Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to āimproveā the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the country. In this piece for FanGraphs, the authors use some GIS tactics to analyze how this shakes out for baseball fans falling within those markets:
So how many Americans would see their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person disappear under MLBās proposal? And how many would see their primary point of access shift from the relatively affordable games of the minor leagues to major league ones? To work out how the closure of these minor league teams will affect access to baseball, we went to the map. More specifically, we took the geographical center of each ZCTA (a close relative of ZIP Codes used by the Census Bureau). We calculated the distance as the crow flies from each ZCTA to each ballpark in America, both in 2019 and in MLBās proposed new landscape.
Seems like a strange move for transit agencies to sell the naming rights to entire stations to private entities. Would it really raise revenues enough to make a dent in paying for operations or improving systems? Seems like the downsides outweigh the upsides here. Iām all for experimentation in improving public services, but this seems like a lazy method for raising a few million bucks.
I did learn a new handy phrase here:
Thereās a phrase that urban geographers use for this private rebranding of public space: ātoponymic commodification.ā
Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Natsā run:
He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.
An annotated version of Mike Migurskiās workshop on RapiD and Disaster Maps from the NetHope Summit. Facebookās work on this stuff looks primed to change the way everyone is doing OpenStreetMap contribution.
Iāve never used TikTok, but itās been a fascination tech story to follow its insane growth over the last 8-12 months. With the current geopolitical climate and the fact that itās owned by Chinese owner ByteDance, it seemed like this CFIUS investigation was inevitable.
Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPNās telecasts. Iāve thought about this, too, but have to give it to the ESPN one, with Fox right up there.
Scott Alexanderās review is an excellent in-depth look at this book on meditation. Iām still making my way through it, but itās definitely a fantastic soup-to-nuts guide so far.
From an objective observer in the 16th century, what site would have been the best bet to predict the flowering of the Industrial Revolution, based on contemporaneous evidence?
In fact, England in 1550 was not even close to being Europeās preeminent naval power. It was Hispania, not Britannia, who ruled the waves. Even on maps made in England and for the use of the English government, the ocean off the west coast of England and to the south of Ireland was labelled The Spanish Sea. The foreign maps agreed. The North Sea, too, was the Oceanus Germanicus, or German Sea. It gives an idea of who controlled what. And England of course came close to catastrophe in 1588, when the Spanish decided to launch an invasion ā it was largely only stopped by the weather. Despite having always been on an island, English policymakers only seriously began to appreciate Britainās geographical potential for both defence and commerce in the late sixteenth century.
It took until the mid-17th century for promise to start taking hold in England. By then itās growth and expansion had begun overtaking its neighbors.
On a misty Saturday morning in Vienna, on a course specially chosen for speed, in an athletic spectacle of historic proportions, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya ran 26.2 miles in a once-inconceivable time of 1 hour 59 minutes 40 seconds.
An architectās manifesto on how teams can rethink the design of baseball stadiums:
Fans want to feel that the club has bought into them, and a bolder model of fan engagement could give them a real stake in the clubās success. One of the most promising recent trends in North American sports is the way soccer clubs are emulating their European counterparts by developing dedicated supportersā groups. These independent organizations drive enthusiasm and energy in the ballpark, and make sure seats stay filled.
Instead of just acknowledging and tolerating the supporter group model, weāre going to encourage and codify it in the parkās architecture by giving over control of entire sections of the ballpark to fans. Rather than design the seating sections and concourse as a finished product, weāll offer it up as a framework for fan-driven organizations to introduce their own visions.
Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. Theyāve put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well all season:
The Rays emphasize power now, but in a different way: Through Monday, their hitters had the highest exit velocity in the majors, at 90.1 miles per hour, and their pitchers ā who specialize in curveballs and high fastballs ā allowed the lowest, at 86.3. Hard-contact rates enticed them to trade for Pham from St. Louis last July, and to land Yandy Diaz in an off-season deal with Cleveland. Pham was hitting .248 for the Cardinals, but the Rays assured him he had simply been unlucky; he hit .343 the rest of the season.
And I get to post this on the back of their 11th inning win over the Yankees this afternoon.
Great quick read from Horace Dediu on Appleās Services business. As he points out in the piece, Appleās business model is continually oversimplified and/or misunderstood by many:
This disconnect between what people think Apple sells and what Apple builds is as perplexing as the cognitive disconnect between what companies sell and what customers buy.
Companies sell objects or activities that they can make or engage in but customers buy solutions to problems. Itās easy to be fooled that these are interchangeable.
Conversely Apple offers solutions to problems that are viewed, classified, weighed and measured as objects or activities by external observers. Again, itās easy to be fooled that these are the same.
This post goes into how the author put together a visualization of tornado trend data for Axios. Observable notebooks are so great. The interactivity lets you not only see the code and data to create it all, but can be forked and edited right there.
We had the chance on Monday night to go to the Padres game with a small group. Whenever the home team of a baseball city is in town, itās a must-do for me to try and catch a game and check out the scene and the stadium.
Petco Park is an amazing facility. We had seats halfway up on the third base side. The stadium is an entire entertainment complex with a ton of activities, shops, food options, and of course beer (a San Diego specialty). Right outside we did a pregame stop at the Stone Brewing tap room, as well.
The weather was fantastic, even though the game result wasnāt so much for the home team. The Rockies took the win, but we had a good time anyway.
Interesting data here in Oktaās annual report. Itās clear that the way customerās buy SaaS is very different than the āsingle-vendorā purchasing preferences from years past. SaaS allows businesses to buy and integrate the best-fit tools for any jobs:
We also looked at whether companies who invest in the Office 365 suite ā the top app in our network ā end up committing to a Microsoft-only environment, and the answer was clearly āno.ā We found that 76% of Oktaās Office 365 customers have one or more apps that are duplicative of apps offered by Microsoft. Over 28% are chatting on Slack. Nearly 24% are connecting with their colleagues on Zoom. And over 28% of Oktaās Office 365 customers are ādouble bundlingā themselves, subscribing to G Suite as well.
28% of customers have both Office 365 and G Suite. Thatās a high number for an area that many consider zero-sum competition.
The Rays picked up Colin Poche in the Steven Souza, Jr. trade with the Diamondbacks last season. Sounds like heās making some waves in the farm system:
The most unhittable arm in the minors is Colin Poche. Last year, he led the minor leagues in strikeout rate. This year, he again leads the minor leagues in strikeout rate, having increased his own strikeout rate by a dozen points despite going up against much stiffer competition. When Poche pitched in High-A last year, he struck out 37% of the hitters. In Double-A this year, he struck out 60% of the hitters. In Triple-A this year, heās struck out 50% of the hitters. All year long, over 41.1 innings, heās allowed just three runs. Heās allowed an OBP of .185, and heās allowed a slugging percentage of .184. Colin Poche is turning in one of the most unbelievable performances you might ever see.
The St. Josephās Peninsula is special to our family, having gone camping, sailing, and fishing their growing up. The hurricane storm surge cut right through the island north of the boat launch area. I remember walking from the campground down to the marina to go fishing. Now youād have to swim to get between them.
Iām a baseball fan from way back, and grew up as a Braves fan during the early years of their 1990s NL East dominance. As much as I always enjoyed following the sport as a casual fan, Iād never studied the game much, nor its history beyond the bits that are conventional knowledge to anyone with an interest in the sport (the seminal records, player achievements, and legends of the game). Iāve been on a kick lately of reading about sports I enjoyābaseball and soccerāand have picked up a few books on the subjects to find out what Iāve been missing.
I just finished reading George Willās Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, his 1989 book that dives deep on the strategy of the game. He sits down with 4 separate professional baseball men to analyze the sport and its component parts: managing with Tony La Russa, hitting with Tony Gwynn, fielding with Cal Ripken, Jr., and pitching with Orel Hershiser. One of the first things that attracted me to this as a re-primer to a newfound interest in baseball is that itās not new. This book is over 20 years old, so most of the players mentioned in the text are ones I grew up watching.
The book offers a deep analysis of the tactics of baseball games. Rather than write about the specifics as an armchair expert, the author leaves most of the opinion about the elements of the game to the actual practitioners. He poses the question and lets La Russaās 2,700 wins or Gwynnās 3,000 hits do the talking. Will does pepper in some of his own opinions on things like the practicality of the designated hitter rule (he thinks pitchers hitting in the NL is a waste of time), and that Walter Johnson is hands-down the best pitcher to have played the game (a bold position, but not a surprising one). But itās by no means a book of opinion on the game.
He spends a lot of the bookās introduction emphasizing the differences between baseball and other sports. No one would deny that baseball is extremely different than the other Big Three US sports, all of which are āget object to the other side to scoreā games. All of those sports have depths of complexity in and of themselves, but the important differentiation isnāt about which sport is āharderā or innately ābetterā. He points out that baseball is the only sport where the defense initiates every playāpitcher throwing to batter. This shows that no matter how dominant or overpowering a particular hitter is, he only gets 1 of every 9 team at-bats. One offensive player simply canāt dominate the entire game on behalf of his team if the other eight are consistently striking out. In football or basketball, the ball can be dished to the same runningback or power forward each play, if heās dominating. The only player on the baseball field that can dominate is the pitcher, a part of the defense. I love these dynamics of baseball games, with each pitch functioning as a set piece with strategies set up for each hitter, count, baserunner position, batter tendency, and stadium configuration. A typical baseball game consists of 300 pitches or more, so the intricate interlock of the gameās components is incredibly complex when trying to compete at the big league level, for 162 games a season.
The theme throughout the book, touched on by each of the professionals, is that baseball is, fundamentally, a game of attrition. There are more opportunities to fail and go into a slump than there are to succeed, even for the cream of the crop. Even the winningest managers in the modern era (La Russa, Bobby Cox, Joe Torre) racked up 2,000 losses in their careers. At the end of the day, baseball is a game of failure, and excelling at the game is an exercise in minimizing failure as much as it is about success. Thereās an excellent anecdote at the start of the book from Warren Spahn, the Bravesā left-handed legend, speaking at a dinner at the US Capitol with a host of congressmen:
Spahn was one of a group of former All-Stars who were in Washington to play in an old-timersā game. Spahn said: āMr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today (Spahn, 363 wins, 245 losses; Bob Gibson, 251 wins, 174 losses) lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.
The pros that get on top are the ones that overcome the ridiculous rate of failure to edge out the competition.
Much is said in the game about āluckā as an immovable fixture of the sport. You canāt watch a broadcast or listen to a managerās press conference without them talking about luck or misfortune. Analysts in the last 10 to 15 years have created an entire science out of developing statistics that removeluck from the equation when measuring a pitcher, fielder, or hitterās effectiveness on the field. Part of the reason luck becomes an interesting āmetricā when analyzing the sport is the sheer number of individual events in a baseball seasonāpitches, hits, strikeouts, runs, stolen bases, the list goes on and on. A season is 2430 games, not including the playoffs, so thereās an enormous amount of data streaming out continuously, ripe for analysis.
āLuck is the residue of design.ā -Branch Rickey
Because of this, baseball is a game of numbers and averages (with a āsteadily thickening sediment of statisticsā, in Willās words). Lots of current baseball writing and analysis is overrun by esoteric sabermetricians hyperanalyzing the game in such ridiculous detail that casual fans wouldnāt even understand the meaning of the numbers. Look at stats like wins above replacement (WAR), batting average on balls in play (BABIP), or ultimate zone rating (UZR) and try to understand their meanings without detailed study. With Men at Work, I liked that Willās approach was closer to the surface in reflecting on the practical aspects of the game, rather than the in-the-weeds examination of player performance and team contribution thatās become commonplace in the post-Moneyball era. Thereās certainly no shortage of statistics or an appreciation of their importance to the sport, but they take a backseat to the observable strategies and decision-making processes of a La Russa or Hershiser. My favorite part about baseball statistics has always been looking at historical trends in player output, and many of the old school numbers work just fine for seeing individual and team performance.
I highly recommend Men at Work to anyone interested in baseball, and particularly more avid fans of the sport. This book deepened my appreciation of the game, and now makes me think differently about strategies unfolding on the field.
