You knew it was coming. When Houston acquired Aaron Sanchez from the Blue Jays, changes to his repertoire were bound to follow. By now, the pitching preferences of the Astros organization are well known: throw your best pitch more often and ditch your worst. It’s not as simple as telling pitchers to throw more breaking balls or throw fewer fastballs, though. It’s an individualized pitching strategy based on the strengths and weaknesses of the particular pitcher.
AJC.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Tim Tucker from
… Martin did those jobs around Arlington, Texas, his hometown, for four years in his early 20s after “hanging up my cleats” as a baseball player because of a chronically painful right shoulder. Eventually, he found his way back to baseball and a career that has taken him to multiple teams around the globe — from Grand Prairie (Texas) to Japan to, now, Atlanta.
It’s fair to say that few, if any, players have traveled a stranger, harder path to the Braves than Martin.
“It has brought me to here,” Martin, now 33, said of the journey, “and it has humbled me and definitely (made) me more grateful for baseball.”
… The good news for U.S. tennis is that a new wave of 21-or-under players is emerging to challenge — as well as motivate — those elders. Sofia Kenin is the oldest in this kiddie corps, at age 20. Her peers include Anisimova, 17, and other developing players of the same age: Whitney Osuigwe (a French Open junior champ), Catherine McNally and Hailey Baptiste. And, of course, there’s sensational 15-year-old Cori Gauff.
Martin Blackman, the USTA’s general manager of player development, told ESPN.com: “Every week it seems a different young one is breaking through. These women are used to a high bar set by Venus and Serena. They see themselves at the top and they thrive on the positive peer pressure.”
“You could have looked at Harry Maguire at 16 and said ‘he can’t run,’ because people in England like to find something a player can’t do,” says Travis Binnion, Sheffield United’s former Academy Manager.
The 31-year-old, who left the Blades this summer following a decade’s service for the club, first worked with Manchester United’s new £80m centre-half when he was a gangly 14-year-old.
“Our biggest strength at Sheffield United was that we catered for all types, not just athletes or technicians,” Binnion explains. “It was an individual and personal approach to development. The biggest clubs often get players who are outstanding in all areas, so maybe they don’t have to do that same work.
… The science is clear. And Jack Marucci loves clear science.
Four years ago, Marucci, LSU’s director of athletic training and experimenter-in-chief, began partnering with a sleep doctor to study the effects of rest on football players.
What they found was both obvious and often overlooked: the Tigers needed more rest. Their brains needed it, and their bodies needed it, too.
“The benefits have been well-documented,” Marucci says, “from focus and concentration and mood behavior. The number one thing is, that’s when you release a lot of your growth hormones for body repair and recovery.”
With training camp in full swing, quarterback Marcus Mariota, the first Samoan Heisman Trophy winner, will be the signal caller for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. Alabama Crimson Tide quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, a pre-season favorite to become the second Samoan Heisman winner, is entering his junior year. His younger brother, Taulia, also a quarterback, has joined him at Alabama. One day, Taulia could very well square off against another Samoan, D.J. Uiagalelei, a top-ranked high school quarterback who committed to Clemson in May.
How did American Samoa – a tiny island territory in the Pacific – become a wellspring of football talent?
Samoans have become the most overrepresented group, per capita, in the NFL. About 180,000 people of Samoans descent live stateside, while another 55,000 live in American Samoa, a U.S. territory. Over the past few seasons, roughly 50 players of Samoan descent have been on NFL rosters – about 3% of the league, and nearly 40 times their proportional share of the U.S. population. The 200-plus Samoans playing Division I collegiate football are similarly overrepresented.
Zebra Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: ZBRA), an innovator at the edge of the enterprise with solutions and partners that enable businesses to gain a performance edge, today announced the renewal of its partnership with the NFL, extending Zebra’s role as the League’s Official On-Field Player-Tracking Provider through the 2021 season. This extension builds on the past five seasons during which Zebra has worked with the NFL to successfully implement a best-in-class player and ball tracking system, helping to launch a new era of football data and analytics known as Next Gen Stats.
Wearable human-machine interfaces – devices that can collect and store important health information about the wearer, among other uses – have benefited from advances in electronics, materials and mechanical designs. But current models still can be bulky and uncomfortable, and they can’t always handle multiple functions at one time.
Researchers reported Friday, Aug. 2, the discovery of a multifunctional ultra-thin wearable electronic device that is imperceptible to the wearer.
The device allows the wearer to move naturally and is less noticeable than wearing a Band-Aid, said Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston and lead author for the paper, published as the cover story in Science Advances.
“Everything is very thin, just a few microns thick,” said Yu, who also is a principal investigator at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH. “You will not be able to feel it.”
The Pistons’ return to downtown Detroit in 2017 necessitated the construction of a new practice facility nearer their new home at Little Caesars Arena. It didn’t necessarily have to be the biggest and best the NBA had to offer, but that’s what the Pistons will call home when their new Henry Ford Pistons Performance Center opens in October.
Located about 2 miles north of Little Caesars Arena and a few blocks south of the Fisher Building in Detroit’s New Center area, the Pistons Performance Center will combine all of the best features Pistons front-office executives found in their nationwide canvassing of the latest generation of training facilities – not just the NBA, but a slew of college athletic facilities, as well.
At 185,000 square feet, the PPC is the largest practice center and team headquarters in the NBA and its creature comforts would be mind-boggling to the Chuck Daly-era Bad Boys who practiced at Oakland University or – when it wasn’t available – at Orchard Lake St. Mary’s Dombrowski Fieldhouse.
Imagine you have been asked to define pain by your doctor. They might have asked for a rating on a scale from zero, no pain, to 10, unbearable pain. Or you chose from a selection of faces ranging from happy to tearful. Maybe you answer with your words and gestures. You may have even drawn on a human outline found in your intake paperwork to illustrate the pain’s presence in your body.
Where does it hurt? How do you feel? The enormous number of questions a provider can ask reflects the many variables that are important for treating pain. It also makes clear that communication about pain is difficult for both patients and providers. Pain is subjective and no two experiences are alike. And, a fundamental understanding of what pain actually is has evaded science.
This is despite the establishment of numerous foundations dedicated to its study, like the International Association for the Study of Pain (or IASP), and the fact that nearly 20 percent of the United States is struggling with chronic pain. Pain’s successful escape from our grasp is due, in part, to the fact that laboratory science does not, and may not be able to, actually study pain psychology, beliefs, and expectations in animals.
As a heat wave continues across much of the country this week, the NFL continues its work to further prepare clubs to address heat-related illness. Thanks to the University of Connecticut’s Korey Stringer Institute, the NFL distributed a video to its clubs that reviews best practices for treating exertional heat stroke.
In the video, Dr. Douglas J. Casa, PhD, CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute (KSI) and Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Connecticut, provides step-by-step guidelines designed by KSI to prevent, identify, assess and treat exertional heat stroke – a severe condition characterized by a body temperature above 105 degrees and signs of central nervous system dysfunction.
“It is imperative that medical personnel and coaching staffs quickly recognize [the signs of heat stroke] and initiate appropriate care,” Dr. Casa said.
The latest product launch from legacy sports nutrition brand MusclePharm is called Protein Candies—little gems of protein-packed chocolate reminiscent of Mars’ M&Ms or Nestlé’s Smarties.
… There was a brief moment last season where it looked like the streak might actually be broken. Sacramento was just a game out of the No. 8 seed as late as Feb. 10, but a loss in their final contest prior to the All-Star Game followed by four losses in five games immediately after the break knocked them out of the running. Still, they were right in it for 56 games, which is far longer than anybody thought they’d last.
The challenge, now, is actually building on this (moderate) success. And there’s reason to believe they are better-equipped to do so right now than they have been at any point during this 13-year run of futility. Last year’s Kings had a minutes-weighted age of just 24.3 years old, making them the fourth-youngest team in the league. Among the five teams that had minutes-weighted age south of 25 years old, the Kings had the second-best record, behind only the 54-win Nuggets. The three other teams won 17 (Knicks), 19 (Suns), and 22 games (Bulls).
According to my Wins Above Age-Derived Expectation (WAADE) metric, you would have expected a team with the experience level of the 2018-19 Kings to win only 33.31 games. These Kings won 39, which means they outperformed their expectation by 5.69 wins. That marks the first time their WAADE has been positive during this 13-year stretch.
… Now that we have four and a half years of data at our disposal, we can get a good picture of how exit velocity and launch angle change as a player ages.
Aging curves are a crucial part of projections, affecting our expectations of how the future will come to pass. Setting expectations is the method we as fans use for knowing how we feel about the sport we’re watching. When Ketel Marte all of a sudden becomes an All-Star starter or Mike Trout sits atop the WAR leaderboard again, we know how to feel about it because we’ve set our expectations. Understanding aging in baseball creates more accurate expectations, which helps us feel validated more often but it will also increase the level of surprise we feel when we see the outlier cases on the tails of the distribution.
After a summer in which leading clubs made some clear strategic choices, the 21st Club Intelligence team sat down to discuss what we should be on the lookout for in the 2019-20 season after the summer’s activity.
Omar: Right – 2019-20 has come by quick! Where to start – how about with the transfer market?
Alex: I’ve heard people question ‘is a transfer ban good for Chelsea?’ and it made me think about whether it is possible for a club to change its core philosophy. Chelsea fans are used to short term success with managers, but I wonder if the club can create a more patient fan-base with this change (has this problem ever been solved before?), and it might even be a ‘principle’ others can follow?
Omar: I like the idea of how ‘random’ shocks can totally change a club’s perspective. Southampton, Lyon, Schalke, Feyenoord all became talent factories in part due to financial difficulties. You may get a situation here where fans accept that trading players isn’t the only solution for success, which might then influence decision-making across the club.