📝 The Week That Was (Mar. 31-Apr. 4, 2025)

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

Apr 05, 2025

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

Here are the things I wrote or podcasted about during the previous week, sorted in descending order by quality, popularity and/or current relevance.

🏀 Will the Most Overpowered Final Four Save the Most Boring NCAA Tournament? - The bad news? This NCAA men’s tourney has been almost completely devoid of upsets and/or close finishes. The good news? The all-1-seed Final Four is, on paper, the most talented in modern history.
⚾️ The Yankees’ Torpedo Bats Are a Formula 1 Moment in MLB - With everyone in the MLB world freaking out this week over the Yankees’ new “torpedo” bats, I immediately thought of another sport in which the introduction of new technologies are known to take the competition by surprise.
⚾️ Will the Dodgers Ever Lose? Are the Braves Screwed? Your guide to early MLB records - To help contextualize early hot and cold MLB starts, I calculated what the average eventual record is for teams who start the season a certain way.
🏀 Shareef Abdur-Rahim Had Damn Good Stats on Some Bad Damn Teams - The latest edition of the Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players is all about the patron saint of padding stats on losing squads.
🏁 Breaking down Bubba Wallace's big year in the making - At NASCAR.com, I wrote about the career-best start for Bubba Wallace in 2025, and how he can keep the momentum going — perhaps even by ending his 86-race winless streak at Darlington this weekend.
- 🏁🎧 11 Against the World - This week on Podracing,
  Tyler
  and I talked about the Xfinity Series wrecks and Denny Hamlin’s dominant win at Martinsville, Bubba’s breakout potential and previewed the Darlington spring race.
⚾️ Can MLB’s Orphans Write a New Kind of Underdog Story? - With both the Rays and A’s playing in minor-league ballparks, I meditated on their shared history as plucky, analytically minded upstarts, and why success this year would be their most improbable feats yet.
🏀 Programming Note: Be sure to check out my 🏀 2025 NCAA Tournament Forecast 📊 for a free, updating look at each men’s tourney team’s odds to advance through (and win) the NCAA championship.
🏒 Other Programming Note: As Alex Ovechkin quickly (and I mean quickly) closes in on Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goals record, I’m refreshing my 🚨 Ovi Tracker 🚨 after every Washington Capitals game to estimate his odds of breaking it by any particular date over the remainder of the 2024-25 regular season.
⚾️ Other Other Programming Note: I am now updating the ⚾ 2025 MLB Elo Power Rankings 📈 page as new results come in from the start of the season.

Athletic performance of the week

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

A collection of articles (with a heavy focus on my fellow Substackers), videos and other media that I enjoyed and/or found thought-provoking over the past week. I don’t always 100% agree with what’s linked here… but that’s also sort of the point.