I made two more charts in the past week that are worth a brief discussion. The first looks at injuries by team, and the other considers team winning percentage at home or on the road. ...

I began writing morning pages in June. I first came across the concept via Pagi when they made a post about it being rejected by App Store review. It was a funny way to be introduced to a new creative method, but I didn’t give it additional attention. The idea was tossed into some filing cabinet in my memory. Morning pages resurfaced in the second episode of Paper Places, a new podcast about writing on Relay FM. Hearing a conversation with actual writers let me more fully connect with the practice, and I decided to give it a shot. Every morning since June 3rd, I’ve taken time in the morning—not first thing, I do my puzzles before anything else—to sit down at a device1 and write about 1000 words, letting whatever pops into my head flow onto the page. ...

I went to Modesto this past Friday to watch my first Single-A baseball game between the local Modesto Nuts of the Seattle Mariners organization and the San Jose Giants, creatively named after their parent organization, the San Francisco Giants. The environment reminded me of a mid-season high school football game, complete with inexpensive food vendors, large groups from local church and youth sports organizations, and season ticket holders who maintain conversations from several rows away. There are angry dads, town heroes, and four-dollar hot dogs. I adored it. ...

I love puzzles. I was lucky enough to coauthor a puzzle book at my job, and I’ve been fascinated by any logical, engaging game I can find. I’m no expert, but I am an enthusiast. Over the last several months, I’ve nailed down a set of puzzles that bookend each day, getting my mind working in the morning and letting me wind down in the evening. ...

You may have seen any number of scatter plots on the internet that show data comparisons among players or teams in a given league. These are part of my daily experience on the /r/baseball community, and I finally decided to scratch my statistical presentation itch by making my own. This post isn’t to cover what statistics to compare, just the process I’ve settled on for now to turn a table of comparisons into precisely-designed charts suitable for sharing on the internet. ...

Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project is an excellent collection of pithy and useful observations about the world. They range from the purely practical, to the advisory, to the somewhat absurd. It’s worth a read. I follow a Mastodon Bot that posts something from the document every six hours, and save any that catch my eye. This one resonated with me: Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company. ...

Until my older sister got a Nintendo DS, the only gaming devices we had were those cheap handheld ones that had a single game on it—Sudoku, a baseball simulator—and the similarly-cheap Plug and Play TV game consoles that typically comprised a joystick, a button or two, and composite video cables. They required batteries. They were slow. I loved them. ...

Last week we published episode 304 of Comical Start, We Were Very Stupid and Did Stupid Things. It featured our first ever proper guest—that is, someone we didn’t go to high school with. The whole thing felt surreal as it was happening, but it was cool that it happened at all. Give it a listen. It was a unique experience.

In early high school, I remember all the hubbub about requiring metal baseball bats to align to the BBCOR standard. Given the pronunciation of this (“Bee-Bee-Core”), I always assumed it was a regulation about what specific materials must be used to make the bat. That’s only true insofar as the standard actually defines a material property. BBCOR stands for “Batted Ball Coefficient of Restitution”. In other words, the standard tells you how elastic the collision between ball and bat is allowed to be. This standard was designed to dull metal bats in an effort to protect pitchers, the most likely players to be grievously injured by a batted ball. It was adopted by the NCAA in 2011, and most youth leagues that I’m aware of followed their lead. I used BBCOR-certified bats throughout high school, and continue to do so in my adult league. ...

If you grew up around the plain-text internet and pre-smartphone texting, you may be aware of the distinction between emoticons and emojis. The latter are separate unicode characters that are increasingly-detailed artistic renderings of various faces and items, like a Ferris wheel: 🎡. The former are clever constructions of non-emoji characters, which provide some intangible level of whimsy and cleverness that never fails to delight.1 Consider this shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or someone flipping a table in frustration: (ノ ゜Д゜)ノ ︵ ┻━┻ ...