… Lue brought up James’ 37.6 minutes-per-game average, which had him tied entering Tuesday with Toronto’s Kyle Lowry for the league lead.
“I still got 0.4 minutes leeway,” Lue said, referencing a conversation he had with James early in the season when the coach and four-time MVP said they would target 36-38 minutes for him this season. “I’m keeping that in my back pocket.”
At the sound of his coach referencing his minutes and his machine-like body, James — feet plunged in a bucket of ice with green cellophane holding ice packs in place on his back and both knees — leaned back in his folding chair and knocked his knuckles against the wooden locker façade behind him.
… “I will tell people in conversation all the time the wrong day of the week,” Lakers Coach Luke Walton said. “‘Well, today’s Tuesday, why don’t we just do it Wednesday, Thursday or whatever.’ They’ll be like, ‘Luke, are you serious? Today’s Thursday.’ ”
NFL weeks have a rhythm — most teams have Tuesdays off and make Wednesday the official first day of a game week, Saturday is for travel and Sunday is game day. When baseball teams travel, they spend several days in a city.
Basketball has no such rhythm. Games can be scheduled on any day of the week, and teams practice whenever they can. Preparation for one game blends into the next.
… I’ve made my peace with this. Placido Polanco, a player born on the exact same day as me, Oct. 10, 1975, finally retired last August. There are currently four Major League Baseball players older than me. That number gets smaller every year. Eventually there will be none. I guess then I’ll just have to break into the big leagues myself.
Thus, it’s time to do our annual look at the 10 oldest players in Major League Baseball. If you’re younger than anyone on this list, well, there’s still time: You’re still old, but you can still see a couple of these players and pretend.
National Basketball Players Association, Jared Zwerling from
… What’s helped Gasol become a key playmaker on the perimeter, with his legs under him for longer shooting and his mobility to attack the basket, has been maintaining his lower weight. He’s had a tough time with that since he’s been 18 years old, but fish and vegetables (the latter making up 60 percent of his diet), and working with a nutritionist, has helped him drop to eight percent body fat.
“I’m trying to get to even lower if I can,” he said, “but now I’m in a good place.”
His slimmer frame has also enabled him to become an emerging force in the fashion game.
One of the biggest topics in elite running in recent years has been the quest to break two hours in the marathon. Here’s what you need to know about the chase.
In December last year, Nike unveiled Breaking2, an innovation moonshot to deliver the first two-hour marathon barrier.
To make it happen, Nike assembled a diverse team of world-class innovators who are bringing this bold vision to life. Together, they offer an unrivaled combination of expertise. They are engineers and designers; biomechanists and nutritionists; physiologists and materials developers — all working together to help Eliud Kipchoge, Lelisa Desisa and Zersenay Tadese get the most out of every stride.
For more than a century, biologists have been studying sleep. And over the decades, interesting findings have piled up: Sleep deprivation, we now know, can be lethal. Sleep pressure — the need for sleep — increases the longer you’re awake. In humans and other mammals, sleep is very recognizable in readings of brain activity. Early on, the squiggling line of an EEG readout starts to form kinks called sleep spindles, unfurling across the glowing screens inside sleep labs.
But for all these meticulous observations, the molecular machinery behind our nightly departure from consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries in modern biology. “On a mechanistic level,” said Amita Sehgal, a chronobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has pioneered the study of sleep using fruit flies, “we don’t know what’s happening to make us sleepy.” Biologists have mutated thousands of lab organisms like flies, picked out those with sleep abnormalities, and studied their genes, as well as those of people with sleep disorders. The idea is that if we can identify which genes are disrupted — what is making people fall asleep at their desks, or what makes flies too snoozy to mate — we’ll be closer to understanding why we get sleepy and what, on the molecular level, sleep consists of.
Now, a team of researchers in Japan and Texas have unveiled the first results of a colossal experiment that takes this approach with mice, on a scale never seen before: Over the course of several years, the team mutated the genes of thousands of mice, hooked them up to brain wave monitors and watched them sleep.
… The topic, in that moment, was actually Miguel Montero, the veteran catcher who lost his job last year to a rookie, Willson Contreras. But it’s an apt metaphor for the one-word message Maddon wants to sear into the minds of his returning champions: uncomfortable.
“What I like about that motto is you have to find a way to be comfortable within an uncomfortable position,” starter Jake Arrieta said. “We had a lot of uncomfortable situations last year, and we were able to persevere and get through and come out ahead.”
Last season, to be sure, was a wonderful process for the Cubs, who hoisted more than a couple of beers after their thrilling victory over the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the World Series. For the first time in 108 years, everybody is happy in Wrigleyville and beyond.
… In a recent article, psychologists Peter Rentfrow and Markus Jokela argue that they can tell a great deal about your personality if they just know your postal code. These researchers are working in a new field called geographical psychology, which studies the ways that psychological phenomena are spatially organized. As it turns out, environments have great effects on individual characteristics. But at the same time, the people actively shape the environments they live in.
Rentfrow and Jokela identify three processes that lead to a clustering of personality types in specific locations. The first process is social influence, which refers to the various ways that people shape each other’s thoughts and behaviors as they interact. Even if you barely talk to your neighbors, they’ve still communicated to you a whole list of expectations, and you know full well what those are. That lawn ornament you inherited from your grandmother? Not in this neighborhood! And maybe you should take better care of the yard. “The grass is looking a bit brown,” mutters the old man next door as he meets you by the mailbox. The neighborhood you live in can affect your attitudes on a variety of moral, political, and social issues.
… I certainly don’t enjoy being told that I’m wrong. And it seems that I’m not alone. A recently published working paper from Paul Green and Francesca Gino of Harvard, and Bradley Staats of the University of North Carolina, caught people in the act of avoiding criticism. The particular kind of criticism that interested the researchers was where I think I’m doing a good job, and then you tell me that I’m not. (In the jargon, this is “disconfirmatory feedback”.)
Green, Gino and Staats looked at data from an internal peer feedback process in a medium-sized company over several years. They were able to show that when disconfirmatory feedback arrived, workers would then avoid contact with the people who had given them the unwelcome comments. This is the exact opposite of my professor friend’s behaviour — but, I think, a much more typical response. We don’t like it when people tell us that we’re failing.
The irony is that disconfirmatory feedback is the most useful kind of feedback imaginable.
A Boston-based startup called Gamalon has developed technology that lets computers do this in some situations, and it is releasing two products Tuesday based on the approach.
If the underlying technique can be applied to many other tasks, then it could have a big impact. The ability to learn from less data could let robots explore and understand new environments very quickly, or allow computers to learn about your preferences without sharing your data.
Back in 2011, Posner et al. published a descriptive study called “Epidemiology of Major League Baseball Injuries”. The researchers reviewed all the injuries reported in MLB from 2002 to 2008 and classified them based on anatomical region. As expected, there was a lot of disabled list time attributed to injuries to shoulders, elbows, hamstrings, low backs, hands, and wrists – and a host of other maladies.
Interestingly, “illness” accounted for 1.1% of all “injuries.” No big deal, right? Players get the flu, food poisoning, and the occasional migraine, so this is actually surprisingly low.
Actually, it’s a very misleading number. You see, as the study authors point out in their “methods” section, “We utilized data only for those injuries that resulted in a player being placed on the disabled list.”
… The theory is that taking away the lowest of low strikes will reduce strikeouts and create more hittable pitches. Of course, it could also create longer counts and more walks or some other unintended consequences. The point is that MLB knows it has a pace of action problem—a problem that is growing—that does not position the game well to its next generation of fans in a crowded entertainment marketplace.
I’ve been telling you in recent years how relief pitching is suffocating baseball. More and more pitchers throwing harder and harder is a brutally efficient run prevention methodology that works. The inventory of power arms only grows. That’s because throwing a baseball is a very specific skill with few variables. It’s perfect for today’s hyper-focused society. We are applying professional training methods to the amateur market—successfully, and at younger ages. Hitting, on the other hand, is a complex read-and-react skill that involves far more variables. The training gap will only grow.
The raising of the strike zone is nothing but a small, interim step—baseball’s typical rate of change—to modernize the game.
… Often, young MLS players are forced to negotiate twice to get a raise in salary. The player agrees to a contract with their club first, which is subsequently sent to be approved (or not) by MLS. In the end, the league itself is the supreme decision maker when it comes to valuing players. Domestic leagues investing in domestic talent appears to be a modest yet lucrative proposal, but Warren Buffet would be amazed at all of the investment potential in the underpaid domestic talent in Major League Soccer.
It’s understandable which direction the young homegrown talent usually chooses in these scenarios. Players want to go get paid true market value for their craft while enjoying an alternative experience abroad. One only needs to look at the case of Jorge Villafana. The market came knocking on his door and Villafana ended up substantially increasing his salary from his MLS reported $135,000. Now, if Villafana decides he wants to come back to Major League Soccer, his price tag will have compounded. Rather than paying the player his fair market value, the league is now forced, by the market, to pay a premium price for a slightly upgraded (or downgraded) product. The league would thus be offsetting massive long-term costs by incurring relatively small increases in upfront costs. This doesn’t reinvent or revolutionize the salary cap format by any standards (which is a topic of discussion all its own), but, rather, rethinks its investment strategy. Thus, in creating a viable, sustainable model any company or league could establish a continual economy in its infancy.
It is at times such as these when Eddie Howe benefits from a sense of perspective. Bournemouth, ninth at the turn of the year, suddenly hover precariously above a six-club free-for-all at the foot of the Premier League, their confidence on the wane after a solitary win in eight games, defensive options decimated, and Gabriel Jesus, Leroy Sané and, if necessary, Sergio Agüero to be unleashed upon them at the Vitality Stadium on Monday. If that were not bad enough, Manchester City have scored 13 times in these sides’ three meetings in the top flight.
As scenarios go, this all feels ominous. Yet Howe can always point to having emerged from worse. Even at a club forever seeking to progress, there are occasions when reminders of the darker days before their sprint up through the divisions are opportune. “When I look back to the League Two days, they couldn’t have been bleaker,” offered the manager. “Then, going for promotion in League One, we lost five in a row and everyone thought we were going to sink back into oblivion.” He acknowledged the “heavy blows” suffered with early-season thrashings at Watford and Huddersfield as his players adjusted to life in the second tier, “so we’ve been in trickier situations than this, believe me”.
Eddie Howe makes clear desire to sign Jack Wilshere on permanent deal
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The difference now, of course, is heightened expectation after five years of ascent, and the sense of crisis whipped up from the outside at any hint of a stumble.