Gerrit Cole has been the best pitcher in baseball during the young 2018 season. Through six starts, the newest member of the Houston Astros rotation is averaging almost seven innings a start and has a 1.73 ERA and the lowest FIP (1.92) among qualified starters in the American League. Cole leads all starters in DRA, the more sophisticated ERA estimator from Baseball Prospectus, with a 1.30 mark. Unsurprisingly, both BP and FanGraphs rate Cole at around 1.8 wins above replacement, also tops among starting pitchers. Perhaps most impressively, Cole, whose strikeout numbers have never quite matched his stuff, is leading MLB in both strikeouts and K%.
While the 27-year-old Californian is pleased with his performance to date, he doesn’t want to dwell on it, preferring to focus on the more than 80 percent of the season that remains.
“It’s kind of like spring training,” Cole said. “If you have a bad spring training, you’re like, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter.’ If you have a good spring training, you’re like, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter,’ but it feels a whole lot better than getting your ass whacked for three weeks.”
… What would you have thought of your NBA career if you had not come back?
It’s professional sports. I made it. My mind was like, ‘Mek, you didn’t accomplish everything you wanted to accomplish, but at the end of the day you made it. Anybody would switch positions with you in a heartbeat.’ There was that rational side of my brain. And then there was the competitive side that says, ‘Hey, Mek, you haven’t done X, Y and Z. And because you haven’t done X, Y and Z, you have to try. And if you try and fail, that is OK. But not trying, that is not going to cut it.
How much did injuries hurt your career?
Who is to say? In professional sports, you can’t look at it like that. There are so many stories in sports like that. Injuries are part of the game. Things happen. You have to just roll with that.
I got injured later in my career. I am back here trying to make the most of it, trying to put my stamp.
In mid-May, New York Times contributing writer Zach Schonbrun released a book called The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius. The book — which, as promised, provides an interesting, science-heavy look at the role the brain plays in athletics — is available just about everywhere and in every possible format.
Recently, Schonbrun took some time to talk to us about the book, how neuroscience is being applied in baseball, and why he can no longer view sports the same way.
BJSM blog, Ashokan Arumugam and Kavitha Vishal from
Hamstring strain injuries (HSI) are common among sportspeople participating in high-speed running and sporting manoeuvres causing excessive stretching of the hamstrings (e.g. slide tackling or kicking a ball). The chances for HSI exist in the terminal swing phase of high-speed running3 owing to eccentric loading and lengthening of the hamstrings. Therefore, hamstring strengthening using an eccentric loading exercise, such as the Nordic hamstring exercise (NHE), has been recommended to prevent HSI.
Participation in soccer match-play leads to acute and transient subjective, biochemical, metabolic and physical disturbances in players over subsequent hours and days. Inadequate time for rest and regeneration between matches can expose players to the risk of training and competing whilst not entirely recovered. In professional soccer, contemporary competitive schedules can require teams to compete in excess of 60 matches over the course of the season with periods of fixture congestion occurring, prompting much attention from researchers and practitioners to the monitoring of fatigue and readiness to play. A comprehensive body of research has investigated post-match acute and residual fatigue responses. Yet the relevance of the research for professional soccer contexts is debatable, notably in relation to the study populations and designs employed. Monitoring can indeed be invasive, expensive, time inefficient, and difficult to perform routinely and simultaneously in a large squad of regularly competing players. Uncertainty also exists regarding the meaningfulness and interpretation of changes in fatigue response values and their functional relevance, and practical applicability in the field. The real-world need and cost–benefit of monitoring must be carefully weighed up. In relation to professional soccer contexts, this opinion paper intends to (1) debate the need for post-match fatigue monitoring; (2) critique the real-world relevance of the current research literature; (3) discuss the practical burden relating to measurement tools and protocols, and the collection, interpretation and application of data in the field; and (4) propose future research perspectives. [full text]
Melatonin is a supplement that’s supposed to help you sleep. But does it work? What’s the chemistry of this sleep aid? This week on Reactions, we go into the chemistry of melatonin and the realities of supplements.
Capturing “events” in images by using a bio-inspired approach sounds not just cool but downright futuristic. But how many developers have actually witnessed event-based machine vision technology at work?
Most developers have heard or read about it, and they might be curious. But they‘re stuck on the sideline without hands-on experience with novel non-frame-based machine vision technology.
Prophesee, a Paris-based startup, wants these spectators in the game. The company is rolling out this week a first-of-its- kind reference system for vision system developers to try, test and understand how neuromorphic vision works.
At the Intel Capital Global Summit 2018, the NBA and Intel Capital announced the “NBA + Intel Capital Emerging Technology Initiative”
The NBA and Intel Capital will jointly identify and evaluate global technology companies for potential investment and other collaboration opportunities
The multiyear collaboration targets technology disruption in the sports and entertainment industries
With unprecedented levels of inequality in football, a clear hierarchy of both clubs and leagues has been established. While between 1986 and 1988 clubs from Romania, Sweden, Scotland and Belgium were represented in European finals alongside clubs from the continent’s bigger countries, between 2016 and 2018 pretty much all spots have been reserved for teams from Europe’s strongest leagues.
Some leagues have adapted better to this new reality than others. Take the Serbian SuperLiga and Hungarian Nemzeti Bajnokság I. Our World Super League model – which ranks all teams (and by extension leagues) globally in one ‘league table’ – rates these two leagues as having similar-quality teams on average. However, the Serbian leagues has been much better at exporting to better leagues, having sold nearly three times as many players up the football ‘food chain’ as their neighbours.
… Lacrosse’s definition of home turf, however, is expanding geographically as well as culturally. It is among the fastest growing sports in the United States, according to a recent Sport & Fitness Industry Association report, with participation increasing nearly 10 percent in 2017 and by 25 percent since 2012. Meanwhile, football participation has dropped nearly 16 percent and baseball has had just 2 percent growth over the past five years, according to the report.
Nearly 1.1 million boys and girls now play the sport in youth leagues, and the impact of this grass-roots growth has powered a westward expansion. Men’s programs like Denver, Notre Dame and Ohio State and women’s teams like Northwestern, Florida and Stanford are part of the national title conversation. Northwestern won seven women’s titles in eight years from 2005 to 2012, and in 2015 Denver became the first team from west of the Appalachian Mountains to capture the men’s title.
“There’s a window opened wide now like the one that I went through back in the late 1970s and 1980s,” said Tim Gordon, a managing director at Raymond James Financial, who played at Cornell, where he won an Ivy League championship and made the national semifinals before graduating in 1985.
The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) is beginning what is being described as a “painful but long overdue” process to re-invent itself after years of criticism about athlete performances on the international stage.
Robert Woodard used to write down every move and position, and every night he’d relive them all.
What could I have done differently? How should I have responded here?
Woodard wasn’t any sort of math prodigy. He never expected to outsmart or outthink the kid on the other end of the chessboard—kids who could memorize complex patterns and strategies with relative ease. But he knew he could outwork them.
A Montreal company specializing in sports analytics has opened an artificial intelligence lab in Kitchener.
Sportlogiq’s proprietary software tracks and analyzes player movement and actions in sports like hockey and soccer using standard broadcast footage. It can track game events such as shots, passes and possessions, time-stamp them and record the location co-ordinates on the playing surface.
Baseball is stacked with stats. Old stats like average. New stats like barrels. Controversial stats like WAR. Funny-sounding stats like BABIP. There are rudimental stats like hits, environmental stats like wRC+, judgmental stats like errors and, to be sure, experimental stats being dreamed up by the savviest minds front offices have to offer.
With so many stats swirling around, it can be difficult to know which stats to hone in on, but, like all else in life, it comes down to a matter of personal preference. And because Major League players are judged by — and ultimately paid because of — their stats, we thought it would be interesting to see which numbers they value above all others.
So we posed the following question to a bunch of ballplayers from a variety of teams:
When you look at your stats at the end of a given year to evaluate yourself, what number do you gravitate toward and why?
… Houston won 65 games this season, most in the NBA, on the strength of an offense that confounds with its simplicity. The Rockets pass and move less than any team in the league, according to tracking data. About 90% of the time, they run some variation of the same play (a pick-and-roll on one side of the court, two shooters perched behind the three-point line on the other) with the same people (Harden or Chris Paul handling the ball, Clint Capela setting the screen, everybody else spacing the floor). “I like when there’s no thinking,” says D’Antoni, still playing the bumpkin, unconvincingly as ever. “So we just do the same thing every frigging time.” His minimalist approach reminds general manager Daryl Morey of an Albert Einstein quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
D’Antoni’s favorite stat is OER—Offensive Efficiency Rating, measured in approximate points per 100 possessions—which he commits to memory because, of course, he likes when there’s no thinking. Houston leads the NBA in overall OER (116.1), half-court OER (112.8) and isolation OER (121.8), ranking second in transition OER (128.5) and pick-and-roll OER (113.5), per in-house research. All due respect to Green, some actions are wrong: namely, curls, pin-downs and any other stilted sets that produce midrange jumpers, with OERs under 100. “Why set something up to get the worst shot in basketball?” D’Antoni asks. When young centers wonder whether they should post up, player development coach Irv Roland politely explains why that’s an awful idea.