The Week That Was (June 10-16, 2023)

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

In this space on Saturday, 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!), 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.

• ⚾ Shohei Ohtani Is Having His Best Year Yet. Will It Finally Matter? - After two of the greatest seasons in MLB history, the Angels’ brilliant two-way virtuoso is somehow topping himself once again. He’s currently on pace for the best total WAR of his career, and the Angels are even winning for once. But it still might not be enough to make the playoffs — in part because teammate Mike Trout isn’t quite playing like Mike Trout anymore.

• 🏒 The Golden Knights Weren’t Like Other Stanley Cup Winners - I’m officially obsessed with the Vegas Golden Knights’ run to the Stanley Cup this season. Built much more on depth than star power, they had one of the most unusual talent distributions of any Cup-winning roster ever; they also relied heavily on goaltending, yet didn’t have their regular-season starter for the whole playoffs. And of course, their path from expansion team to champion in just 6 seasons is the stuff of legend.

• ⚾ Is Michael Harris II Following The Jeff Francoeur Career Path? - In bit of wild historical symmetry, the Atlanta Braves of the past few decades have had two young outfield prospects whose first two MLB seasons map onto each other’s almost perfectly — right down to the playing styles, and matching sophomore slumps. While Francoeur’s career didn’t really live up to the early hype, Harris still has time to redeem the archetype and become a special player.

• ⚾ The Royals And A's Are Racing To The Bottom - Since Opening Day, it was basically taken for granted that the Oakland A’s were going to be the worst team in baseball this season. In fact, the A’s seemingly wanted to be the worst, through a “Major League”-style scheme by scumbag owner John Fisher to move the franchise… and the baseball gods seemed to be obliging with loss after loss. But a rare A’s winning streak happened to coincide with the Kansas City Royals’ worsening play to give Oakland some real competition at the bottom of the standings.

• 🏒 Vegas Passed All Of The NHL's Tests - Though the Golden Knights were not the best team in hockey over the entire 2022-23 NHL season, they did make up for that in the postseason by beating basically every different kind of team — offensive teams, defensive teams, balanced teams, physical teams — en route to the Stanley Cup. And in the end, that’s worth more than a record-breaking regular season record paired with an early postseason exit.

• 🏀 Denver’s Revenge Of The Regular Season - All season long, the NBA’s pundit class was searching for reasons to discount Nikola Jokić, Jamal Murray and the Denver Nuggets. Starting in the second round of the playoffs, the Phoenix Suns, L.A. Lakers and even the #8 seed Miami Heat were hot picks to beat Denver, based mainly on the rationale that the regular season means nothing and that the Nuggets were frauds that had somehow gamed it and would be exposed in the postseason. Instead, Denver went 12-3 against that group of opponents, proving that we know far less about what it takes to win an NBA title than we want to think we do.

• 🏁 Who's Up For Some Snowboarding? - In Episode 5 of

  Podracing
  , the NASCAR podcast I co-host with Tyler Lauletta, we discussed Martin Truex Jr.’s win in the road race at Sonoma, then I did a deep dive into the history of the iconic Hendrick Motorsports #5 car — from Geoff Bodine and Ricky Rudd to Terry Labonte, Kyle Busch, Mark Martin, Kasey Kahne… and finally Kyle Larson.

• ⚾ The Mets Deserve Their Bad Record - Few teams came into the 2023 season with more expectations than the New York Mets, who set a new record for the highest Opening Day payroll in MLB history. Fewer still have been more disappointing, as New York is still fighting to get back to .500 despite all of their talent. What’s more, things could be even worse — the Mets have actually overachieved relative to their underlying stats this season.

• 📝 I Guest-Wrote Numlock News Today! - With

  Walter Hickey
  away on important business, I filled in with an all-sports edition of his data newsletter on Monday.

Some stories I didn’t post about this week

• Manchester City won the Champions League for the first time.

• Andrew McCutchen joined the 2,000-hit club.

• Stefon Diggs had a mysterious drama-saga at Buffalo Bills camp.

• Oakland A’s fans reverse-boycotted the team, Nevada OK-ed the A’s new park in Vegas, and Rob Manfred pissed everyone off by defending the deal.

Some interesting things I read and watched this week

• The Nuggets Were Hiding In Plain Sight by Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin

• Sports Writers Out, Zoomer TikTokers In and The NCAA Has a ‘Hot Girl’ Problem, by Ethan Sherwood Strauss

• Ranking The Most Organically Built NBA Champions Of The Century by Frank Urbina, HoopsHype

• Golden Knights Join Short List Of Expansion Success Stories With Quick Title by J.J. Post, ESPN

• Jerry West Opens Up About NBA Legacy, Kobe Relationship, Difficult Childhood & More by Paul George, Podcast P

• Playoff Jimmy Butler and the Era He Exposed by Skap Attack, YouTube

What I played this week

In this blurb, I post either a video game/board game/etc. that I’ve been playing around with recently. Note: I am not sponsored by these games!

This week’s selection is Super Mega Baseball 4, which recently came out on PC and a bunch of other platforms. I’m a longtime fan of this series, but I’ll admit the 4th edition doesn’t offer many changes over SMB3 on the gameplay front. Instead, the big additions to this new version are off the field, in the form of new franchise mode and fantasy draft mechanics, and hundreds of licensed legends. Some of the legends are recreated more faithfully than others, though it’s pretty cool to sign Jeff Bagwell to my Wild Hogs team and then hit bombs with him.

Overall, I’m not sure the increase in price from Super Mega 3 was fully warranted, and I’m concerned about the future of the game under the ownership of Electronic Arts, given EA’s extremely long history of destroying the studios they buy. But the game is still pretty damn fun to play, so… I’m enjoying it regardless.

Old YouTube game of the week

Phillies vs. Braves, May 1994

Music to play us out

“Looking Up (Live)” by Dave Holland Quintet

(Update: I forgot to add one YouTube video to the list of interesting things I came across, so the email version doesn’t contain as many links as the Substack version. Whoops!)

Filed under: Weekly Round-up