The Week That Was (Mar. 25-29, 2024)

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

Mar 30, 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.

🏒 Why Canada's Stanley Cup drought might end this year ($) - At ESPN, I wrote about how this season features the best chance of a Canadian NHL team winning the Stanley Cup since 1994 — the first season of the nation’s long drought — and looked at the four real candidates to end the winless streak.
🏀 Paige Bueckers’ Rise Was Interrupted. Now She’s Ascending Again. - Believe it or not, the UConn star was ranked ahead of Caitlin Clark (among others) in their HS class, and even played better during their freshman season. After two devastating injuries knocked her off course, Bueckers is back to playing like one of the best in the game.
⚾ Jordan Montgomery to the Diamondbacks caps off MLB’s Best Offseason - With apologies to, idk — Brandon Belt? Tommy Pham? — Montgomery basically represented the last of the important free agents to sign when he landed with Arizona this week. So I calculated which teams had the best (and worst) offseasons in terms of net Wins Above Replacement added since the end of last year.
⚾ What Out Of The Park Baseball 25 Thinks About The '24 Season - In a fun bit of tradition, I made Out Of The Park Baseball simulate the upcoming MLB season 25 times, tracking which teams it thought would be good or bad. (Or just win everything, like one team sort of did.)
⚾ The Futility of Trout - You want symbolism? Mike Trout hit the very first HR of MLB Opening Day on Thursday… and his Angels were then completely blown out. That’s pretty par for the course for Trout’s career in L.A. But what’s especially depressing is that, even if he’d stayed healthy through his time as teammates with Shohei Ohtani, it wouldn’t have even mattered to the Angels’ playoff hopes. The futility of Trout’s striving is baseball’s cruelest lesson about the true nature of the universe.
🏀 March Madness Heat Index: Who could make a run in both Sweet 16s? ($) - Coming out of the Round of 32, I looked at the most (and least) impressive teams and players in both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments.
🏀 This Is One of the Best — And the Most Experienced — Men’s Sweet 16’s in Recent History - With so few upsets in the first week of the men’s NCAA tourney, it meant the remaining field was just about as stacked as in any year of recent memory. But more interesting was how those teams got so good, from a team-building perspective. Let’s just say the pendulum has swung hard in the opposite direction from the age of freshman-laden winners a handful of years back.
📈2024 MLB Elo Ratings & Playoff Odds⚾ - Just a heads-up that I am maintaining these ratings daily throughout the season — and I also revived my composite odds model, which blends predictions from FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference, Baseball Prospectus and TeamRankings into a single consensus forecast that I found very handy to track last season.