Conor McLaughlin

Peek at the header of my site and you’ll see a new capability added - a search bar!

As a pitcher, two-strike counts can be tricky.

Anyone who has swum in the Pacific Ocean on the West Coast knows one thing - the water ain’t warm.

As a long-term lover of the Home Run Derby (by far a better event than the All Star Game), I had SUCH A BLAST watching this year’s version, which scrapped the batting clock and introduced a swing cap.

One of the most interesting backstories at the 2026 World Cup has been the huge surge in “foreign-born” players who compete for a different nation than their birth country.

One day, perhaps we’ll look back at this moment and laugh.

It’s been a bad few years to be a Washington Nationals fan.

On May 2nd, Spirit Airlines permanently ceased operations.

Last weekend, I went down to San Diego for my close friends’ annual Kentucky Derby party - reliably one of the most fun weekends of the year.

It was in mid-March that I started hearing the rumblings, lunchtime comments from ski and snowboard friends at work: “I wanted to go up to Mammoth this weekend, but decided to skip it since there just isn’t much good snow” “We went to Tahoe but I kind of…

For the 2026 season, Major League Baseball introduced its challenge system to great fanfare, with the Automated Balls/Strikes (ABS) system serving as a backstop to overturn (or validate) calls made by the umpires.

Earlier today, the Team Report Cards compiled by the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) leaked and were published by The Athletic, despite the NFL winning a grievance in arbitration that blocked the NFLPA’s release of the data.

On Wednesday night, as I watched the Hoos smoke Georgia Tech in a 94-68 win, the perfect blog post idea popped into my head.

Last week, the Dodgers signed Kyle Tucker to a 4-year, $240M contract - adding him to their already back-to-back winning lineup, and keeping him away from the Mets and Blue Jays, two of their biggest three-peat threats.

In the spring of 2024, I started a new job in West Hollywood and quickly noticed something amusing on my commute home: it was almost always warmer at my office than at my house in Santa Monica.

The Virginia Cavaliers are 7-1 to open 2025–26 and have topped 80 points in all of their games thus far.

A week ago, LeBron made his season debut for the Lakers, posting an 11/3/12 line in 29 minutes against the Jazz.

Last Sunday, the U.S.

This Thursday, November 6th, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it would take steps to immediately reduce flights at 40 critical US airports by up to 10 percent in hopes of reducing strain on air traffic controllers, who continue to work…

Earlier this month I read through the presentation Lufthansa leadership shared with the media and their investors on Lufthansa Group (LHG) Capital Markets Day, on September 29th, 2025.

On August 11th, President Trump mobilized the National Guard to patrol the District of Columbia under the guise of restoring public safety.

One of the most unstoppable trends in baseball has been the steady increase in fastball velocity, with relievers and now starters throwing meaningfully harder than they did ten, or even five, years ago.

“Elevate to Celebrate”, an all-time great sports catchphrase, entered the baseball lexicon sometime in 2016 or 2017, giving shape to a trend that had been underway but nameless.

Earlier today, a friend sent me a link I knew I had to turn into a quick blog post - an article published August 5th in the Santa Monica Next titled “SMPD Stats Show Shocking Drop in Traffic Enforcement”.

Keibert Ruiz is one the absolute best players in baseball at putting bat on ball - he’s in the 96th percentile for avoiding whiffs, and the 97th percentile at avoiding strikeouts.

Humor me with a quick thought experiment - imagine an industry.

Earlier this week I read a great article from Car and Driver, which ran some controlled tests to try to understand how electric vehicle acceleration varies as a function of battery charge level.

A few weeks ago I got back in the Tidbyt-app-making business, relaunching my Planes Overhead app with a new backend.

In March, news broke that a French scientist had been denied entry into the United States after making critical comments about the Trump Administration’s research policies.

Finally!

About six weeks ago, my Planes Overhead app for the Tidbyt smart display died.

Last year I wrote a blog post outlining my use of DBHub.io as a serverless backend for typecode lookups in my Planes Overhead app.

It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I frequently have planes on the brain… Recently, this obsession interest led me towards building a small ADS-B ground station in my house!

With Spring Training well underway in Florida and Arizona, I’ve started doing a little reading and research in anticipation of Opening Day - set to be March 18th for the Dodgers and Cubs in Tokyo, and March 27th for rest of the league.

Yesterday the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) released their latest set of Team Report cards, following the 2024 release and 2023’s inaugural data.

A few days ago, CNBC released their latest valuations of NBA franchises.

On December 18th, the Senate Budget Committee dropped a doozy of a blog post, titled “New Data Reveal Climate Change-Driven Insurance Crisis is Spreading”.

Yesterday I wrote a quick blog post discussing how the distribution of field goal attempts by distance has shifted quite a bit over the last twenty five years: teams are attempting fewer short field goals and more long field goals.

A major storyline this NFL season has been the unprecedented success of kickers on extra-long field goals.

Most fantasy football leagues have a notion of “start percentage” for players - as ESPN says, “start percentage shows the number of fantasy leagues a player is started in divided by the number of leagues he is eligible in.

Well, at least the wait is over.

Earlier this fall, I entered into a machine learning contest to predict plane take-off weights, organized by the Opensky Network, an aviation group.

The past few months I’ve used my spare blog energy to work on a fun project that I’d like to loop everyone into!

I’ve got a long-running project in the works which involves temperature sensors that I’ve deployed in a number of locations in Santa Monica.

It’s been a tough year to be a Washington Nationals fan.

With the NFL season right around the corner, I thought it would be fun to preview the potential impact of one of the biggest rule changes the NFL has made.

Major League Baseball (MLB) has a long history of using the minors as a sandbox for rules reforms - with the recent testing and rollout of the pitch clock as a prime example.

Despite a surprisingly-solid record of 36-37 out of the gate for the Washington Nationals (thank you pitching staff!)

Earlier this week, I saw a post on one of my favorite internet forums (Airliners.net) which shared some cool data: the number of international passengers at the 30 largest US airports, split by foreign and domestic passport holders.

For the 2024 season, Major League Baseball (MLB) upgraded the Statcast cameras in each stadium so that path, extension, and velocity data can be captured for every swing.