📝 The Week That Was (June 17-21, 2024)

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

Jun 22, 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.

⚾ Willie Mays Was Baseball’s Greatest All-Around Star - To honor the late baseball legend after he passed on Tuesday, I looked at his reputation as the best all-around player in MLB history from a couple of statistical angles.
Credit: Getty Images
⚾ Effectively Wild Episode 2180: Passing the Greatest-Living-Player Torch - Relatedly, I joined Ben Lindbergh and Rany Jazayerli on FanGraphs’ Effectively Wild podcast, talking about Mays’ legacy and who the Greatest Living Ballplayer™ should now be.
🏀 Why Don’t the Advanced Metrics Like Caitlin Clark (Yet)? - I dug into the numbers to explain why everyone’s favorite lightning-rod of a basketball player, Caitlin Clark, has advanced metrics that aren’t as impressive as we’d expect from her reputation or exciting style of play.
⚾ The Dodgers Have Been MLB’s Most Injured Team... And It’s Going to Get Even Worse. - To introduce my new MLB injury WAR tracker, I looked at baseball’s most injured team, the Dodgers, who keep adding new names to their wounded ranks.
🏀 The Year Of The Celtics - This NBA season could only belong to one team… and it was the Celtics, literally all year long.
🏀 2024 WNBA Estimated RAPTOR player ratings - I finally calculated Estimated RAPTOR for the WNBA this week, and added it to the Consensus Wins composite ranking as well.
🏁 Who should replace Martin Truex Jr. at Joe Gibbs Racing? - For NASCAR.com, I ranked the potential replacements for Truex using Adjusted Points+ index. (My No. 2 pick among Cup drivers, Chase Briscoe, appears to be the choice after Christopher Bell may have let the news slip early.)
🏀 Are 2024 Boston Celtics the ultimate four-player depth team? ($) - At ESPN+, I ranked the depth of the Top 4 Estimated RAPTOR players on each champion. The ‘24 Celtics rank very high!
🏀 13 Takeaways from the NBA Finals - As part of
Royce Webb
’s Finals round-up, I reflected on the Celtics’ title (and maybe gloated a lil bit over correctly picking Boston in 5).
🏀🏒 Neither Championship Sweep Happened. (BOY, Did They Ever Not Happen.) - For a little while there, it looked like we might get not just one, but two of those increasingly rare championship-round sweeps. Then both sweeps were averted in record-breaking blowout fashion.