Brandon Nickell

Some personal news.

After embarking on a side quest for the past 2+ years with an early stage startup, I'm excited to share that I'm joining the Boston Red Sox R&D group as a Sr. Backend Engineer.

I always knew I was going to return to baseball--it's humbling to be a part of such a historic org.

Yep was surprised Oracle's deepest point wasn't in the top three, suspected Colorado was going to be the deepest--and who can forget Tal's Hill?

Surprised to see Oracle as 5th deepest. Good stuff here.

Trevor Cahill is my Rich Hill.

All ballparks started using humidors starting in the 2022 season, I know in the '21 derby it was mentioned publicly that the humidor was not used for the Coors ASG HR Derby. I wonder if that's the case here as well, maybe minimal impact, but storage conditions were the first thing that came to mind.

Junior Caminero is my pick for the derby.

Oneil a close second.

I totally forgot that I'd said this months ago but I'm glad I did after looking at Acuña's 433 ft homer last night

Amazing, look at that little guy. Strong contender.

I always think of the 1927-28 Tigers logo when this topic comes up, but it's so ridiculous that it now holds a special place in my heart. Looks like a cereal box.

Statcast Park Factors Baseball Savant

BTW, I would love to hear any insight and input you have on the Sutter Health ballpark environment--there is probably not enough data yet but early returns is that it has among the highest park factors right up there with Coors (obviously very different). baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/...

Also given that the A's would regularly play in a park that was consistently the coolest in all of MLB (where I grew up originally) that temperature was closer to the 60's at night in the summertime, so close to ten feet is non-negligible.

We're just being flippant, as someone who went to school and lived in Davis area during the summertime--it's fun to point out that the park is going to be a hot wasteland.

Man if Joe Boyle limits the walks watch out.

via @tjstats.ca

"The Andre Ethier Draft"

Didn't see this anywhere but...it took Xavier Edwards 320 plate appearances before he logged his first barrel for the 2025 season which happened today on a flyout (HR in 13 parks).

🚨New Statcast release day at Baseball Savant from the gang

This time: Catcher stance data. Which of your favorite catchers are using one knee down? (All of them.) Is the impact bad? (No.)

The trend here is overwhelming.

See the data here --> baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/...

Rest in Peace, Dave Parker.

Ancient proto pitch tracking of Rip Sewell's eephus.

youtu.be/1VYkh9C_BZk?...

AAAAI fraud detection.

Also nobody respect's Miss Rabbit's grind working multiple jobs.

1. Running the ice-cream stand
2. Supermarket checkout
3. Piloting the rescue helicopter
4. Driving the bus
5. Working at the museum
6. The aquarium
7. The library

Simply the Marwin Gonzalez of the Peppa Pigverse.

I can't stop thinking about Killer of Killers, 10/10.

He’s just out there aura farming.

From the Terence Tao interview:

"Infinity (mathematical) is an abstraction of a final number that you do not have a bound for."

I love that description.

This is my Super Bowl.

Google Cloud outage brings down a lot of the internet | TechCrunch Google Cloud seems to be at the core of a major outage affecting popular internet apps and services on Thursday.

Caused by GCP IAM: techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/g...

Looks like it's some kind of interdependency between Google Cloud and CF. CF operates a global edge network of data centers, but a lot of GCP services sit in front of CF, so this indeed may be mostly caused by a major GCP outage...guess we'll find out.

www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/25...

Apparently it’s some network configuration error involving Cloudflare from what I’ve been able to piece together but might be something deeper than that similar to a physical backbone (like L3, etc.) — sure we’ll get the full post mortem.

Today is a humble reminder that most major internet services and infrastructure in 2025 are not the decentralized networks that were dreamed up by the government over half a century ago. Cloudflare probably handles way too much of our DNS and CDN, we trade scaled convenience in favor of resiliency.