… If you’ve checked Guerrero’s Instagram feed this winter, you’ve seen anywhere from one to one thousand clips of Guerrero working on his fitness, an issue that, to his credit, he’s improved significantly. With so much focus on that and Guerrero’s defense, though, as he campaigns to reclaim some of his reps back at third base, it’s taken the spotlight off his bat, which isn’t all that far removed from being considered a generational tool when Guerrero came up as the top prospect in baseball.
As he sought to rediscover himself this winter, Alex Cobb headed for a destination where so many pitchers before him had gone to take their performance to a new level.
The new Angels right-hander went to Driveline, the high-tech baseball factory in Seattle.
Although many pitchers credit work at Driveline with increasing their velocity, Cobb said he was simply looking to rediscover the mechanics from his successful years with the Tampa Bay Rays, before Tommy John surgery and the struggles in Baltimore.
“I still feel like physically I’m capable of doing all those things,” Cobb said before the Angels worked out on Friday morning in Tempe, Ariz. “The ball’s still coming out of my hand well. There really are just some slight mechanical changes that I need to get back to. It just needs to click, and then once it does click, it just needs to be a matter of repeating it.”
Comparing Lionel Messi to anybody else is a futile endeavor. He’s been that dominant for that long. There are only so many ways to say that Messi is the best. But, comparing Messi to himself is a different matter entirely. At 33 years of age it’s not surprising to see that Messi is at least starting to slow down. What is surprising is seeing just how much the way he’s playing has changed.
The important thing about Messi this season, possibly his last at Barcelona, is that he has completely reinvented himself. Messi, more than at any other point in his career has morphed into an out and out gunner. With Luis Suarez gone, teenager Ansu Fati and high-priced shoot-a-holic Philippe Coutinho both injured, it’s been Messi who has taken up the shooting slack. Barcelona have broken out of their deep early season funk by asking Messi to shoot more than he ever has before, and he’s taking them up on that offer.
Ahead of Barcelona’s Champions League round of 16 first leg vs. PSG (streaming on CBS All Access on Tuesday), here are three numbers which fully capture just how differently the new, volume-shooting Lionel Messi is from his former self.
Canadian Running Magazine, Brittany Hambleton from
In our technology-obsessed world, it’s easy for runners to get caught up in the numbers — pace, heart rate, weekly mileage, etc. As we compulsively check our smartwatches and Strava totals, we can sometimes become detached from how our bodies are actually feeling and miss important physical cues that our training needs to be adjusted. For this reason, it is sometimes beneficial to ditch technology and run instead by feel. But how do you control your pace during runs and workouts without a watch? The answer is in your breathing.
The Washington Post, L. Alison Phillips and Jacob Meyer from
… Other people influence your attitudes and emotional responses to exercise. That is, they can affect how you feel about exercising, which is critical for determining whether you do it or not. If you get to know others who exercise regularly, you start to perceive exercise as more positive, common, desirable and doable.
Psychology and exercise researchers like us know that people are influenced by those around them in a few different ways. Knowing other people who lift weights or take a spin class influences your explicit and implicit attitudes — your thoughts and feelings — about exercise.
It also molds what are called social norms — your perceptions about whether other people exercise and if you think you should.
Over the past generation, youth sports in America has become increasingly privatized and exclusionary. Families with resources often move children into club programs costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year, chasing college athletic scholarships and preferential admission to universities. According to research from the Aspen Institute and Utah State University, youth from low-income homes quit sports because of the financial costs at six times the rate of those from high-income homes. This statistic is particularly troubling as research shows physically active children are less likely to be obese, report lower levels of depression, perform better academically, have reduced health risks as adults and become active parents with their own children. Investment in youth sports that serves all children is an upstream solution with long-term benefits.
What we currently lack is equitable youth sports programming that serves children at scale. It’s community-based play made available at low-cost and close to home. It’s Little League Baseball, house basketball leagues at the rec center and learn-to-swim classes at the local pool.
Sun Devil Athletics has partnered with the Global Sport Institute and the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute at ASU to launch a new venture program for small, sports-related startup companies.
The program, called the Sun Devil Athletics’ Venture Challenge, will pair each participating company with a mentor who will then help develop and continue to perfect the company. This process also gives the entrepreneurs access to resources and the opportunity to use their product at Sun Devil Athletics’ facilities. Winners can receive up to $25,000 and there is no set number of winners to be chosen.
In addition to celebrating the extraordinary dynasty of the Carmel High School girls’ swim team and its incredible 35th IHSAA Swimming and Diving Championship it clenched earlier this month, the Carmel Swim Club (CSC) has the impending groundbreaking of a new facility, the Carmel Swim Academy, to look forward to this coming April.
I spoke with head coach/CEO Chris Plumb and CSC Director of Business Development Maggie Mestrich about the new facility, how it will impact the club members and staff and what it will offer the community in the way of noncompetitive programs as a whole.
Major League Baseball has slightly altered the specifications of the baseball heading into spring training and the 2021 season. And veteran manager Joe Maddon hopes the unintended consequences may completely alter the game.
“Funny how the game is called baseball, and actually the baseball holds the key,” Maddon said in an interview.
Without delving too far into the details, a mechanical adjustment in the way the ball is woven has decreased its weight by 1/10th of an ounce, an MLB spokesman said. Scientists have determined that the change alone will result “in a small reduction in the distance of a typical fly ball,” Alan M. Nathan, a renowned professor emeritus of physics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement provided to Sportico.
BBC Science Focus Magazine, Science Focus Podcast from
In the UK, one in four people experience a mental health problem each year. The reality of living with common problems like depression and anxiety is increasingly well-known.
But how much do you actually know about what’s going on in your brain when your mental health suffers? [audio, 46:00]
The Daily Princetonian student newspaper, Wilson Conn from
The Ivy League will not see athletic competition for the entire duration of the 2020-21 academic year, though there may be potential for “local spring competition” if there is a drastic improvement in public health conditions.
It has been nearly a year since the Ivy League last held athletic competition.
… Let’s look at what makes AI superior to humans at solving certain types of problems and how that can inform executives’ approach to the technology. In recent years, AI has trounced the world champions in poker, chess, Jeopardy, and Go. If people are surprised by these victories, they are underestimating how much rote memorization and mathematical logic are needed to win those games. And in the case of poker and chess, they are overestimating the role insight into human behavior plays.
Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, created the Libratus AI, which beat the world’s top poker players. He described his algorithms as mostly probabilistic prediction machines and recognized that studying the behaviors of the AI’s opponents — their feints and “tells” and so on — was not needed to win. By applying game theory and machine learning, Libratus crushed opponents simply by playing the odds. Even in championship poker, understanding the laws of probability is far more important than reading an opponent’s behaviors.
Pop quiz: Which club were Concacaf’s top spenders in the global transfer market in 2020, at least according to FIFA’s official report on the topic?
The answer is Vancouver Whitecaps FC. And while people both inside the club and out have some questions about the global governing body’s calculation methods, it hints at the extent of the roster makeover during CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster’s first year at BC Place, as well as the club’s determination to improve their standing in the MLS Western Conference.
Now the ‘Caps have recruited one of world soccer’s most intriguing analytical minds to make that process more efficient. A year in the making, the hiring of Nikos Overheul as their new director of recruitment caps a significant buildout of VWFC’s scouting department – and a commitment, perhaps, to some of the sport’s most innovative ideas.
… The names and faces driving the analytics movement in the sport are overwhelmingly white and male. When [David] Sparks stepped back and looked, he saw the same picture.
“I think that, going back in time five years, the list would have been smaller and similarly diverse,” he said.
The past 20 years, nothing has reshaped sports at large more than the shift toward quantitative analysis. The standard box score statistics that everyone knows and understands are still there. But the foundation that Bill James laid with sabermetrics in the 1970s became the inspiration for the minds who created the Association for Professional Basketball Research message board at the turn of the century to provide concrete answers for questions that typically came in the form of hot takes.