… Over the last few years, the Dodgers have dabbled with mixing in more of the modern advanced analytics, but still the primary focus of Honeycutt and company appeared to be in game planning and execution.
With Honeycutt stepping back, the 39-year-old Mark Prior took the helm as major league pitching coach for Los Angeles… but he brought company.
Now that company — being the likes of assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness and pitching coordinator Rob Hill — is tasked with getting a successful and establish group of veterans to buy in on the future. However, at least one pitcher seems to be less than ready to acknowledge the new normal.
Jayson Tatum has taken the leap into superstardom in his third season with the Boston Celtics. How did the 22-year-old go from a young, promising talent to an All-Star reserve? The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor breaks it all down by analyzing his offensive and defensive adjustments, while also talking to trainer Drew Hanlen, Celtics general manager Danny Ainge, and even Jayson Tatum himself. [video, 7:38]
… It can be said, without argument, that Phil and Jen Dalhausser have built a beautiful life here. They have two adorable children, Sebastian and Sophia. Between sets, Sophia will run over and give daddy a hug. When Phil asks to see the routine she’s been practicing at dance class, she’ll run back to the grassy area she’s been playing on, giggling the whole way. Sebastian busies himself playing made up games in the sand.
It is a wonderful scene in every way, one they get to enjoy almost every day of the week, and yet, beginning today, there will be small ripples in this glassy smooth life of theirs. Phil will be on the FIVB Tour again, to Doha, to Australia, to Cancun, three straight weeks on the road, in pursuit of one final Olympic Games.
So why, after one of the most remarkable and decorated careers in American beach volleyball, is Phil Dalhausser messing with perfection?
… “Enjoy every moment of it, enjoy the process,” Leonard said in January after scoring 43 points in three quarters in a victory over Cleveland. “Use it as a learning tool when we get down in the trenches.”
After recent wins and losses alike, Leonard’s teammates have indicated that his mindset has registered with them.
“It’s all about getting better,” Patrick Beverley said after the Clippers beat Philadelphia 136-130 on March 1. “Of course you get a lot of criticism when you’re not healthy and you’re not winning the games you’re supposed to win. But our focus has always been long term and Kawhi has definitely helped us seeing the big picture in everything, which is, of course, the trophy.”
… After being drafted in the 37th round by the Yankees as a draft-eligible sophomore last June, Jarvis turned down a substantial bonus offer and decided to return to Duke for his junior year, with the goal of boosting his stock into the top rounds and helping the Blue Devils break through to Omaha after back-to-back super regional appearances. He and his father Kevin, a former 12-year major league pitcher turned scout, mapped out his path meticulously. Instead of taking the traditional route and spending the summer in the Cape Cod League, Jarvis would spend part of the summer working on pitch design at the Driveline facility in Seattle, and part of the summer working on building strength at Cressey Sports Performance in Massachusetts. … He had it all mapped out, and it all sounded great. But it’s still stunning to see first-hand just how dramatically all his hard work paid off, and how huge of a leap Jarvis has made as a junior. …
Lafayette Journal & Courier (IN), Mike Carmin from
Since Justin Lovett worked for the Denver Broncos during a three-year span – rising from the level of an intern to assistant strength and conditioning coach – the desire to work in the NFL never went away.
Lovett is returning to the NFL, accepting a position as the head strength coach for the Los Angeles Rams. Lovett served as Purdue’s director of strength and conditioning the last three seasons under coach Jeff Brohm.
“Just like coach Brohm, I’m competitive and the NFL represents the highest level in our industry,” Lovett said Monday while driving through Iowa en route to California. “I couldn’t look away from that. That level of intensity is something different.”
Rachel Balkovec’s history-making journey to become the first female full-time hitting coach in a major league organization was not an easy one. She said she faced repeated gender discrimination before being hired by the New York Yankees.
But as she looks ahead to the start of her first season, she said all the obstacles she overcame “fortified” her “soul.”
Balkovec, armed with two Masters degrees in human movement science as well as weight lifting and softball experience, had a competitive resume when she began applying for positions. [video, pre-roll + 6:27]
In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair. The study was part of an NIH Clinical Center trial for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy whose seizures cannot be controlled with drugs.
“Memory plays a crucial role in our lives. Just as musical notes are recorded as grooves on a record, it appears that our brains store memories in neural firing patterns that can be replayed over and over again,” said Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and senior author of the study published in Science.
… The biggest players in wearables production continue to work on advanced functionality for the medical market that will not only provide more data on fitness levels, but also determine susceptibility for disease and monitor critical health metrics. It isn’t just about collecting data on individual metrics, though. Wearables need to be able to link up with other devices so it can fuse all of their data, process it and draw conclusions about user health.
A lot of these applications will be huge for disease detection, patient comfort and convenience – hopefully in the near future. With this type of tracking and analysis on a wearable device, it will cut down on invasive testing procedures and frequent visits to the doctor.
Covestro, the Pittsburgh Penguins and Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) College of Engineering will reunite for the third annual Make-a-thon, as they continue to “Rethink the Rink” in a unique collaboration to make hockey safer. With a strong performance record and two innovative concepts already in the net, the Rethink the Rink team is setting up for a hat trick in its third year. The 2020 Make-a-thon will explore a new aspect of hockey innovation – protective padding.
… Here’s how the Football Operations data and analytics team helped propose the Figure 8, with a hat tip to the College Division winners of the 2019 Big Data Bowl.
The 2019 winning paper, “Routes to Success,” was written by four students from Simon Fraser University — Dani Chu, Lucas Wu, Matthew Reyers and James Thomson. Though the original paper tracked the most common wide receiver patterns, the algorithm easily translates to other positions. Last summer, the students worked with the NFL Football Operations team to modify it for defensive linemen.
… Every week they feed data from the previous round of matches into a series of coding scripts and machine-learning models.
Out of the other end comes the success rate for various tactical choices, potential vulnerabilities for each team and the tactical tendencies they tend to fall back on.
These, along with six closely guarded metrics the pair have identified as key to Test success, go into two reports that land on [Eddie] Jones’ desk at Pennyhill Park shortly after the final whistle – one reviewing England’s performance on the weekend just gone and another assessing the opposition to come.
… Liverpool are the only big club in Europe to truly invest in a top-down analytical approach. They moved quickly for one of the best managers (Klopp) in the sport. They’ve acquired perhaps the best attacking trio (Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane) in Premier League history, and all for cut-rate deals. They’ve understood the value of set pieces. They’ve spent big on a top keeper (Alisson) and a top central defender (Virgil van Dijk), and both that keeper and that defender now have a claim to “best in the world” titles at their respective positions. They’ve also unearthed a dominant pair of fullbacks (Trent Alexander-Arnold, Andy Robertson) who have been able to carry a massive creative burden.
What isn’t clear, however, is how the midfield contributes to all of this. They clearly do. You don’t gobble up as many points as this team has over the past two seasons if 30% of your outfield lineup isn’t contributing in some way. But while the rest of the roster is unarguably dotted with world-class players, the picture in the midfield is a little murkier.
A mixed bag but some developments to be excited about. The research track feels more like an ML conference each year. If that is the unavoidable trend, code sharing would be a positive addition
… “When launching a new league with seven, now eight, brand new clubs, naturally there are certain departments that need some time to ramp up and get organized,” Oliver Gage head of recruitment and on-field analysis said to Transfermarkt. “That includes scouting and analysis departments.”
The goal of the system is to identify players around the world that could potentially add quality to the league. But it is also supposed to take an in-depth look at the players within the CPL.
“No,” Gage said when asked if central scouting was created to avoid past mistakes. “The centralized scouting branch of the CPL was created to improve the general recruitment of its clubs on the global market.