Background

A few days ago at work, I had a fun conversation with a coworker discussing the price of cocktails in LA and how the “standard price” of a cocktail varies from city to city. It’s been my belief for a long time that New York will always set the upper limit on how much people are prepared to spend on their drinks, and over time, that price point slowly trickles down to other markets. However - without any information to back up my point, I was helpless to argue my point in the face of stern opposition from the San Francisco contingent, which likes to have the most expensive everything!

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More than any other post I’ve written in recent memory, this post was inspired directly by a moment in today’s Nationals - Braves game (crushing, by the way). In the telecast, one of the commentators mentioned that batters are hitting fewer singles today than ever before. “Is that really true?” I wondered to myself on the couch…

Luckily for me, baseball being baseball, there’s almost always an easy way to answer these kinds of questions, and next thing I knew, I was down a Baseball Reference rabbithole of historical hitting data. What I ended up finding was a fascinating picture of baseball’s evolution, crystallized into just a few charts that help answer our singles question, show just how significant the recent eruption in home runs has been, chronicle the growth of the “Three True Outcomes”, and finally, show the demise of small-ball in the modern game.

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One of my favorite aspects of baseball has always been its grounding in statistical reality - while every player has their own style, everybody is shooting for the same things: Hits, Runs, and RBIs. What I find particularly interesting is that there can be an enormous difference in what kinds of players achieve the same statistical milestones. Sure, Giancarlo Stanton hit 39 home runs last season - he’s a beast. But did you know that all 190 pounds of Francisco Lindor managed the same feat?

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Despite losing Bryce Harper to the Phillies in Free Agency, expectations were high for the Washington Nationals opening the 2019 season. With two twenty-something phenoms starting in the outfield (Soto, Robles), one of the best players in baseball at the hot corner (Rendon), an offensively dynamic shortstop (Turner), a revamped catching corps (Gomes, Suzuki), a third ace (Corbin), and the reigning best pitcher in baseball (Scherzer) still taking the mound on Opening Day, the Nats projected to be the most talented team in perhaps the toughest division in baseball.

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Earlier this month, the City of Chicago became the first major American city to make rideshare data public. Following a number of recent controversies over user anonymity and privacy in publicly-released location data, the City performed an extensive amount of data de-identification before making the datasets public.

With datasets for trips, drivers, and vehicles all available, I thought it would be fun to play around and see what we might be able to find in the data! Note that only the months of November and December, 2018 are in the scope of this data, so all activity below is reflective of those two months.

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The Special Counsel’s Investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States election, better known as the Mueller Report, has been one of the more fascinating stories of our time. Responsible for a number of indictments and convictions of political operatives related to the President and the Trump campaign, the Report ultimately did not conclude that the President committed obstruction of justice beyond a reasonable doubt. It did, however, indicate that it could not clear the President of those allegations either - leaving the truth-seeking portion of the US public in a tough spot.

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Following their rival Lyft’s recent public offering, Uber’s much awaited IPO seems to be finally coming to pass. On Thursday, Uber filed their S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which outlines the details of their current operations, financial health, and planned use of offering funds. While a variety of other outlets have reported extensively on some of the details in the filing (such as the fun fact that a quarter of Uber’s revenue comes from only five cities), I thought it might be handy to build a few charts to more easily visualize some of the financial metrics being reported.

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With the NBA regular season concluded and the playoffs now on deck, I thought it would be fun to peek back at the players and teams that defined this season. There’s a million things one could investigate, but I wanted to call out just a few of my findings that really resonated in combination with what I observed watching games this season!

MVP Candidates

It’s commonly accepted that there is an inverse relationship between efficiency and utilization - as a player bears more offensive responsibility, their scoring typically becomes less effective on a marginal basis. Consider a player like Steven Adams, who is great in his role of taking 7 or 8 shots per game. Do you think Steven Adams would maintain his shooting percentages if forced to take 12, 15, or 18 shots per game? In almost all cases, players typically struggle to retain their shooting efficiency as their offensive workloads increase. This isn’t due in any part to their merits as players, but simply because of the toll that increased decision-making, ball handling, clutch shooting, and offensive creation requires of any player.

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I was recently reading Hacker News and noticed a post linking to the USCIS H1-B data repository, which contains information on the H1-B Visa applications process and statistics about visa submission, approval, and rejection by Citizen and Immigration Services.

As a bit of background, the H1-B visa program was created to allow US employers to employ foreign nationals in jobs requiring specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s or master’s degree. H1-B visas must be sponsored by an employer, and are typically valid for 3 - 6 years. While there is a cap of 65,000 visas that can be awarded each year, there are a number of exemptions for research institutions, particular countries of origin, and rollover between years that make the practical number of visas available much higher. Furthermore, there are 20,000 H1-B visas available to individuals who possess a master’s degree or higher from an American university. This means the total number of H1-B visas available in the lottery is in the 150,000 - 200,000 / year range, for both initial and continuing visas.

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Given Major League Baseball’s status as the only major American sports league without a salary cap, I’m always interested in seeing how teams choose to allocate their resources every year. There’s a lot that plays into how much any given team will spend on their roster, depending on everything from how badly a team is looking to compete, the proportion of their production coming from young players vs older players, how their local cable TV deals are looking, and how much of a dip each team takes in that season’s free agent market.

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