro spotlight: Perfect Dark Zero by

  Marc Normandin

• 📺 The Show That Redefined Television: The Prisoner (1967) Retrospective by Leo Vader

• 🏒 Top 10 Broadcast Calls in NHL HISTORY (with TONS of Honourable Mentions) by IceWyre

• 💻 the end of our extremely online era. by

  Tommy Dixon

Chart of the week: Best MLB in-season acquisitions

Music to play us out

George Benson - Down Here on the Ground

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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