Recent content on Conor McLaughlin
As a pitcher, two-strike counts can be tricky. On one hand, you’re one pitch away from ending the at-bat. On the other, you still have to throw a small ball sixty feet, six inches past a very motivated man - a brutal task if you dwell at all on the mechanics of what you’re doing. In my experience, the best thing to do was simply try to block the situation out and work one pitch at a…
Anyone who has swum in the Pacific Ocean on the West Coast knows one thing - the water ain’t warm. Sure, it’s not quite as cold as Maine where my family goes in the summer… a trip that is very useful for me by making the California water seem “not that bad” upon my return! But the best adjectives in my experience have been “brisk” and…
As a long-term lover of the Home Run Derby (by far a better event than the All Star Game), I had SUCH A BLAST watching this year’s version, which scrapped the batting clock and introduced a swing cap . While the change towards timed rounds in 2015 was fun for a few years, over time it became unwatchable as players responded to the incentives in play by swinging as fast (and as much) as…
One of the most interesting backstories at the 2026 World Cup has been the huge surge in “foreign-born” players who compete for a different nation than their birth country. Per the BBC , foreign-born players now account for 23.2% of all players, up meaningfully from 16.5% in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and 11.4% in the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Nowhere was this trend more visible than…
One day, perhaps we’ll look back at this moment and laugh. “The moment before it all came together”, we’ll say. “Pitching needed a bit more time than the hitting”, we’ll admit. Today though? We stew. We stew in incredible frustration, watching our bullpen implode in jaw-dropping fashion, turning yet another Curly W into an L. This series against the…
It’s been a bad few years to be a Washington Nationals fan. Ever since the 2019 World Series, each season has been marked by disappointment: COVID derailing the victory lap year, injuries and trades undermining the 2021 and 2022 seasons, and then a failed rebuild from 2023-2025 resulting in the departures of GM Mike Rizzo and manager Davey Martinez. Coming off that streak, one might…
On May 2nd, Spirit Airlines permanently ceased operations. The airline, which had been the seventh-largest in the US, leaves behind 172 planes (many of which are currently being ferried back to their lessors) and 73 destinations. It’s those destinations I’m most curious about - what will happen to them when Spirit exits? While Spirit may have been a terminally flawed business, boxed…
Last weekend, I went down to San Diego for my close friends’ annual Kentucky Derby party - reliably one of the most fun weekends of the year. This year was a bit more “mature” than prior years, with the arrival of a few new babies amongst the friend group, but rest assured - there were still plenty of mint juleps consumed and beer die played. The most interesting part of the day,…
It was in mid-March that I started hearing the rumblings, lunchtime comments from ski and snowboard friends at work: “I wanted to go up to Mammoth this weekend, but decided to skip it since there just isn’t much good snow” “We went to Tahoe but I kind of wish we hadn’t since it was really slushy” I have to admit, I initially gaffed these comments off. Surely a…
For the 2026 season, Major League Baseball introduced its challenge system to great fanfare, with the Automated Balls/Strikes (ABS) system serving as a backstop to overturn (or validate) calls made by the umpires. In doing so, MLB finally formalized the definition of the strike zone - no longer would it be “knees to letters” at the discretion of umpires - now it ranges from 27% to…
Earlier today, the Team Report Cards compiled by the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) leaked and were published by The Athletic , despite the NFL winning a grievance in arbitration that blocked the NFLPA’s release of the data. This legal aspect added some intrigue to what has otherwise been a customary dump of data - one that clearly bothers the owners of the NFL’s 32 franchises! As a…
On Wednesday night, as I watched the Hoos smoke Georgia Tech in a 94-68 win , the perfect blog post idea popped into my head. In December, I wrote a fun post identifying some of the (early) changes in Virginia’s playing style under new head coach Ryan Odom. At the time, the differences in pace of play and shot distribution really stood out, for good reason! But what I hadn’t yet caught…
Last week, the Dodgers signed Kyle Tucker to a 4-year, $240M contract - adding him to their already back-to-back winning lineup, and keeping him away from the Mets and Blue Jays, two of their biggest three-peat threats. Around the same time, I read an article talking about how the WNBA was set to miss a negotiating deadline between the league and the players’ association - with the two…
In the spring of 2024, I started a new job in West Hollywood and quickly noticed something amusing on my commute home: it was almost always warmer at my office than at my house in Santa Monica. On many evenings, the temperature would drop five or even ten degrees between WeHo and the coast. Nerd that I am, I decided this microclimate was worth mapping myself. That decision sent me down a year-long…
The Virginia Cavaliers are 7-1 to open 2025–26 and have topped 80 points in all of their games thus far. For a program long defined by a slow, deliberate pace and box scores in the 50s and 60s, that’s a huge change! For reference, the Cavs reached 80 points just two times in 32 games last season. The elephant in the room here, of course, is that Tony Bennett is no longer with us, and with…
A week ago, LeBron made his season debut for the Lakers, posting an 11/3/12 line in 29 minutes against the Jazz. The outing was particularly notable because it marked the first time any NBA player has ever competed in their 23rd season - a remarkable feat of longevity. A few days later, I found myself watching the Washington Wizards at my parents’ house in an “Emirates NBA Cup” match against the…
Last Sunday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York unsealed an indictment against two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz , for rigging pitches. In the scheme , Clase and Ortiz would intentionally throw pitches, usually for balls, often below certain speed levels, so that “prop bets” on those individual pitches would pay off for…
This Thursday, November 6th, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it would take steps to immediately reduce flights at 40 critical US airports by up to 10 percent in hopes of reducing strain on air traffic controllers, who continue to work without pay during the ongoing government shutdown. I don’t really want to get into the politics of this decision… what I do want to…
Earlier this month I read through the presentation Lufthansa leadership shared with the media and their investors on Lufthansa Group (LHG) Capital Markets Day, on September 29th, 2025. In the presentation, they lay out their plan to deliver an EBIT margin target of 8-10% by 2028 to 2030, double the 4% they returned in 2024. One of the key drivers of their plan is “Local brand strength & hub…
On August 11th, President Trump mobilized the National Guard to patrol the District of Columbia under the guise of restoring public safety. Around the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) meaningfully ramped up enforcement, with roughly 1,200 arrests in the most of mid-Aug through mid-Sept. By many accounts , the visible presence off troops and agents and accompanying surge in…
One of the most unstoppable trends in baseball has been the steady increase in fastball velocity, with relievers and now starters throwing meaningfully harder than they did ten, or even five, years ago. A Minneapolis Twins fan site (humorously named Twinkie Town ) put together some great graphics of this trend - so good that I’ll just re-post them below to illustrate the trend. One thing to…
“Elevate to Celebrate”, an all-time great sports catchphrase, entered the baseball lexicon sometime in 2016 or 2017, giving shape to a trend that had been underway but nameless. During those years, players like Jose Altuve, Jose Bautista, and Daniel Murphy underwent well-publicized and shockingly successful swing transformations which led them to career best seasons. The key? Banishing…
Earlier today, a friend sent me a link I knew I had to turn into a quick blog post - an article published August 5th in the Santa Monica Next titled “SMPD Stats Show Shocking Drop in Traffic Enforcement” . The piece shares traffic stop and crash data obtained from the City Manager’s office. It shows a large, sustained decline in the number of citations written by the Santa Monica…
Keibert Ruiz is one the absolute best players in baseball at putting bat on ball - he’s in the 96th percentile for avoiding whiffs, and the 97th percentile at avoiding strikeouts. He’s also one of the least productive hitters in the game, with a Batting Run Value in the 7th percentile. What on earth is going on? The Data A quick note before we survey the data - I made all of the charts…
Humor me with a quick thought experiment - imagine an industry. A handful workers in this industry are extremely well paid, while vast majority earn almost nothing. Many workers feel they are underappreciated in their current roles, so they frequently hop between employers. There are few ethical standards, so both workers and employers push the boundaries of acceptable behavior in pursuit of money…
Earlier this week I read a great article from Car and Driver , which ran some controlled tests to try to understand how electric vehicle acceleration varies as a function of battery charge level. In their research, they found that the Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a remarkably flat performance curve, while the Lucid Air and especially the Rivian R1T see more performance degradation as their battery charge…
A few weeks ago I got back in the Tidbyt-app-making business, relaunching my Planes Overhead app with a new backend. With that success still fresh in my mind, I wanted to keep the momentum going and try to finish off a project I had started a number of times before without being able to actually finish off - building a “departure board” for LAX. The Inspiration A few years ago I flew…
In March, news broke that a French scientist had been denied entry into the United States after making critical comments about the Trump Administration’s research policies. The story wasn’t a one-off — it seemed to hint at a broader trend. Increasingly, tourists and travelers are being denied entry into the country or even detained for days or weeks. And now, the chill is starting to show up in…
Finally! The Washington Nationals seem to have realized that the game of baseball is a heckuva lot easier when you’re able to knock the ball out of the park! After years of kvetching , I can’t say how pleased I am with this development, and the thought of how much better our offense might be this season… next to the Chicago White Sox isn’t where you want to be on any lists…
About six weeks ago, my Planes Overhead app for the Tidbyt smart display died. This death wasn’t exactly a surprise - the founder of DHub.io, the backend service I was using which ceased operations , had reached out to give me a heads up - but it did mean that I would need to do some unplanned engineering work to get the app up and running. I did the bulk of that work last week and tried to…
Last year I wrote a blog post outlining my use of DBHub.io as a serverless backend for typecode lookups in my Planes Overhead app . Unfortunately, DBHub.io ceased operations at the end of February, putting me back in the market for a new solution! The Need As a reminder, my Tidbyt app uses the OpenSky API to obtain the closest plane overhead and populate the display. The typecode detail on the…
It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I frequently have planes on the brain … Recently, this obsession interest led me towards building a small ADS-B ground station in my house! It’s got a dinky little antenna, so it can’t really pick up planes too far away, but it works great within the reaches of LA County and provides a pretty incredible live view…
With Spring Training well underway in Florida and Arizona, I’ve started doing a little reading and research in anticipation of Opening Day - set to be March 18th for the Dodgers and Cubs in Tokyo, and March 27th for rest of the league. One of the biggest topics of conversation this offseason for the Washington Nationals was whether or not they would be active on the high-end free agent…
Yesterday the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) released their latest set of Team Report cards , following the 2024 release and 2023’s inaugural data . These report cards include grades by 1,695 players, scoring their own teams on a variety of player experience dimensions from A+ to F-: Treatment of Families Food/Cafeteria Nutritionist/Dietician Locker Room Training Room Training Staff Weight…
A few days ago, CNBC released their latest valuations of NBA franchises. The data shows the Golden State Warriors with a nearly $2B lead on the Knicks as the most valuable franchise, and biggest revenue earner in the 2023-2024 season. The Warriors’ move to the Chase Center and San Francisco has clearly earned huge financial dividends, though I can’t help but feel that their departure…
On December 18th, the Senate Budget Committee dropped a doozy of a blog post , titled “New Data Reveal Climate Change-Driven Insurance Crisis is Spreading”. They didn’t bury the lede at all, getting right to their conclusion that “climate change is increasing insurance non-renewals around the country” and that “the failure to deal with climate change is also…
Yesterday I wrote a quick blog post discussing how the distribution of field goal attempts by distance has shifted quite a bit over the last twenty five years: teams are attempting fewer short field goals and more long field goals. In this post, I’ll look to round out my analysis, focusing not on attempts , but the actual make rate of kicks by distance, and how that has evolved over time.…
A major storyline this NFL season has been the unprecedented success of kickers on extra-long field goals. In this post, we’ll look at how the kicks being attempted have skewed longer and longer over time - I plan to fast-follow this post with another focusing on how field goal make rate has also evolved through the years! What’s Going On It should stand as no surprise to NFL fans that…
Most fantasy football leagues have a notion of “start percentage” for players - as ESPN says, “start percentage shows the number of fantasy leagues a player is started in divided by the number of leagues he is eligible in. This helps indicate how the public views a player.” Watching football last weekend, I was struck by the number of touchdowns being scored by users who I…
Well, at least the wait is over. In the latest bit of intra-NL East star player migration, yet another former National has signed a megadeal with a hated rival. Throughout the Boras-led bidding process, I had expected the Yankees to retain Juan Soto, but it seems that Steve Cohen decided he would simply not be outbid, and the Mets flexed their financial muscles to lock Soto down with a fifteen…
Earlier this fall, I entered into a machine learning contest to predict plane take-off weights, organized by the Opensky Network , an aviation group. A week or two ago, I finished a write-up of the final model I built for the competition, overviewing the approach I used to engineer features and train and test my model. Since finishing that post, I’ve been excited to point my attention to a…
The past few months I’ve used my spare blog energy to work on a fun project that I’d like to loop everyone into! On August 1st I received an email from the OpenSky listserv (I became a member while building ) my Planes Overhead app for the Tidbyt ) announcing a data science challenge, focused on predicting plane take off weights. This challenge felt precision targeted for me, as a…
I’ve got a long-running project in the works which involves temperature sensors that I’ve deployed in a number of locations in Santa Monica. Earlier today, it came time to finally go recover those temperature sensors - I wanted to share a little tool I made to make the job quick and easy! The Task When I put out the sensors, snapping a quick photo was all I did to track their location.…
It’s been a tough year to be a Washington Nationals fan. It’s been a tough five seasons honestly… since that amazing 2019 World Series win over the Astros, the franchise has been mired in a teardown and rebuild, which is finally showing some signs of progress but has yet to deliver consistent winning baseball. One thing that’s particularly evident when watching the team is…
With the NFL season right around the corner, I thought it would be fun to preview the potential impact of one of the biggest rule changes the NFL has made. Anyone who has watched football in the past decade knows that kickoffs have been a “dead” play - kickers are so good at generating touchbacks that we rarely see returns, formerly one of most fun plays in the game. Furthermore, when…
Major League Baseball (MLB) has a long history of using the minors as a sandbox for rules reforms - with the recent testing and rollout of the pitch clock as a prime example. This season, the “robo ump”, formally known as the automatic ball-strike (ABS) system, is being trialed across all of Triple-A. This system implements the strike zone as a rectangle set in the middle of the plate,…
Despite a surprisingly-solid record of 36-37 out of the gate for the Washington Nationals (thank you pitching staff!), one recurring theme has bugged me: a lack of patience by our hitters. Too often, I’ve felt, have they swung at sub-optimal pitches early in at-bats, leading to mediocre contact and letting opposing pitchers skate through the game with low pitch counts. “If only they…
Earlier this week, I saw a post on one of my favorite internet forums ( Airliners.net ) which shared some cool data: the number of international passengers at the 30 largest US airports, split by foreign and domestic passport holders. I’ll let the original poster LAXdude1023 point out what is meaningful about this data: “While the below is NOT O&D data, it does give a significant…
For the 2024 season, Major League Baseball (MLB) upgraded the Statcast cameras in each stadium so that path, extension, and velocity data can be captured for every swing. This data is now available in the Statcast portal , and it’s so cool that I couldn’t help but mess around with it! To be honest, I haven’t had the time to put together a really thoughtful analysis of the data…
A few months ago, I spent a week in Paris with my mom and sister, visiting museums and exploring the city. One of the more exciting things we stumbled upon was the 2024 Summer Olympics countdown timer in the Place de la Concorde, which signaled 7 months until opening ceremonies - pretty cool to see! As we read about the government’s plans to host events throughout the city, we discovered…