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Friday Fun Thread for September 09, 2022

We don't have the bot, so let me step in: this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Old data at this point, but the Curse of 370 used to hold up pretty well for running backs.

No statistical evidence that baseball hitters who debut as pros younger have earlier peaks than players who remained as amateurs

In general I think mileage is more folk-logic than anything else. But I would say across many sports you see the phenomenon of a player playing an extreme outlier high stress and high use seasons can lead to a player breaking down.

Peak performance requires all of your joints to be in excellent shape. I think the issue is that every hard hit does a little bit of permanent damage. Or at least slow healing damage that never heals because they keep playing.

Accumulated micro-damage isn't visible. So the number of times they carried the ball is a reasonable proxy.

Having some dedicated fans go through all of the hits for each player and ranking them from 1-5 based on how hard they looked would probably also work well, but that's a lot more work.

For most purposes, it probably suffices for a fantasy enthusiast to say, "Derrick Henry takes a lot of abuse, I will devalue him going forward relative to his past performance". Getting more data-oriented is fun, of course, but sample size issues will apply when there just aren't that many players with massive carry burdens.