By Walt Hickey

And such small portions!

Last night’s home run derby was a welcome exception to the new normal in baseball, where batting averages are at the lowest levels in a half-century. The major league batting average was .239 in May, the lowest since the .237 notched in 1968, which went down as the “year of the pitcher.” It’s also low in the minor leagues, where the batting average is .243. One reason for that is that the pitches are fast these days: The average four-seam fastball’s velocity was 94.2 miles per hour this year, on par with the rate in 2023. In last year’s season, there were 3,880 pitches over 100 miles per hour; in 2008, there were just 214. Still, the games are way shorter, with the average time of a nine-inning game dropping from 3 hours, 4 minutes in 2022 to 2 hours, 36 minutes so far this year.

Ronald Blum, The Associated Press

On

The hottest new shoe in running is the Cloudboom Strike LS from Swiss brand On, which started only in 2010. The shoe is created by a single synthetic monofilament over a mile in length, extruded to perfectly fit to a runner’s foot. It’s very light — 170 grams, or 6 ounces, in the same tier as the Nike ZoomX Streakfly — and it’s potentially the future of this kind of performance footwear, requiring just seven components compared to the typical 150 to 200 in a running shoe and handled by one person rather than a hundred on an assembly line. It also cuts down substantially on waste and can be made essentially on-demand, meaning less supply surplus. It’s $330, which is naturally on the higher end, and will debut at the Olympics.

Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times

Dizi

Turkey has become a major producer and exporter of television, and Turkish television dramas — dizi — have legions of devoted fans worldwide. From 2020 to 2023, global demand for Turkish television series was up 184 percent, and about 400 million viewers a night tune in to Turkish dramas. It’s also getting Turkey into people’s vacation planning, with the international image of Istanbul in particular buoyed by its presence on television screens across not just the region but the world as a whole.

Robert Badendieck, The Associated Press

Comics

The latest estimates for last year’s sales of comics and graphic novels are in, and while things took a slight dip from 2022 to 2023, the overall level of sales is still significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels. Total sales of comics and graphic novels in the United States and Canada were estimated to be $1.87 billion in 2023, down 7 percent from the $2.01 billion logged in 2022, the height of the pandemic bump. That said, in 2019 those sales were at just $1.1 billion, which puts the 2023 sales at still up 70 percent compared to 2019. What’s changed? Comic book shops are slightly less significant, accounting for 36 percent of the total business compared to 41 percent in 2019. In-store book fair sales were up 12 percent and manga was down 14 percent off the pandemic peak, while graphic novels for kids stayed relatively sturdy at a mere 2 percent decline.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Selfie Videos

“Know your customer” requirements are put on financial institutions to ensure that they know precisely whom it is they’re dealing with, so as to fight money laundering or nefarious actors. Sometimes in order to satisfy those requirements, services will require an individual to send a video verifying they’re real and the person indicated on their documents. Well, underground services are selling them now, going to places like Serbia, paying people $5 to $20 to take a selfie, a video and a few photos, and then selling them to would-be fraudsters to circumvent the KYC requirements. An investigation found that a set of 80 photos and four videos of the same person can be had for about $30 in bitcoin, videos specifically designed for someone to edit in a passport or an ID card.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media

Dealerships

The long national nightmare of car dealerships’ software being hacked has ended, and it certainly looks like it concluded with a discreet ransom payment in cryptocurrency. CDK Global, which makes software for auto dealerships, appears to have ended their hack by paying a $25 million ransom to the hackers. On June 21, 387 bitcoin were transferred to an account that is known to be controlled by a group behind the ransomware BlackSuit, according to TRM Labs. A week later, CDK was bringing car dealers back online.

Sean Lyngaas, CNN

Spot Rates

The peak season for shipping is about to kick off, and will run through China’s Golden Week in early October where factories shut down for seven days. As it stands, spot shipping prices are flat: The Shanghai-Rotterdam route is $8,048 per 40-foot container, the Shanghai-Genoa leg is $7,614 per 40-foot container (up 1 percent), the Shanghai-Los Angeles leg is up 1 percent to $7,512 per 40-foot container, and the Shanghai-New York leg is up 3 percent to $9,387 per 40-foot container. On the transatlantic route, spot prices were even down 1 percent to $1,955 per 40-foot container on the Rotterdam-New York route. The expectation is that prices are generally going to remain high through the end of the season.

Gavin van Marle, The Loadstar

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