Sports:
The Reds Have a Baseball Unicorn, so Why Aren’t They Developing the Next Shohei Ohtani?
Superstars in the NBA playoffs, and the heightening of income inequality. Speculative, as Tyler Cowen would say.
Nobody had any idea what was going on in the Pacers-Cavs Game 4 finish.
Energy:
Tech firms like Google, Amazon push power companies toward solar and wind, a blow to coal. “It’s become such a movement that last year, U.S. corporations bought more renewable power than utilities did.”
The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry
by Irving Rein, Ben Shields, and Adam Grossman, 2014
This book was among the conference swag at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference a few years ago. I finally got around to reading it. I was expecting it to focus more on analytics and strategy in on-the-field performance, but it is actually about managing professional teams and athletic departments off-the-field. Overall, perhaps 2-3 of the chapters kept me riveted, but the other 8-9 dragged on. The best part was the call-out boxes that took deep dives into topical anecdotes, such as how the Dayton Dragons (class A minor league team) have a 1000+ game sellout streak or how the Tennessee Volunteers handled Pat Summit’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. Worth reading and referencing if your are in a management, marketing, or public relations role in a popular company or for a sports organization.
Sports:
I prefer it when my links are about on-field actions, but it’s been a slow week. The Reds have not been good, and I haven’t watched other sports.
NBA2K League players paid more than G-League players.
The Marlins Will Sue Almost Anyone.
The carriage fee for Pac-12 Network is way down.
Energy:
Drones Are Lowering the Cost of Clean Energy.
Other:
It’s time to rebuild the web.
Dash writes about the demise of the View Source browser feature, which dispays the HTML from which the web page is built. View Source isn’t dead, but it’s sick. He’s right that the web succeeded, in part, because people with little background could look at the source for the pages they liked, copy the code they wanted, and end up with something that looks pretty good. Today, you can no longer learn by copying; while View Source still exists on most browsers, the complexity of modern web pages have made it next to useless. The bits you want are wrapped in megabytes (literally) of JavaScript and CSS.
and
Much as we may complain about Facebook, selecting relevant content from an ocean of random sites is an important service. It’s easy for me to imagine relatives and friends building their own sites for baby pictures, announcements, and general talk. That’s what we did in the 90s. But would we go to the trouble of reading those all those sites? Probably not. I didn’t in the 90s, and neither did you.
We already have a tool for solving this problem. RSS lets websites provide “feeds” of news and new items. Applications like Feedly and Reeder let you build a collection of sites that interest you, and show you what’s changed since the last time you visited. While I’d never check a dozen sites each day, I use Feedly to monitor hundreds of websites. I would never check those sites by hand, but I scan Feedly every morning. And, unlike Facebook, Feedly doesn’t know anything about its users except for the sites they read.
You should really use Feedly.
It’s hard to consistently get multiple weekly link roundups (one for sports, one for energy, one for other stuff) out, and I’ve been doing a bad job of it this year. I’m going to collapse them to one weekly link roundup on Wednesday afternoons. This is the first attempt at that. Here are your weakest links:
Sports:
The Four-Man Outfield and Position-Less Baseball.
The Pacers Are Bucking Every NBA Trend. And It’s Working. We’ll see how it goes in the playoffs.
Fake Sister Jean Twitter.
Energy:
FirstEnergy Files for Bankruptcy; To Close 4 Nuclear Reactors.
Other:
How to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane.
How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes. Already my specialty.
How to make a ship bigger — cut it in half first.
Army Strips Down Network To Survive Major War.
Orioles let kids in for free. 2 kids under 9 per regularly priced real person.
Indians stressing shut-eye strategies. Subscription to The Athletic, which has been worth it so far, required.
68 Facts about this year’s March Madness field. From Harvard Sports Analysis Collective. Better than most.
Similar to last year and the year before and the year before that, I will run my NFL model over NCAA men’s basketball teams to show the strength of each team. The model predicts how many more points a team will score than the “average” team, along with how many more points they will give up on defense. The model is only based on the final scores of games during the season and conference tournaments. Positive numbers are good for Offensive strength. Negative numbers are good for defensive strength. My model does not discount (late season runs matter no more than early season victories) and does not account for injuries.
Some things to note:
1. 6 tournament teams are worse than an NCAA Division 1 average team.
2. The top 8 teams are within 5 expected points of each other.
3. My model says Xavier is only the 11th best team, deserving of a 3 seed. Chronically under-seeded West Virginia is a 5 seed deserving to be a 3 seed. Virginia’s offense is below average, but their defense is preposterous (7 points better than 2nd best Cincinnati). Villanova has the best offense, but Oklahoma is right behind them.
4. The best teams not to make the tournament are Penn State (14.0 points above average), Baylor (13.7), Louisville (13.7), and Notre Dame (13.5).
5. Creighton, Butler, and Arizona State deserved seeds that were 3 better.
6. Miami and Rhode Island deserved seeds that were at least 3 worse.
As Medals Pile Up, Norway Worries: Are We Winning Too Much? I love everything about this article.
Instead of holding back its athletes, Norway is trying to lift others everywhere else. It has conceived the Alpine athletics version of the Marshall Plan. For seven years, it has invited competitors from all over the world to visit for a weeklong training camp. A separate camp is offered to World Cup coaches. Attendees pay to get there, and Norway covers all other expenses.
2018 PyeongChang Games are the least-watched Olympics ever. Yes, but all networks are down nowadays. “NBC’s primetime viewership beat its broadcast brethren by a whopping 82%.”
Smart Baseball: The story behind the old stats that are ruining the game, the new ones that are running it, and the right way to think about baseball
by Keith Law, 2017
The sabermetric revolution in baseball has already happened. There are no longer any holdouts among MLB front offices; by the start of 2017, all thirty organizations had established analytics departments, employing multiple people, often with Ph.D.s in computer science specialties, charged with gathering data and using them to answer questions from the GM or the coaching staff, or to look for previously undiscovered value in the market for players. If your local writer is still talking about players in terms of pitcher wins, saves, or RBI, he’s discussing the role of the homunculus in human reproduction. The battle is over, whether the losers realize it or not.
If you are familiar with wRC, FIP, and fWAR/bWAR in baseball, you probably don’t need this book. It spends a long time explaining why old stats (RBI, ERA, pitcher wins) are not as useful as previously imagined and how new stats are better. The last few chapters include interesting discussions on why certain players should be in the hall-of-fame and on the role of scouts in a modern organization.
On a night when the Cavs and Timberwolves combined to hit the most three-pointers in an NBA game, ever.