Sports Staturday July 5, 2025: Recapping Random Sports Stats From The Week

7/05/2025 2:00 PM

Welcome to Sports Staturday. I want to get back to doing these more. I could see this as being a personal weekly check-in where we do a drive-by on some stats behind sports stories of the past week. Just a quick Saturday morning flow through whatever concoction of headline/random/irreverent sports stories that cross my desk.

Personal check-in for me. I spent my week recovering from a scheduled surgery that turned into a complication leading to an "oh shit I'm losing enough blood to cover the entire bath tub and it's still coming and - yep - starting to feel faint" moment which led me to fight every man instinct inside telling me "eh, you're fine" and motioning to the pen to call 911. But don't worry - as this three-day hospital stay setback didn't stop me from getting back in time to crush some Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest stats for a blog with some picks. Most of them losers. I'm so back

I'm also now able to continue my summer slog of pulling various sports data and creating my own customized dashboards for easier querying mainly to prep for the NFL season, but also to be able to do these blogs more often. So let's get to this. Nothing complicated about it. We're just going to touch on some stories from the past week with a spice of stats to give you a little Saturday morning entertainment.

This is Sports Staturday.

Major League Baseball executed just the second "Settlers of Catan" qualifying transaction in league history after designating "Forrest" for "Rock"

This transaction makes sense for the Rays. 2nd place in the AL East, right at the Yankees heels. They clearly have a nice settlement but need rock to help turn it into a city. For those of you who didn't get that joke - congrats on the sex. Settler's of Catan is a board game that was forced upon me at a young age at family gatherings. Basically, you trade resource cards to build a civilization better than everyone else. And while not exactly written in the rules, somehow requires someone at every ten second internal to ask the entire table "anyone need sheep?". I'll let you in on something. No one ever needs sheep. Sheep are plentiful. There's more of them than "thiccest 18-year olds on this app".

Anyway - I was recently able to procure every MLB transaction in history and figured why not test it out by looking for any other Catan-esque transaction in history. To qualify - the name would need to meet a similar enough threshold to the five Catan resource cards (Rock, Wood, Sheep, Wheat, Clay). I would accept similar enough names such as stone, wood, forest, bah, wool, brick, mountain, amongst others.

Turns out - in the 100+ years of major league baseball, there was only one other that qualifies. Ron Stone traded for Clay Dalrymple:

So what's better? Stone or Clay? Turns out Clay as the Orioles won 109 games in 1969 and a trip to the World Series while the Phillies lost 99 games to place second-last in their division.

Emmanuel Acho and I figured out the formula for best NBA legacy

In other nonsense news, I spent a portion of my time last week on pain meds recovering from surgery by helping Emmanuel Acho derive the mathematical proof for the NBA Legacy Formula. I did a blog on this already, but it's important we share this with the world. It's a simple formula, but as is the case with any good math formula, you still need the Good Will Hunting Chalkboard to work out all the exceptions:

The thing about making formulas and doing mathematical proofs is that when the results don't yield what you're looking for the statistical next step is to carve out some exceptions. We just couldn't have Udonis Haslem with the same Legacy as Jordan. Acho asked me to up the minimum average minutes played, but that wasn't quite enough with Udonis around 25.

Get that chalkboard out again. Still gotta get rid of Haslem and make room for some additional exceptions.

No problem Acho! Go spread the good word that we figured it out mostly. I mean… except the minimum average game minute thing… We really just gonna let that slide?

There it is. The perfect NBA legacy. I guess if you didn't have Kyle Kuzma as the #54th best legacy in NBA history then you don't know ball. Sorry - it's just the simple math. Very simple math…

Karma bit Mintzy in the ass at the World Series of Poker

I was really trying to make it to the WSOP this year to play a lower level NL tourney, but due to the aforementioned surgery, I'm currently forced to rest Forest Gump eating ice cream over the urinal style which wouldn't exactly be conducive to day-long sessions at the felt. Watching this happen to Minty though was tough. Losing with an Aces over boat is generally the threshold for winning a bad beat jackpot. And sure, at the time the money went into the pot here, Mintzy was only a 80% favorite, but pulling an ace on the flop to trump trip 8s and get one-outed on the river is a hell every poker player knows quite well.

Then again. Maybe karma had a role to play here. Here's a nice posterizer shot from Mintzy just a couple days prior.

While Mintzy was a 91% favorite post-flop on his bad beat already mentioned, his poor opponent was at 94% with top trips (6s) vs AK. The only paths for Mintzy out of this mess post-flop would be a runner-runner 4, 5 (can't both be spades though) to split with a straight, or runner-runner spades to win with a flush. Obviously, the flush hit. Maybe don't posterize your bad beats next time Mintzy. The poker gods will find you.

Malik Beasly - Guilty or guilty and being used as an informant to land a bigger fish?

I actually didn't really dive into any stats on this one but had as good a time as anyone else watching clips of incriminating Beasles tape.

But then DeAndre Ayton got moved to LA and it all made me start to wonder…

Watching Ayton and Luka fight it out for worst defender in the NBA on the same team has me already psyched for the NBA to come back. If we had the proper "give a shit" metric that considers effort on the court and off I can't see Luka and Ayton any higher than bottom-five league-wide and having them on the same team will be fun to watch as a Lakers hater.

Thanks for joining Sports Staturday. Back to work pulling more data and getting ready for football season. Going to have a bunch of fantasy football prep blogs coming out soon with an updated wins above replacement model and data driven pre draft analysis that will give you confidence in the season to come before getting your hopes destroyed by the fantasy gods.

But hang on now! One more. Let's finish up with the GOAT of GOATS.

Joey Chestnut broke the 9-dog minute barrier

What's harder - the four-minute mile or the nine-dog minute? I think we all know the answer here. Joey Chestnut came back with a vengeance and took back the crown that's rightfully his. I went ahead and stacked up the leaderboard for the top dog eaters in Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest history (plus one other) for the historical record.