⚾️ The Rays are a Surrealist’s Delight

Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They’ve put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well all season:

The Rays emphasize power now, but in a different way: Through Monday, their hitters had the highest exit velocity in the majors, at 90.1 miles per hour, and their pitchers — who specialize in curveballs and high fastballs — allowed the lowest, at 86.3. Hard-contact rates enticed them to trade for Pham from St. Louis last July, and to land Yandy Diaz in an off-season deal with Cleveland. Pham was hitting .248 for the Cardinals, but the Rays assured him he had simply been unlucky; he hit .343 the rest of the season.

And I get to post this on the back of their 11th inning win over the Yankees this afternoon.

📱 The Pivot

Great quick read from Horace Dediu on Apple’s Services business. As he points out in the piece, Apple’s business model is continually oversimplified and/or misunderstood by many:

This disconnect between what people think Apple sells and what Apple builds is as perplexing as the cognitive disconnect between what companies sell and what customers buy.

Companies sell objects or activities that they can make or engage in but customers buy solutions to problems. It’s easy to be fooled that these are interchangeable.

Conversely Apple offers solutions to problems that are viewed, classified, weighed and measured as objects or activities by external observers. Again, it’s easy to be fooled that these are the same.

🧭 Mapping Gridded Data with a Voronoi Diagram

This post goes into how the author put together a visualization of tornado trend data for Axios. Observable notebooks are so great. The interactivity lets you not only see the code and data to create it all, but can be forked and edited right there.