Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 13, 2019

… Gallo lives in a place that baseball had previously thought unlivable. He saw the formerly extreme zones of Adam Dunn and Russell Branyan and Jack Cust, and he dove right down beyond them. Surely, if a guy has this kind of power, he will have to be able to get on base a little more, went the conventional thinking on inhabitable spaces. Surely, if a guy strikes out this much and makes this little contact, he cannot hit this many home runs. Gallo heard all that, and he made himself at home, anyway. There should not reasonably be any baseball life at a .500 SLG and .200 BA. Yet, suddenly, there is.

In 2019, Gallo has been less extreme than usual. He’s struck out a little less and walked a little more. He’s even hit a few more singles. (His .274 average might as well be .400, as unlikely as that previously would have seemed for him.) It might stick, or it might not, but either way: Gallo’s shown that he can live in an extreme environment if he has to and even if he doesn’t.

… McKenzie was named Friday to the U.S. men’s national team roster for the under-20 World Cup, which runs from May 23-June 15 in Poland. The centerback was a cocaptain of the squad in last autumn’s qualifying tournament, and has been a key player in U.S. coach Tab Ramos’ game plan throughout the two years since the last World Cup.

“I feel good. I’ve been working with the trainers here to try and get back out there on the field as fully and as fast as possible,” McKenzie said. “Where I’m at now, I’m ahead of the game, and I have full confidence in myself that I’ll be OK.”

… “I was fortunate to be with Becky when she first came into the national team,” said national team coach Jill Ellis. “To see her growth, to see a player who went from fighting to make the roster, fighting for playing time, to see her where she was in 2015, the leader of the back line with tremendous experience. She’s just a player that really kind of embodies what it means to be a great professional. She’s very popular with her teammates, she’s contributes on and off field. She’s a fierce competitor and one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.”

… Each of those NFL quarterbacks remain on speed dial whenever coach Mark Dantonio’s latest signal-callers need a sounding board for problems or advice on how to improve. Sometimes, they reach out to each other without prodding.

“That dinner, even as small as it was to Drew maybe, had a big impact on my confidence level moving forward,” Cousins said. “So if I can offer that to any of the younger players at Michigan State, I certainly want to be there for them like Drew was there for me.

“It’s so important to have those people who speak belief into you. Drew was one of them and has been since then. He continues to be a great example for me. You gotta have those people in your life.”

Wolves manager Nuno Espirito Santo has paid tribute to his medical staff and players after the club reported a 99% availability rate this season.

The Premier League newcomers say they have not had a single long-term injury since Santo took over as manager almost two years ago. They were also on course to match a 23-year-old record held by Liverpool for the fewest number of players used in a Premier League season before their penultimate game against Fulham last weekend.

… “Troy played inside the formation. Danny played inside the formation. Wes played inside the formation. Julian plays a lot outside the formation. He does a lot more on the outside, in the running game, in the passing game, than those guys did in particular.”

They all have the same body type. Brown was 5 feet 10 inches, 196 pounds. Welker was 5-9, 185. Amendola is 5-11, 190. Edelman is 5-10, 198.

But McDaniels said Edelman has more versatility, as a former college quarterback and ball carrier.

“It’s just the nature of what he’s kind of become and what he’s worked himself into. He’s been here a long time,” McDaniels said. “There’s a little bit of a difference, from my eye, based on the way we’ve used him and what he’s been able to do for us than those other guys.”

… “I’m responsible for training and giving direction towards a plan for the week that gets the most out of the team. Together with Jurgen and Pete, we decide where we want to go in our sessions and I will make sure it’s getting done. Everything we do in training is related to our ideas. Every exercise is specific to what we want to build.

“I prioritise what’s more important to train and to let our ideas evolve – fundamental principles but in a less complex way. Then I create and contextualise specific exercises, where we want our players to learn, acquire and develop. I focus on what we can control, practise fundamentals of our game.

“I believe that you become what you believe so we stimulate high on and off the pitch standards. We work as hard as possible and see each training session as the game.

Wednesday’s spring football practice at Corona del Mar High may have looked like a typical practice, until you noticed all of the men on the sideline wearing polo shirts and jackets with college football team logos on them.

CdM head coach Dan O’Shea and offensive coordinator Kevin Hettig took a page from the college football playbook and held the school’s first showcase.

The showcase, similar to a college pro day, was an opportunity for CdM players to perform in front of college coaches in the hopes of continuing their football careers on the next level.

We’ve become accustomed to our smartwatches and smartphones sensing what our bodies are doing, be it walking, driving or sleeping. But what about our hands? It turns out that smartwatches, with a few tweaks, can detect a surprising number of things your hands are doing.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) have used a standard smartwatch to figure out when a wearer was typing on a keyboard, washing dishes, petting a dog, pouring from a pitcher or cutting with scissors.

By making a few changes to the watch’s operating system, they were able to use its accelerometer to recognize hand motions and, in some cases, bio-acoustic sounds associated with 25 different hand activities at around 95 percent accuracy. And those 25 activities are just the beginning of what might be possible to detect.

… “Bioelectronics begins and ends at the same places that the pharmaceutical industry begins and ends,” says Kevin Tracey, president of the Manhasset, N.Y.-based Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, the research branch of the Northwell Health healthcare network.

Tracey outlines the process to develop a treatment in the pharma industry: “You pick a disease, and you pick a target. Then, you screen for drugs or molecules to hit the target, and then you test them and sell them.

“It is the same in bioelectronics,” Tracey goes on. “We pick a disease and identify a target, but rather than screen for molecules or drugs to hit the target, we discover, search, or screen for neurocircuits that control the target in the body. Then, from the neurocircuits knowledge gained, we develop the specifications for a bioelectronic device to control the nerve to control the target.”

We live in a world of wireless signals flowing around us and bouncing off our bodies. MIT researchers are now leveraging those signal reflections to provide scientists and caregivers with valuable insights into people’s behavior and health.

The system, called Marko, transmits a low-power radio-frequency (RF) signal into an environment. The signal will return to the system with certain changes if it has bounced off a moving human. Novel algorithms then analyze those changed reflections and associate them with specific individuals.

The system then traces each individual’s movement around a digital floor plan. Matching these movement patterns with other data can provide insights about how people interact with each other and the environment.

… When athletes suffer injuries in televised competitions, fans fix their eyes on the screen — if they can bear to watch the replays — and attempt to diagnose the injury from the couch. For medical professionals who are also sports fans, that concentration is even more intense.

“It’s an underworld of injury diagnosis and speculation, hopefully with a better trained set of eyes,” Lindley said.

The same way coaches can’t watch a game without thinking up strategy or players on the bench imagine what they’d do on the field, medical professionals watch the game through a unique lens, hoping to spot injuries first and diagnose them, as if the process was a sport all its own.

“Doctors watch the play much differently than fans watch the play,” said Ellen Smith, a recently retired emergency room physician and sports medicine expert.

The basis and main principle of Liverpool’s 4-3-3 pressing system is to keep the ball at the central zones, therefore preventing the be moved by horizontal circulation, which usually -if done well- stretches the defensive structure both in the vertical and horizontal axis.

To achieve that their system is both passing-lane and option-oriented: 1st line is closing passing lanes to prevent passes out wide towards the full-backs/wingers, whilst 2nd line is much rather option-oriented therefore their principle is to position themselves to have access to 2 players (defensive shifting’s decision making based on oppositional system, distances, ball’s speed). Meanwhile the last line, mostly the fullbacks also have the option-orientation: if the 2nd line can’t create optimal access to the oppositional full-backs, then they push higher up, leaving a numerical equality at the back. Ideally the last line stays in position to offer better access at the central zones for the long balls.

Major League Baseball continues to push for an international draft and is getting buy-in from influential trainers who have grown weary of players as young as 13 years old agreeing to deals with teams, sources with knowledge of the situation tell ESPN.

In a recent meeting between MLB and those involved in the league’s Trainer Partnership Program, a segment of buscónes — or the the trainers who find and prepare amateurs in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela to sign as 16-year-olds — lamented the rash of early agreements and said a draft would alleviate the pressure on pre-teens to vie for multimillion-dollar contracts. At least four players from the 2021-22 signing period struck deals with teams as 13-year-olds, according to sources familiar with the agreements, and the majority of elite players are committed to teams at 14.

Randomized experiments have enormous potential to improve human welfare in many domains, including healthcare, education, finance, and public policy. However, such “A/B tests” are often criticized on ethical grounds even as similar, untested interventions are implemented without objection. We find robust evidence across 16 studies of 5,873 participants from three diverse populations spanning nine domains—from healthcare to autonomous vehicle design to poverty reduction—that people frequently rate A/B tests designed to establish the comparative effectiveness of two policies or treatments as inappropriate even when universally implementing either A or B, untested, is seen as appropriate. This “A/B effect” is as strong among those with higher educational attainment and science literacy and among relevant professionals. It persists even when there is no reason to prefer A to B and even when recipients are treated unequally and randomly in all conditions (A, B, and A/B). Several remaining explanations for the effect—a belief that consent is required to impose a policy on half of a population but not on the entire population; an aversion to controlled but not to uncontrolled experiments; and a proxy form of the illusion of knowledge (according to which randomized evaluations are unnecessary because experts already do or should know “what works”)—appear to contribute to the effect, but none dominates or fully accounts for it. We conclude that rigorously evaluating policies or treatments via pragmatic randomized trials may provoke greater objection than simply implementing those same policies or treatments untested. [full text]