Posts tagged “baseball”

• Andor was phenomenal. Full stop. It wasn’t simply a great Star Wars story. It was a brilliant story even if you had — quite inconceivably — never even heard of Star Wars. It also managed to stay full-throttle awesome from S1E1 through S2E12, and somehow it did this even though everyone watching knew exactly what happens next, which had to have been unimaginably difficult to execute. (And I am not ashamed to admit that I didn’t realize Andor was “and/or” until several episodes into the first season, even though anyone unlucky enough to be the recipient of a professional email from me can tell you that’s one of my favorite conjunctions.)
• Related? The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site
• The New York Liberty Became the First $450M Women’s Team
• I (mostly) agree with the list Bruce Feldman compiled of the 25 best players of the millennium (so far). I have bigger issues with the list David Ubben put together of the best college football games since the turn of the century. I was somewhat surprised to see Florida ranked tenth in the list Stewart Mandel made of the best programs of the 2000s. It’s hard to believe how long it’s been since we had the best QB in history.
• Take It on the Run by REO Speedwagon holds up.
• Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Oneil Cruz recently sent a home run out of PNC Park at 122.9 mph (against the Milwaukee Brewers), recording the hardest hit ball in the Statcast era.
• (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction:
  • Dozens of staffers walked out when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya promoted an unproven COVID origin story.
  • [Current] administration orders Michigan coal plant to stay open
  • The Belief System Behind the Palm Springs Bombing
  • “[D]on’t worry about making your products safe for your customers. Even if you kill them, just pay a small fine and move on.” Apparently not prosecuting criminals is how to make America great again.
  • It’s always a bummer to learn that a perfect domain name is already taken.
  • Every high school theology, civics, social studies, and American history teacher should show the Bible lesson scene from The West Wing (The Midterms, S2E3) at least once each semester.

• The SNL 50th-Anniversary special drew almost 15M viewers, becoming NBC’s most-watched primetime entertainment telecast in five years. (For comparison, Super Bowl LIX had over 127M viewers.)
• Republicans have reintroduced the SAVE Act, a bill that could disenfranchise millions of American voters. Feeling helpless? Email Your Senators to Vote NO. Call Your Senators to Vote NO. It’s not nothing, and it really does make a difference.
• “This is a blunt-force budget cut with no clear strategy—gutting programs without considering their impact or even how services could be improved for the American people, often spinning public health into fear and chaos.”
• Related: The USDA is scrambling to rehire fired workers who were involved in the government’s response to the ongoing bird flu outbreak that has devastated egg and poultry farms over the past three years.
• Senate Democrats have the power to block federal contracts to Tesla and SpaceX. It’s the path to pushing [him] out of politics.
• Scratch Huntington Beach, CA off your list of travel destinations. Former Minnesota Vikings player Chris Kluwe was arrested at a city council meeting there after protesting the installation of a disgusting “MAGA” plaque at a local library.
• I graduated a long, long time ago and I still bleed orange and blue, but there’s something more than a little disgusting about the University of Florida begging me for cash when they have a $6B endowment and are annually paying millions of dollars to multiple football coaches they fired years ago. – via me
• Is ‘Zone 2’ the Magic Effort Level for Exercise?
• A new study on more than 17,000 people discovered that too little sex is linked to cardiovascular disease and a higher risk of all-cause mortality.
• Major League Baseball will employ what it calls the automated ball-strike system, or ABS, in a big-league spring training game for the first time this week.
• Dirpy is a handy site that lets you rip YouTube videos to mp3. (e.g. Doechii rapping about anxiety over the Gotye song Somebody That I Used To Know, Taylor Swift performing You Belong with Me and Untouchable on SNL)

• I loved reading this story about an 11-yo who pulled one of the most valuable baseball cards in history. The best quote from the article? “My brain pooped.”
• Hackers are hijacking WordPress sites to push malware on unsuspecting visitors. This is another good reason to make sure your plugins are core files are routinely updated.
• This short article about the psychology of scene transitions in film is really interesting. (Watch the video, too!)
• One of the more concerning consequences of the current administration is that when the most powerful nation in history is ruled by feckless ignorant toads, those who lust for power elsewhere are emboldened:
  • Paramilitary group attacks an open market in Sudan, killing 54 people and wounding scores
  • Congo says 773 dead in week-long fighting as military tries to repel Rwanda-backed rebels
• Last night I realized I can watch Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough on BBC through AppleTV. I had to pay for it, but I think that’s pretty reasonable. I was pleasantly surprised to see Steve Brusatte make an appearance. I read his book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World a year or two ago and loved it. It’s really mind-blowing how much more we know about dinosaurs than we did when I was fascinated with them in elementary school. Scientists might even have finally discovered where dinosaurs first evolved! (The documentary is titled Dinosaur Apocalypse on AppleTV for some reason. I guess that sounds much more dramatic.)
• More Bird Flu Bad News: Infectious disease expert warns wind-blown avian feces may be route of transmission.
• Google searches for “adult tennis lessons” were up 245 percent shortly after the premiere of the Zendaya love-triangle sports-flick Challengers. – via The Athletic
• After reading a few of her Bluesky posts, I decided to subscribe to the tech newsletter rendezvous with cassidoo.
• Just in case you were under the misguided impression that the current administration cares about, y’know, people:
  • The head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been fired.
  • On Monday the Senate confirmed fossil fuel executive Chris Wright to serve as Secretary of Energy.
• A Coup in Plain Sight: An Explainer as the Crisis Solidifies

• Shrinking (Apple TV+) is probably the best show on TV right now. Jason Segal and Jessica Williams are phenomenal in it and — as impossible as it is to believe — it might be the best work Harrison Ford has ever done on screen. The show was co-created by Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) and the theme song is Frightening Fishes by Tom Howe & Benjamin Gibbard.
• Engineers found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• Is there anything better than college football bowl season?
• ProPublica has an online tool that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial, which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases. – via @broingerm (threads / bluesky)
• Rare baseball stats are my jam. When I was an early teen I watched Roger Clemens mow down sixteen Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park and was bored out of my mind. I wish I’d appreciated the feat as much as I did the mini batting helmet ice cream. (I still have the helmet.) It’s wild that there have been fewer 20-K games than perfect games.
• On Sunday, December 8, 2024 — in a loss to the Los Angeles Rams — Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills had the best fantasy football performance ever by a QB. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• Over 21 months, Taylor Swift‘s culture-dominating Eras Tour brought in $2B, more than double the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• Staffers at roughly 600 booksellers are receiving $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson, the bestselling novelist who has been awarding independent store employees since 2015. – via @abcnews
• You can find something for everyone in The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide.

Which app’s score presentation do you think I prefer?

I appreciate that the CBS one shows the pitching data, which is (traditionally) the second-most important meta data about the game. But the fact that I can’t tell who won the game, which is the most important data point anyone wants to see, makes their alert more annoying than it is useful. If it wasn’t for the CBS football pick’em games, I’d delete the app entirely because of this dumb alert. The app from The Athletic is far superior.

Jesus, I miss Vin Scully.

PSA: It’s still easier to win back-to-back Super Bowls than it is to bat .400 for a season.