The Daily Valet. - 7/23/20, Thursday

✔️ It's Baaaack

July 23, 2020

Thursday, July 23rd Edition

Cory Ohlendorf, Editor in Chief of Valet.

It’s been 271 days since the end of the 2019 World Series, but baseball has returned.

Cory Ohlendorf , Editor ⋯ @coryohlendorf

Today’s Big Story

Baseball Is Back

The weirdest MLB season ever is about to start

Baseball, a game that fancies its season as a marathon, will engage in an outright sprint during the 2020 MLB season, reports ESPN.

The sport that night after night packs fans into stadiums will play with no crowds. Instead, slightly creepy cardboard cutouts will fill the seats and artificial crowd sounds will be pumped from the speakers.

What else is different, you ask? Well, there are already several players on the injured list, reports CNN. Not the 60-day injured list, but the “COVID-19 Related Injured List” instead.

COVID MLB will be essentially hands-free too. There should be limited high fives, few fist bumps and hardly any hugs. For the most part, they should be avoided, MLB officials warn. And no spitting!

It kicks off tonight with a pair of marquee games involving four of the league’s most prominent teams. The action begins at 7 p.m. ET when the defending World Series champions Washington Nationals host the New York Yankees, a team that’s tied for the best odds to win it all this year. The doubleheader concludes at 10 p.m. ET when the Los Angeles Dodgers—the projected top club in the National League and World Series co-favorite—take on their rival San Francisco Giants.

And some things remain the same. According to Forbes, oddsmakers have put odds on the board for each of these MLB Opening Day 2020 games, heralding in the highly anticipated return of pro baseball betting. I’m not a big baseball fan myself, but I’m as hungry for normalcy as every other red-blooded American, so I’ll probably be watching.

↦ Power Rankings: Here's where all 30 teams stand ahead of Opening Day.

Tesla’s Profits Defy Pandemic Shutdown

They also announced a $1 billion factory in Austin

On Wednesday afternoon, Tesla CEO Elon Musk answered questions from investors following the announcement that the company reported a fourth-consecutive profitable quarter, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Musk, who heads a company with a valuation approaching $300 billion, doesn't want the electric-vehicle maker to be super profitable. “I think just we want to be like slightly profitable and maximize growth and make the cars as affordable as possible,” he said on the call.

Wrapping up a months-long search for a location to build the upcoming Cybertruck, Musk also announced that Tesla will build a $1.1 billion assembly plant in Travis County, Texas that will employ 5,000 people, reports the Austin American-Statesman.

The new factory will be open to the public, Musk said, and that there will be a boardwalk and hiking and biking trails. “It’s going to basically be an ecological paradise. Birds in the trees, butterflies, fish in the stream.”

↦ FYI: Tesla is also building an app store for vehicle owners or passengers so they can purchase digital content while in their vehicles.

The U.S. Commits to Buying Pfizer’s Vaccine

But the company won’t receive any money from the government unless their vaccine succeeds

Life probably won't fully return to normal until we have a widely distributed COVID-19 vaccine, but the good news is that this might be happening sooner than expected.

On Wednesday, the U.S. government announced a $1.95 billion deal with Pfizer to acquire 100 million doses of its vaccine candidate against the coronavirus, reports NPR.

The vaccine has shown positive results in small clinical studies, but the company won't know if it is effective until they run larger trials. According to Reuters, the deal will only take effect if and when the firm carries out a Phase 3 clinical trial to prove that the vaccine is effective and safe to use—and the FDA approves the vaccine.

The vaccine would be free to Americans, according to the deal (though health care providers could charge to administer it). But experts warn that it might still be a while before we actually see it. Ken Frazier, chief executive of pharmaceutical giant Merck, told CNN: “We don't have a great history of introducing vaccines quickly in the middle of a pandemic. We want to keep that in mind.”

↦ Dig Deeper: The Upshot looks into what makes this such an unusual deal.

“X” Marks the Spot

A visual study in social distancing

You might say, in this strange new world of social distancing, that X marks the spot—or rather the spot you should avoid.

Companies, shops and governments are all finding creative ways to encourage and, at times, enforce the recommended six-foot radius we should all be keeping around around ourselves.

And this Instagram account, dubbed “Observing Safe Distancing,” shows all the unique ways the ground, seating areas and walkways have been marked off.

It's almost like an art exhibition, the ways in which these slashes of tape are similar, yet played out in various forms and colors. It'd be beautiful if it wasn't a stark reminder that our world will remain changed for the foreseeable future.

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Meet the Peloton of Boxing

It tracks the accuracy and power of your punches

Earlier in July, the underrated MMA show Kingdom was released on Netflix. I'm now hooked and have been shadowboxing whenever I've got a spare minute, so I think I might need the new Liteboxer.

It's being billed as a reimagining of the traditional punching bag into a portable, free-standing device that replaces sand or water with an LED illuminated runway of lights, targets and force sensors that work in conjunction to simulate the act of sparring with a trainer.

According to Hypebeast, it's meant to improve coordination while building up a sweat. And like Peloton, there are trainer-led workouts and routines organized by type, duration and difficulty available via an app. Plus, you can challenge friends or engage in functional strength training and recovery workouts that complement a boxing training regime.

↦ Buy: We've pulled together the best new fitness gear that's all but guaranteed to help you crush your fitness goals.