When Noah Syndergaard went down with a torn lat last April, he took more than just the Mets season down with him. He also scuttled what was to be one of the most interesting experiments in baseball.
We didn’t get to see it, but Syndergaard and the Mets were remaking one of the league’s most dominant pitchers in real time, under the hypothesis that a more diverse pitch mix would make him even better. Syndergaard spent the first two seasons of his career as nearly unhittable, totaling a 2.89 ERA, 2.72 FIP, 1.10 WHIP and 28.5% strikeout rate in 333 2/3 innings. Could he actually get any better than that? Syndergaard and the Mets decided the risk was worth it more than a year ago, but we’re just now getting to see the hypothesis tested in full. It is succeeding, perhaps beyond anything the pitcher and team could have imagined. Call it The Queens Project.
Before getting to the nuts and bolts of the Project, we must first lay out the details of the control phase. Syndergaard arrived in the majors in 2015, armed with arguably the best pure stuff in the league, highlighted by a four-seam fastball that lived in the high-90s. Syndergaard loved his fastball and leaned on it heavily. In 2015, he threw it 37.9% of the time according to Statcast, more than any other pitch in his arsenal. In 2016, when he went to the All-Star Game and pitched to a 2.60 ERA, MLB-leading 2.29 FIP and 1.15 WHIP with a 29.3% strikeout rate, he had the fastball to thank, throwing it a whopping 67.8% of the time that season. Now, that admittedly sounds high to the point that Statcast’s pitch tracking was a bit off. Still, all other tracking services had Syndergaard’s four-seamer comprising an easy plurality of his pitches. No matter the exact percentage, that’s the important takeaway.
… Today was a huge improvement for Farah from his last effort in 2014 where he finished a disappointing eighth. Preparation for this incarnation came with tunnel-vision focus on the marathon, with the track side of his career now finished, which saw him win four long-distance Olympic gold medals.
Leading up to London, he spent three months in Ethiopia training at altitude (10,000 feet). He spoke of how he was chased by wild dogs and had to navigate himself through cattle on occasion, all with that typical beaming Farah smile. It was all geared toward Farah being in a far better place four years on.
The 35-year-old showed huge promise, but he was still left lamenting confusion over the drinks stations. “The staff were helpful at the end, but at the beginning, they were trying to take a picture rather than giving me the drink,” Farah said. “I was saying to the people on motorbikes to tell the staff to be a bit helpful. I wasn’t wasting energy; I just needed a drink. I had to get it right.”
College football fans may recognize Trevor Moawad from the multiple top programs who have subscribed to his mental conditioning methods. Now Moawad is setting up former college stars for the pros on ESPN’s new QB2QB show, hosted by Russell Wilson.
Many coaches’ offices look out at their programs’ football stadium. Some overlook their practice fields. The head coach’s office at Nebraska looks down into the Cornhuskers’ 20,000-square-foot weight room.
“Everything we did started in there,” Scott Frost says.
The Huskers’ new head coach, who returns to Lincoln 20 years after he quarterbacked Nebraska to a national title, wasn’t the one who laid out the football offices this way, but it is an ideal vantage point for him to oversee the project he is undertaking now. After all, Nebraska’s football dynasty was built on Husker Power.
This study investigated the level of creativity of goals scored in football. Therefore, all goals in the Football FIFA World Cup 2010 and 2014, as well as the Football UEFA Euro 2016 were qualitatively examined. Three Football experts evaluated the last eight actions before each goal using a creativity scale ranging from 0 to 10 (0 = not creative, 10 = highly creative) of all goals scored via open play (311 goals in 153 matches). Level of creativity was revealed using an Analysis of Variance and the frquency of high highly creative goals using a Kruskall- Wallis Test. The results showed that the closer the actions to a goal, the more creative they were evaluated. Teams that advanced to the later rounds of the tournament demonstrated greater creativity than teams that failed to do so. High creativity in the last two actions before the actual shot on goal proved to be the best predictor for game success. In conclusion, this study is the first one to show that creativity seems to be a factor for success in high level football. Thereby it provides an empirical basis for the ongoing debate on the importance of creativity training in football.
BEFORE Christmas, Bournemouth gave each of their players a present: a sleep pack, containing a pair of amber-lensed glasses, an eye mask and a small torch.
The players takes the packs wherever they rest their heads, which is often a hotel room in a faraway town. Head of medical services Dr Craig Roberts even remembers an anxious player rushing over to him in a hotel lobby on the eve of one Premier League game.
“He said, ‘oh no, I’ve forgotten my pack, I won’t be able to sleep,’” the South African remembers. “I gave him a spare and was able to say, ‘it’s ok, you’ll be alright.’ That shows they have bought into it and seen the benefits.”
Fulham Academy Director Huw Jennings says England’s young players are technically better than ever and have left Germany trailing.
Jennings is one of the most experienced and respected figures in English Academy football. He was in charge of Southampton’s youth from 2001 to 2006, working with the likes of Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott and Adam Lallana.
Jennings then became Youth Development Manager at the Premier League for two years, before joining Fulham in 2008. During his time at the west London club he has brought through a host of players from Academy to first team, including Championship player of the season Ryan Sessegnon.
“Dare I say, England’s youth is improving and has gone past Germany’s,” Jennings told BBC 5 Live. “We have never seen the standard of technical performance that now exists.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Beckie Supiano from
Introductory courses can open doors for students, helping them not only discover a love for a subject area that can blossom into their major but also feel more connected to their campus.
But on many campuses, teaching introductory courses typically falls to less-experienced instructors. Sometimes the task is assigned to instructors whose very connection to the college is tenuous. A growing body of evidence suggests that this tension could have negative consequences for students.
Two papers presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting in New York on Sunday support this idea.
Garmin has launched Connect IQ 3.0 along with a host of new apps. Announced at its second Developer Summit, the update enables even more functionality across its line of smart-watches and bike computers,
The Connect IQ platform launched some three years ago. Since then, more than 54 million apps were downloaded to more than eight million compatible devices. With a bit of coding knowledge, anyone can use the open platform to create watch faces, customised data fields, widgets and apps.
Connect IQ 3.0 opens up Garmin’s audio player platform, enabling developers to integrate music, podcast, audio books and more into compatible Garmin devices. This was to be expected as the company has recently launched the Forerunner 645 Music, its first sports-watch with offline storage of tunes. The update also makes it easier to take advantage of notification features and allows developers to integrate maps into their apps.
A better understanding of how sports injuries occur in order to improve their prevention is needed for medical, economic, scientific and sports success reasons. This narrative review aims to explain the mechanisms that underlie the occurrence of sports injuries, and an innovative approach for their prevention on the basis of complex dynamic systems approach. First, we explain the multilevel organisation of living systems and how function of the musculoskeletal system may be impaired. Second, we use both, a constraints approach and a connectivity hypothesis to explain why and how the susceptibility to sports injuries may suddenly increase. Constraints acting at multiple levels and timescales replace the static and linear concept of risk factors, and the connectivity hypothesis brings an understanding of how the accumulation of microinjuries creates a macroscopic non-linear effect, that is, how a common motor action may trigger a severe injury. Finally, a recap of practical examples and challenges for the future illustrates how the complex dynamic systems standpoint, changing the way of thinking about sports injuries, offers innovative ideas for improving sports injury prevention.
Male and female elite athletes had a similar high return to competitive sports after hip arthroscopy, according to research findings.
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“Interestingly, we looked at the ability to return to same level; the longer symptoms preoperatively tended to be in athletes that were not able to get back to the same level,” Marc R. Safran, MD, said when he presented the results at a meeting. “Those who returned to the same level had a shorter duration of symptoms preoperatively compared with those who returned to sports, but not at the same level, and compared to those who were unable to return to sports.”
EurekAlert! Science News, University of Waterloo from
The greasy food being served at hockey rinks isn’t really what young hockey players want, according to a study from the University of Waterloo.
The study of 25 travel team players aged 11-15 found they were more motivated by performance, recovery and marketing when making food choices – values that typically aren’t represented with the unhealthy food currently served at arenas.
“The perceptions these players place around the value of healthy food choices for performance and post-exercise recovery could be leveraged to influence change,” said Susan Caswell, a PhD candidate at Waterloo and author of the study. “This has implications for policies and processes relating to player training and food retail and media environments.”
University of Colorado Boulder, CU Boulder Today from
Older adults who take a novel antioxidant that specifically targets cellular powerhouses, or mitochondria, see aging of their blood vessels reverse by the equivalent of 15 to 20 years within six weeks, according to new CU Boulder research.
The study, published this week in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting pharmaceutical-grade nutritional supplements, or nutraceuticals, could play an important role in preventing heart disease—the nation’s No. 1 killer. It also resurrects the notion that oral antioxidants, which have been broadly dismissed as ineffective in recent years, could reap measurable health benefits if properly targeted, the authors say.
“This is the first clinical trial to assess the impact of a mitochondrial-specific antioxidant on vascular function in humans,” said lead author Matthew Rossman, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of integrative physiology. “It suggests that therapies like this may hold real promise for reducing the risk of age-related cardiovascular disease.”
Football matches are a prime example of a complex system that changes dynamically throughout the 90 minutes of play. One team can dominate the match for a given period of time, controlling possession and playing in the opposition’s half of the pitch. But this domination of possession and territory is rarely constant for the entirety of the match, and is a fragile domination that often leaves the team vulnerable to counter-attacks by the opposition.
That is the reason why we have developed an Attacking Momentum plot that illustrates the dynamic flow of a match. The X Axis represents the time in the match, while Y Axis represents the direction in which each team is attacking. In the example below Manchester City are attacking towards the top of the chart and United towards the bottom, and the line in the middle being the half-way line. The coloured spikes represent where the team’s chain of possession ended on the length of the pitch, narrower peaks represent short chains of possession and similarly wider ones represent longer chains. The circles in the chart indicate shots by the team with the smaller coloured indicator circles indication whether the shot was on-target (green), off-target (red), hit the woodwork (yellow) and a star indicating that a goal was scored.
“I’m not sure you would get fired quite so quickly as a banker or trader,” says Michael Jolley. “Football’s definitely more insecure. In football you can walk into a situation where there are lots of constraints and lots of problems and be judged very quickly, and out of a job very quickly.”
Jolley is uniquely well-placed to compare two of the most cut-throat industries: football management and the trading floor. A former fixed-income trader, who worked in London and New York for HSBC, he is now Grimsby Town manager, charged with ensuring their safety in League Two; with three games left, that is not yet assured.
Such a responsibility would traditionally fall to a gnarled ‘proper football man’. Jolley is not one of those. Though an ardent fan all his life, he never played professionally. Instead, he studied economics at Cambridge University before moving into the city.