Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 8/31-9/6

Companies were busy announcing fitness tracking products, attempting to gain a sliver of attention before Apple announces iWatch (expected for Tue) and consumes 100% of the oxygen available for these technologies. The recent reports on new products, and on Apple rumors, is long:

The expectation of health and fitness for athletes goes up as health and fitness norms for the civilian population improve. The ease of use that Apple is known for should up those public health norms which should in turn provide all kinds of interesting data. Assuming the data reaches social scientists, the technical advances should improve the general understanding of incentives and economics for personal health. For individuals norms and incentives reduce to habits, and for professional athletes those habits are eventually going to be quantified and incorporated into the amounts they are paid.

Last week also saw Stats LLC purchase the BSports group from Bloomberg. The BSports baseball analysis software service is probably the best (and most used) of its kind, and it shows what Bloomberg-scale technology development can bring in terms of service quality and polish, something that Stats struggles with. Still, if BSports was making progress with efforts to scale up in non-baseball pro sports, it probably would not have been sold. Besides the baseball service, Stats, which depends heavily on Microsoft for data stores and for its programming infrastructure, gets a BSports sports analysis team that runs mostly on top of Tableau. Closed Source technology stacks (like Microsoft, Tableau) run counter to the Open Source Python-R stack that is becoming the primary education platform for. There’s probably some kind of reckoning that will take place, but the BSports baseball adoption shows that a market exists for turnkey products to provide a lowest common denominator window on sports data. Pro sports teams say things about data and technology to give a sophisticated understanding of technology and where it is headed, but what pro sports teams actually buy or make is actually pretty pedestrian.


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