I just bought my saberseminar ticket!

Unfortunately I'll not be attending this year due to a conflict. But I encourage all my baseball followers out there to attend. Saberseminar has always been one of the great forums for learning about the latest baseball research and connecting with other like-minded people. Do not miss it!

This is exactly why DEI efforts are not anti-meritocratic, as some critics claim. The base playing field is *severely* tilted against people of color, so efforts to push against that preexisting bias effectively just make promotions more fair and more meritocratic. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/u...

Excited to announce that general ticket sales for Saberseminar 2026 are open now! We've got a great lineup of speakers that we'll reveal soon, but you can expect more of the fantastic research and discussions we've had in past years. events.ticketleap.com/tickets/sabe...

That's a shame. There was a lot of really good, sometimes academic-quality research on the site. (There was also some terrible stuff.) There's nothing to be gained by taking it offline.

This is free to read, but if you enjoy reading it, you may also want to consider subscribing. Got some cool stuff coming up, some baseball, some more movies, some politics, and more.

In my last post, I looked at how Hollywood discriminates severely and unreasonably against older actresses, in particular. In this post, I look at how actresses fight back: they look much younger than their chronological age. no-little-plans.ghost.io/for-hollywoo...

Just 3 DAYS LEFT to submit your abstract for Saberseminar 2026! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

The acting head of the CDC has canceled the publication of a study that found that the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits last winter, a Health Department spokesman said.

Which of y'all are submitting something for Saberseminar this year? Which of y'all are attending? Which of you hate baseball and knowledge and good hangs? docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

a little while back, I started a blog, except I guess blogs are called newsletters now. (Apparently I'm sufficiently old to have reached the stage of "that thing I called X is now called Y and I'm mad about it.")

sure, it's well known that all doctors emanate glowing radiance from their hands

Reminder: abstract submissions are open for Saberseminar 2026. We always aim for a mix of talks on a wide variety of subjects, from established professionals to hobbyists to students looking to get a foot in the door. Submit your abstract ASAP! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

back @baseballprospectus.com for the first time in a while, using prospect reports--the raw text--analyzed with deep learning models to predict who will get to the majors and how valuable they'll be. www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article...

Teaching students to ask a question, find and consider evidence, and craft and clearly articulate an argument is at the core of all teaching. It is a slow, messy, non-linear process, but a skill that can be taught. AI short circuits that learning. As Karamanis writes, failure is the curriculum.

I often share ProPublica work by picking one quote that stood out to me. But I can't narrow it down with this jaw-dropping piece by @kbmorales.bsky.social and @davidarmstrongx.bsky.social so, uh, 🧵I guess: www.propublica.org/article/trum...

We're excited to announce that Saberseminar 2026 will be held August 29-30 at the IIT campus in Chicago! We're excited to get back together for another weekend of fundraising and cutting-edge baseball research. For more information, visit our website. www.saberseminar.com

BREAKING: Judge Cobb finds that Sec. Noem's second and third efforts to restrict congressional oversight access to federal immigration facilities still likely violate Sec. 527, issues an order blocking both during litigation.

As the U.S. officially breaks 1,000 measles cases in 2026, experts say that the rate of infections is accelerating much faster this year than it did in years past

This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see. His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert. Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.

yeeeesh www.yahoo.com/entertainmen...

Glad this is getting covered, but also… Completely surreal to read the NYT report on this as recently disclosed info, and just an allegation. This happened to every observer I know! It happened to me twice! I have it on video both times! www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/u...

According to public Department of Justice records, about 2000 staffers left DOJ from 2024-2025, including about 1000 lawyers. The last time there were there this few staff was 2010. no-little-plans.ghost.io/2000-staffer...

Federal agents cornered Marimar Martinez, shot her several times, boasted about it, arrested her, lied about her to the public and in the police report, and falsely charged her with assaulting them. Now the government wants to keep evidence of their lies secret to protect these agents' "privacy."

What is going on w/Bondi's DOJ & Pirro's US Attny's Office? They are repeatedly missing court deadlines in new lawsuits against USG & facing possible default. I had two w/i last few days. Admin has gutted these offices. I feel for lawyers still there. Workload is unmanageable.

“I watched him die… then I watched them maneuver his body like a rag doll— only to discover it was because they wanted to count the bullet wounds and see how many they ‘got’, like he was a deer.”

Mommy Mondays with Tony Dokoupil

perhaps the first Nuremburg defense of the Trump administration? Certainly won't be the last

who's excited for the new CBS segment "Phrenology Phridays"

This is an important paper on social class barriers among faculty in academia. First-generation college grads earn less and are placed at lower prestige institutions despite being just as productive as other faculty. Faculty from upper class backgrounds are overplaced for their research records.

TIL Dell supplies ICE.

America has a housing shortage. Every single housing proposal you see that is not "build more housing" will have the primary effect of pushing up the prices of existing housing, and is therefore, in reality, a plan to enrich current homeowners. In conclusion, build more housing.

The newest course in the SABR Analytics Certification on-demand program is now available, "Applied Statistics for Baseball", led by instructor @robarthur.bsky.social. SABR members get registration discounts and your work will be reviewed by @baseballprospectus.com staff: sabr.org/analytics/ce...

NEW: Civilians have had apparent seizures. One had his eyes roll back. Another had ribs broken. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die,” said a 16-year-old citizen put in a chokehold. The government won’t say if any agents have been punished.

Today on All Of It: Amanda Holden on 'How to Be a Rich Old Lady'💰; Karolina Wydra on the sci-fi drama #Pluribus; director Kaouther Ben Hania on 'The Voice of Hind Rajab'; plus @benlindbergh.bsky.social & @robarthur.bsky.social on why TV seasons now take so long. At Noon on @wnyc.org!

If the DEA had killed 80 innocent Americans in the course of apprehending one drug dealer, there would be riots. But we are so ghoulishly indifferent to the lives and humanity of people abroad that it's barely even part of the conversation.

WAM had @robarthur.bsky.social run a report for us that found that fielders in stadiums with closed roofs were, on average, positioned a foot closer to where fly balls landed than in outdoor venues. Theoretically, you could use WAM's data to position your fielders better and save a few runs a year.

"Individual liberty" is when conservatives decide everything. Their concept of liberty is just domination, not freedom to do what they want, but freedom to force everyone else to do what they want. bsky.app/profile/donm...

whenever I see this topic, I think back to @robarthur.bsky.social's two-parter from 2021 on fielding and how much better it had gotten. First part covered how defenders were playing deeper, removing a bunch of hits thanks to better athleticism and throwing ability in particular:

"My mentor always tells me, 'Kim, dogs don’t bark at parked cars." They’re coming after critical race theory, 1619, intersectionality because these ideas mobilized people. They gave them the language to actually articulate what they were seeing with their own eyes," says Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Every Democrat in Congress should put out a video saying troops have an obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Make them prosecute all of you. This isn't a close call. I'd add Republicans too if I thought any of them had the courage to actually cross Trump on this.

BREAKING: Trump is again separating kids from families The govt isn't releasing info, but we found ICE has sent record # of kids to shelters. One family went to govt office , only to have parents detained while the children—aged 5, 11 and 1--went to shelters www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

"underscores his determination to challenge scientific orthodoxy" is such absolute horseshit. There's no doubt, there's no "orthodoxy"--vaccines save lives, that's a simple fact, and what he is doing will end lives.

Editor-in-chief used AI editing tools to insert hallucinations into stories without fact-checking or disclosure, reports @niemanlab.org. #WCGW #AmReading #GenAI #AI #Journalism

Saberseminar gave a donation of $10,000 to @theyoungcenter.bsky.social using the proceeds from the 2025 event! The Young Center does incredible work protecting the rights and interests of immigrant kids and we are so proud to support them. Thanks to all the attendees for making this possible!

Grok gave me a side by side comparison of how Elon Musk would improve upon Jeffrey Epstein's private island logistics, including how he would avoid getting caught. Not alt-txting that one bc Jesus Christ

What this shows yet again is that DHS's "official version" of events simply shouldn't be believed without verification. In video after video, claims made by DHS officers and DHS itself were shown not to have occurred at all — or to have occurred in a substantially different way than first described.

THREAD: Judge Ellis is the first federal judge to review extensive body cam video of DHS's actions in Chicago. She finds that DHS *repeatedly* misled the public and made claims that were disproven by agents' own videos. I'll go through some of the most egregious ones here.