Chicago Cubs veteran pitcher Jon Lester sounded off on potential pace of play regulations which will likely be implemented before the upcoming 2018 season. Lester has long been an advocate to leave the game as is.
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Lester said at the Cubs camp on Friday. “I think it’s all terrible. The beautiful thing about our sport is there is no time.
“Fans know what they’re getting themselves into when they go to a game. … If you want to go to a timed event, go to a timed event.”
CHELSEA striker Alvaro Morata has travelled to Germany for a third time to be treated by a doctor who specialises in “regenerative medicine,” according to the Marca newspaper.
Dr Peter Wehling runs the Cemor clinic in Dusseldorf and has developed a treatment called Regenokine, which “harnesses the body’s natural healing cells” and injects them back into the body.
A number of prominent US sportsmen, including basketball star Kobe Bryant, golfer Fred Couples and the Seattle Seahawks American Football team, have all travelled to Germany to be treated by Dr Wehling.
… If you’re asking my opinion, the shots he’s taking now in practice look like a guy whose shoulder is bothering him. When he goes up, not at all does he finish his stroke. And then if you watch the highlights from college, when he’s making the threes, his stroke looked pretty good. He’s snapping the wrist, shooting the ball through the guide hand, all the things that you would teach.
Now, I would say this to you. I would never put him in the category of a great shooter, even when he played in college. First of all, great shooters do not shoot 65 percent at the foul line. If you’re going a whole season and shooting 65 percent from the foul line, you can’t be in the category of a great shooter. The only real test for a shooter is foul shooting and three-point shooting.
… Without a deeper understanding of group dynamics, these empty phrases go in one ear and exit almost immediately out of the other. It is all very well to say that a team must work together, but actually achieving this is clearly not so simple. If it was, the leader would simply wave his magic wand, utter the magic words and his previously rag-tag bunch of disparate characters would be under his spell, all individual differences forgotten and a collective, laser-like focus on the task at hand would replace the plethora of petty human disputes that had hitherto been plaguing the collective harmony.
What we might be able to glean from these acrylic-clad preachers – if we can see through the fog of jargon – is that what unites a group is something like shared beliefs. A collective concession to the primacy of some set of super-ordinate principles, a relinquishment of ultimate authority to some higher power.
It is not at all easy to gerrymander the beliefs of people into a panacea of agreed values and behaviours, not easy at all. This is not the type of process that takes place in the team meeting on Monday morning. The meeting where Nick gives another of his pastel-hued PowerPoint presentations, an orgy of bullet-pointed platitudes buttressing the understanding of the ‘stuff’ that Dave talked about at the conference in April. You remember the stuff, right? Come on guys, wakey-wakey, let’s start the week with a bang, yeah?
Once, we believed that the body was a machine, and the secret to optimal performance came from the muscles, the lungs, the heart. Then, we were told that it’s all in our head, and we just need to push through the pain. The truth is that “the brain and the body are fundamentally intertwined,” writes Alex Hutchinson, a fitness journalist (with a doctorate in physics) who competed for the Canadian national team as a runner. To understand the limits of the human body, you have to consider them together.
Hutchinson is the author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, out this month from HarperCollins. In the eight years he worked on the book, he traveled to labs all over the world and spoke to hundreds of athletes and scientists about how the mind and body influence each other and the role that each plays in the “mystery of endurance.”
The Verge spoke with Hutchinson about the dueling theories of endurance, nature versus nurture, and what we can learn from Olympic athletes.
… “I had numerous interviews with the club and eventually was offered the Head of Strength and Conditioning role, and started in early January.”
And it’s been a case of so far so good for a trainer now working with players like Ashley Cole, Giovani dos Santos and Romain Alessandrini.
“My early impressions of the MLS have been excellent,” says Waterson.
“Firstly, the training facilities at the Stubhub are class. Everything is right there in the same precinct. We have access to top quality pitches, gym facilities, recovery facilities and eat meals together in the players room. The players are really well looked after by the Galaxy.”
… In an era in which every world-class athlete seems fixated on personal brand-building and competing for the most Facebook likes and Twitter followers, the Norwegians embrace an altogether different approach to success. It is a contrarian mix of humility, egalitarianism and basic respect — plus sharing an absurd amount of meals over the course of a schedule that has them spending roughly 250 days together every year.
They get along so well and feel so strongly about collegiality that they even share beds sometimes.
“We believe there is no good explanation or justification for why you have to be a jerk to be a good athlete,” Jansrud, the defending Olympic super-G champion, said. “So we just won’t have that kind of thing on our team. You have to get along with everyone.”
NFL teams are about to be bombarded with data that could change the way they scout opponents and evaluate free agents.
The NFL’s Competition Committee recently signed off on a plan to release in-game player-tracking data on every NFL player to all 32 teams, and it’s anticipated the league will begin releasing the data this spring, people with knowledge of the plan told NFL.com on Thursday. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan had not yet been communicated to clubs, which had access to data only on their own players the past two seasons. The plan is to send league-wide data from 2016 and ’17 to every team beginning in mid-April, and teams will receive the league-wide data on a weekly basis during the 2018 season, according to these sources.
While some NFL coaches and scouts remain skeptical of the value, access to league-wide data has “massive scouting potential,” said an analyst for one NFL team that has been using the data. “More new metrics. Understanding if certain fields are slower or faster. Fatigue and injury prevention. Seeing which players are really explosive but maybe don’t make plays because the scheme is bad.”
The Barça Innovation Hub (BIHUB) has taken a big step forward in its mission to become one of Europe’s top innovation platforms. The European Commission recently awarded the facility a Digital Innovation Hub certificate, putting it amongst an exclusive group of just over 400 entities that will actively participate in the European Union’s innovation plans for the coming years.
A Digital Innovation Hub is considered to be a centre for knowledge that offers support to industry, to institutions and to governments in order for them to manage and improve their digital transformation. The BIHUB has formed one such centre, focused on knowledge and investigation into sporting excellence with the mission of helping to transform society.
This certification puts the BIHUB in a privileged position within the European innovation ecosystem, and aids the club’s expansion in this geographical region.
Olympic athletes know that tracking every possible metric can go a long way toward winning the gold. At this year’s games, GE Healthcare has partnered with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to debut a new analytics tool that works to track a variety of different metrics, from vital signs and nutritional data to environmental conditions sport-specific information.
The new platform, known as the Athlete Management Solution (AMS), can also provide imaging scans, venue data, and detailed medical history information on real-time dashboards that can be monitored by medical staff to provide personalized treatment for athletes across the winter games. The goal for GE was to help support athlete health, performance, and safety at the winter games while also providing long-term health and safety improvements for future Olympic games.
“Through digital transformation, the IOC is pursuing its mission of helping to prevent injuries among our world-class athletes,” said Richard Budgett, medical and scientific director for the IOC in a press release. “With 40 sports across the Olympic Games and Olympic Winter Games, each athlete requires unique healthcare monitoring and care. AMS will provide information that helps clinicians personalize training and treatment, so Olympians are best positioned to compete.”
The human body is mostly made from soft materials. Our skin, muscles, and tissue are pliable, but the materials we use to interact with them are often rigid. Catheters, glucose sensors, insulin pumps, and IV tubes are comprised of hard materials that frequently cause discomfort, and in some instances infection. Associate Professor Xuanhe Zhao is hoping to change that.
Proper nutrition is vital for a footballer’s health and performance ─ and this has led to a new UEFA initiative, ‘The 2018 UEFA Football Nutrition Consensus’, to help support players.
The NFL’s leader in tackles for 2017 was not Luke Kuechly or Bobby Wagner, the pair of perennial Pro Bowlers who both can lay claim to being the NFL’s best linebacker.
It was Preston Brown, the Buffalo Bills’ third-round pick in 2014 who enters unrestricted free agency in March having topped the league with 144 tackles this past season — 83 solo and 61 assisted.
Durability has never been a concern for Brown, who said by phone last week that he has only missed four games during his entire football career. But 2017 proved to be a transformative year for Brown, who partly attributes his uptick in production to a decision he made on his own last offseason to shed about 10 pounds and attempt to play faster.
A war is quietly raging inside Major League Soccer. It’s one that could have an enormous effect on the USMNT in both the short and long terms.
On one side stands a band of clubs and executives who remain cognizant of the league’s founding principle of featuring and improving homegrown talent for the benefit of US soccer as a whole. They’re proudly preaching the “play your kids” gospel for both club and country.
On the other, a group tired of dumping millions of dollars into the chaotic world of youth soccer without enough of a clear and obvious return on investment. The millions spent on academies and infrastructure can go to signing players from abroad, they argue, with a more immediate payoff. That’s the quality of the product on MLS fields and the viability of their businesses, most of which still don’t make much profit if any.
New Braves GM Alex Anthopolous had a host of talented young arms when he was the Blue Jays GM. He has that good fortune again … and he’ll be handling them differently.