… At age 29, he is in indisputable, steady decline. The Mets cut Harvey because his once-fearsome fastball became the almost exact definition of a mediocre fastball (MLB averages: 92.7 mph, 2,261 rpm). Because he couldn’t find another way to get hitters out, because he could not change his mechanics and because he could not buy into the bullpen, the Mets could not keep sending out to the mound as a starter.
The decline in his stuff was obvious. And there was no way his fastball was coming back with the way he throws.
Harvey pulls the ball far behind him—crossing the airspace over the rubber, a strenuous maneuver that rarely leads to long careers.
“My dad taught me,” Harvey once told me about his signature arm swing, referring to Ed Harvey, a well-regarded high school baseball coach in Connecticut. “He said bring it down, show it to second base and then go.”
The pushback arm swing, the “showing” of the ball to second base, and the way he raised the ball high and far from his head helped Harvey gain velocity, but over time those maneuvers also strained his arm. I wrote just the other day that Harvey’s “forearm flyout” way of throwing would not allow him to regain his good fastball.
Saturday afternoon, Sidney Crosby walked on skates from the practice ice into the cramped visiting locker room at Capital One Arena and placed his black CCM stick into a rack, jiggling it until it fit. He navigated a horde of notebooks and cameras in front of his locker, sat down and pulled on a black Pittsburgh Penguins cap. At the end of a brief media scrum, a question — one he was perhaps more qualified to answer than anyone on the planet — made Crosby pause: Did he believe hockey instinct could be honed through repetition?
“Mmm,” Crosby said. “Maybe.”
He mulled his answer, a clue to how one of the greatest hockey players ever views the game. Crosby, 30, is playing at his highest level in these Stanley Cup playoffs, having recorded seven goals and eight assists in eight games, controlling games either through muscular stickhandling or planting himself in front of the net. All four Penguins goals in their second-round series against the Washington Capitals, which heads to Pittsburgh on Tuesday night tied at 1, have come with Crosby on the ice. If the Penguins win a third straight Stanley Cup — a distinction no team has earned since the New York Islanders captured their fourth consecutive title 35 years ago — Crosby will again be the engine.
… This is the most talented team Holgorsen has had since he took over in 2011 as West Virginia’s head coach. Alabama or Clemson or Ohio State may deal with this every year, but most college football programs don’t routinely have this many veteran players with shots at the NFL. That’s why Hammond, West Virginia’s associate athletic director for football, approached Holgorsen earlier this year with an idea. Having this many good fourth- and fifth-year players means West Virginia might have a special season, but those players will be subject to some unique stressors during the next year. Other college students attend professional development seminars to help prepare them to enter the workforce in their chosen fields. Why not create a such a seminar for aspiring professional football players?
So Hammond and Holgorsen designed a curriculum. They would put their players in front of experts who could offer advice on how to best handle a year of their lives that—if handled correctly—could pay dividends for generations or—if handled incorrectly—could be a golden opportunity squandered. They would address big-picture issues such as the draft process, what agents do and how they recruit, leadership and financial planning. They also would address less obvious ones such as dressing for success and learning how to travel like a professional.
That’s how quarterback Will Grier, linebacker David Long and seven of their teammates wound up in Atlanta five days before this year’s draft learning how NFL teams will comb through their lives prior to next year’s draft.
… To some extent, I’m inclined to say that we haven’t actually made many significant practical advances in training data since 1970. Things like heart rate monitors and power meters may be helpful for beginning exercisers who haven’t yet internalized the feeling of different training zones. Elite athletes with high-tech monitoring and sophisticated scientific teams helping them interpret their data may be able to extract some useful insights. But is there any mass-market tool that offers useful and accessible training insights to enthusiastic but nonprofessional endurance athletes?
The most promising candidate I could come up with is heart rate variability (HRV), a formerly arcane measure of how regularly your heart beats that is now easily accessible to recreational athletes. If your heart is beating 60 times per minute, that doesn’t mean there’s exactly one second between each beat. Sometimes it’s 0.99, sometimes it’s 1.01, and so on. That variation in the interval between beats tells us something about balance between the sympathetic (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest and recover”) branches of your nervous system. In a nutshell, higher variability is a sign of parasympathetic drive, indicating that you’re more recovered, while lower variability corresponds to sympathetic drive, a sign that your body is still under stress.
San Francisco Giants mental performance coach and former all-star pitcher Bob Tewksbury explains the mental side of baseball and why a record 27 of the 30 MLB clubs employ a mental skills coach this season.
It’s often said that experience is the best teacher, but the experiences of other people may be even better. If you saw a friend get chased by a neighborhood dog, for instance, you would learn to stay away from the dog without having to undergo that experience yourself.
This kind of learning, known as observational learning, offers a major evolutionary advantage, says Kay Tye, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
“So much of what we learn day-to-day is through observation,” she says. “Especially for something that is going to potentially hurt or kill you, you could imagine that the cost of learning it firsthand is very high. The ability to learn it through observation is extremely adaptive, and gives a major advantage for survival.”
Tye and her colleagues at MIT have now identified the brain circuit that is required for this kind of learning. This circuit, which is distinct from the brain network used to learn from firsthand experiences, relies on input from a part of the brain responsible for interpreting social cues.
Even though injury is common in elite sports, there is still a lack of knowledge of young athletes’ injury perception both during and after injury. The aim of this mixed-method study was, therefore, to explore, in-depth, data on injury consequences and adolescent elite athletes’ perceptions and experience of injury. Three hundred and forty adolescent elite athletes (age range 15–19), from 16 different sports, were bi-weekly monitored over 52 weeks using a valid questionnaire. Twenty athletes from the same cohort were interviewed in focus groups about injury experience and perceptions. The results show that the average bi-weekly prevalence of injury was 38.7% (95% CI 37.3–40.1), with 30.0% (n = 102) of the athletes injured for more than half of all reporting times. An overarching theme from the focus groups highlighted the risk among young athletes of a loss of identity while injured. The findings support several suggestions that may improve the rehabilitation process and enhance rehabilitation outcomes: (a) provide clear pathways to the medical team, (b) recognize the identity loss, (c) involve the injured athletes with the rest of the teammates and (d) educate athletes about how to interpret pain signals. Future research should explore and evaluate the effectiveness and generalization of such interventions. [full text]
Aiming to break into the smart wearable space, ambiotex is an intelligent sports shirt that utilises special components/sensors through which the athlete is able to capture his or her performance parameters and activities. ambiotex consists of a shirt with ECG sensors, a TechUnit and an app that runs on a smartphone.
The German-based company notes that ‘Using ambiotex, you can train like a professional athlete and generate your personal performance tests regularly, cost-effectively and without blood.’
Measuring vital performance parameters also reportedly works when the sensors are in a dry condition. This means that even when the wearer is not sweating, data can be measured.
The VeloNews Fast Talk podcast is your source for the best advice and most interesting insight on what it takes to become a better cyclist. Listen in as VeloNews managing editor Chris Case and our resident physiologist and coach, Trevor Connor, discuss a range of topics, including training, physiology, technology, nutrition, and more.
This episode is all about data. Not long ago, people looked at you funny if you had a two-inch screen mounted to your handlebars. Now, we ride with head units the size of iPhones, sensors connected to our limbs, and wearables that track our every step and heartbeat. No one bats an eyelash. [audio, 1:09:05]
Princeton CITP, Freedom to Tinker blog, Julia Stoyanovich and Bill Howe from
In this post, Julia Stoyanovich and Bill Howe discuss their recent technical progress on bringing the idea of Ranking Facts to life, placing the nutritional label metaphor in the broader context of the ongoing algorithmic accountability and transparency debate.
NFL teams leave no stone unturned when it comes to scouting top players for the draft. They scour college tapes, career statistics, physical attributes, intelligence tests, personality traits, social media accounts and school transcripts. By the time draft day arrives, NFL teams know if a player ever stepped out of line in middle school. But there’s one very obvious piece of information that teams seem to be changing their tunes on before choosing the players who can make or break a franchise: their birth certificates.
In last week’s NFL draft, teams seemed to be saying “younger is better” when it came to the top picks. Seventeen of the 32 players selected in the first round will be age 21 or younger on Sept. 1 — about when their rookie season will begin. This is the highest number this century.1 And it’s not a one-year fluke based on this draft’s talent pool: It’s the continuation of a trend.
New software designed by Rice University students working in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) can provide automated sports analytics in an hour.
The software, Cherrypick, was designed by James Grinage, Connor Heggie, Rebecca Lee, Victor Gonzalez, Sachin Jain and Betty Huang as part of their senior engineering design course. The software is the first kind capable of automatically analyzing volleyball matches and providing analytics. It allows coaches to record a game, upload video and receive statistics from the game within an hour. Cherrypick is powered by machine learning and computer vision algorithms developed by the team and is the first software capable of delivering game statistics in an hour.
“Cherrypick will automatically go through the game and extract the important statistical information and tie it directly to the video,” said Grinage, a Duncan College senior majoring in electrical engineering. “Coaches can then easily go through the video and know when different plays took place and who was responsible for specific plays.”
“Ball! Ball! Ball!” a chorus of players screamed inside the University of Southern California’s Galen Center, where the Los Angeles Sparks were holding training camp. The gym was filled with W.N.B.A. stars like Candace Parker, Odyssey Sims and Alana Beard, but the voices ringing out loudest were the rookies competing for a spot on the team.
Winning a spot will be no easy feat with the Sparks coming off back-to-back W.N.B.A. finals appearances.
Shakayla Thomas, who was the team’s second-round pick in last month’s draft, is one of those rookies. A star at Florida State, she is not guaranteed a roster spot despite being drafted, and she could be packing her bags in a matter of days.
“If you played basketball, I’m pretty sure it’s your dream to go to the league,” Thomas said after practice, adding that she planned to “absorb what I can and if it doesn’t work out I’m pretty sure I have a basketball career somewhere else.”
The reality for many rookies competing in W.N.B.A. training camps is that they will have to look overseas to try to continue their basketball careers.
Dan Haren sits back in his office chair and opens a program on his computer. On the screen is an image of a hitter. Next to him are hot zones and cold zones accompanied by dropdown menus and situational stats. Haren toggles through them quickly. He is in his element.
He’s looking for an area of the strike zone where a Diamondbacks pitcher can throw a fastball to a particular hitter. He’s having no luck.
“This is ridiculous,” he said, asking that the names of the hitter and pitcher not be revealed. “Most hitters are not like this. He’s basically going to have to flood him with curveballs.”
A decade ago, Haren authored two of the better seasons by a Diamondbacks starting pitcher in club history. He’s now a behind-the-scenes reason why the team’s rotation ranks among the best in baseball since the start of last season.
Derby County go into their final league game of the season on Sunday knowing it could be win or bust.
Victory at Pride Park against relegation-threatened Barnsley assures them of a place in the Championship play-offs; defeat could see them finish as low as eighth.
As ever, Rams manager Gary Rowett will be in the spotlight in the home technical area, but backing him up will be a tactical surveillance network most fans don’t get to see and know little about.
High up in the gantry, an analyst will be filming the match with a bird’s eye view. Six other cameras will be dotted around the stadium, capturing the action from a variety of angles. All this footage will be fed back to an analysis suite in the tunnel, just a few strides away from the maelstrom on the pitch.
In there you’ll find Joe Carnall, Derby’s Head of Tactical Analysis, coding clips, analysing action and feeding back to the coaches on the bench. At various points during the game, one of those coaches will dash down the tunnel to consult Carnall in this surveillance centre.