Lewie Pollis
@lewispoll
Dog dad. Cheesesteak enthusiast. Data scientist (not the evil kind). He/him Words on sports, food, and politics here:
Crossed a few things off our baseball bucket list with @mrslewsonfirst.bsky.social
I got to see The Room with two different friends named Mark @gregsestero.bsky.social
And of course Bernie Sanders, who stands out among a sea of unprincipled cowards for how thoroughly he debased himself for his inexplicable loyalty to a man who ended up dropping out of the race anyway
I try to have some sympathy for ordinary people who found Platner's platform inspiring, and who did not understand the significance of his scandals. I will never forget the leaders — a list that has grown quite a bit since I wrote this — who knew better, yet spent the last nine months by his side.
No ill will towards Belgium, where I had the single best breakfast of my entire life
Heat index of 98° and he begged me for a walk so he could lie on the scalding-to-the-touch sidewalk
I understand the point you all are making about Balogun but every post I see just reminds me of this
First attempts to make pizza on the Blackstone! Tried classic plain cheese and basil, also Philly-style breakfast pizza with a homemade cheese sauce base, the bacon above, Cooper sharp, scrambled eggs, and kale
Chicken got interrupted by rain, it dried out by the time I made this glazed turkey bacon
I'm not saying this line of thought is incorrect if you are running an MLB team. However, it is a departure from the traditional ethos of baseball, and it's worth reflecting on what that means.
With potential changes to MLB's salary structure on our minds, here's a curveball: We are a only a couple simple steps away from contract bonuses becoming direct functions of pitchers' velocities. It's one of many potential downstream impacts of pitch modeling that we should start considering now.
As a preview of where this goes: I think the complaints about What's Wrong With Baseball are ultimately not about strategic disagreements or aesthetic preferences, but a foundational wish that winning baseball games took different skills than we now realize it actually does.
My ultimate answer here is no, but it’s a much harder position to rationalize than it sounds — in part because stuff models are not mere novelty stats but the intellectual descendants and logical conclusions of the established field of DIPS metrics. How do you draw that line?
This is part of a longer essay I'm working on, but this passage from Moneyball is stunning to read twenty-odd years later. It wasn't that long ago in baseball that the roles were reversed, and the analytics folks were pushing back against what they saw as the old-timey scouts' obsession with velo!
Don't know how this person even happened upon this post, which does not mention his name — are people just name-searching for "Maine"? — but when you put it that way, I've got a couple things off the top of my head
Still relevant, a year later: Cuomo is a true old-school antisemite, and the fact that he branded himself as the pro-Jewish mayoral candidate (over not just Mamdani but Lander!) shows how ass-backwards society's definition of allyship is these days. www.thelewsletter.lewispoll.is/p/empire-of-...