After an injury plagued 2025 season, 2026 has generally been a return to form for the Kansas City Chiefs. Patrick Mahomes has looked spry in his return from knee surgery, Travis Kelce seems like he is running in slightly less mud than usual, and Kenneth Walker has been a godsend in terms of balancing the offense. While they’ve clearly lacked a downfield receiving threat, forcing Mahomes to operate more in the short-to-intermediate space, the offense has still been productive, and they currently sit at 6-2 in the AFC West, a half game behind the Broncos.

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This week featured one of the most “NFC Least” matchups we’ve had in a while - an ugly 27-10 win by the Washington Commanders over the Philadelphia Eagles.

It brings me tremendous joy, of course, to see bad things happen to the Eagles (whose coach has no business being in the National Football League) - and I’ve been heartened by the fight the Commanders have shown in the second halves of recent games.

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Twenty-five years ago, NFL kickers made fewer than one in four field goal attempts from 55–59 yards. Now they’re making nearly two in three.

After reading my January 2025 post on kicker accuracy, which first laid out that improvement, a reader reached out to me and requested another visual: put time on the x-axis, make rate on the y-axis, and give each distance range its own line. With football season underway, I’ve finally gotten back to that idea and have a fresh new plot to share with you all - I think it turned out nicely!

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Since I stood this blog up ~ten years ago, I’ve been a loyal Mailchimp user - I embedded their signup form in the footer of my site, maintained an audience of subscribed users, and had it automatically send a quick email every time I added a new post.

For years, this was the perfect setup, as I could abstract away all the complexity of sending emails and simply focus on writing new content!

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Peek at the header of my site and you’ll see a new capability added - a search bar!

I was inspired by Vicki Boykis’s blog post in which she uses the Lunr.js framework to add search to her blog, which runs on the same static site framework I use (Hugo).

After a bit of research, I decided to use Pagefind instead of Lunr.js - it’s also a lightweight client-side search framework, I just found it to have richer and easier-to-follow documentation.

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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 time.

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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 “refreshing” - and you know what that means.

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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 possible - taking away all of the drama and majesty of the home runs themselves.

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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 in the France vs Morocco quarterfinal, in which roughly half of the starting Moroccan side was actually born in France, making the match almost an all-French affair!

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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 Phillies should have been a statement series for the ballclub. After a strong 4-1 win in Game 1, the Nats proceeded to lose three consecutive games in which they had a lead in the ninth inning - including a breathtaking two in a row which were a single strike away.

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