… The phrase “five-tool player” is thrown around a lot, with fair reason, since this is arguably a golden age of five-tool stars. A pleasant side effect of MLB’s Great Youthening — 23 is the new 27 — is that the stars of the game today tend to have “young” skill sets. They can run fast, and they can throw hard — two skills that deteriorate quickly with age. The superstars of this era aren’t 30-year-old mashers with thick thighs and first-basemen’s gloves, but rather shortstops and center fielders and Gold Glove winners who steal bases and hit triples and dive and leap. They’re highlight machines. Yelich, certainly, is a highlight machine.
But he’s probably not actually a five-tool player.
… From 2017 to 2018, the Bombers continued to tweak their preparation, drawing crucial intel from GPS tracking technology. The 21 missed games in 2017 trickled down to just 11 in 2018. Obviously luck has been on their side, but the team has embraced controlling every factor possible to serve the ultimate goal of delivering the freshest, healthiest roster possible on those fall Friday nights. An additional team objective is to get in stellar shape during the off-season so guys don’t need as much conditioning during preseason camp.
“If we train really well in the offseason, we don’t need to grind to the place where we’re grinding these kids down to a pulp and they’re not able to function when the real games come around,” Gordon says. “It’s really a team effort to limiting injuries in a season, from the head coach and his plan, to the strength and conditioning experts and their plan, as well as the athletic trainers who have a role in looking at the big picture as well as the day-to-day. Everyone plays a role.”
… “It’s just, I feel like there are a lot of things I can accomplish and get a lot better at as a player, for sure,” Winston told The News on Thursday afternoon. “It’s not about just making it (as a pro), but trying to make it last.
“I mean, you can take away all the accolades, and what it means. As a player, I can improve, I can be stronger, I can take my game to another level.”
Offensive lineman Bryce Effner arrived on the Penn State campus on June 24, 2018. He weighed 265 pounds.
Since then, the 6-foot-5 Illinois native has gained one pound every 10 days. That’s three pounds a month. Three hundred pounds is now just a late-night snack away.
On purpose. It’s been Eff’ing crazy.
How did he do it?
“Chick-fil-A,” he said, hardly waiting a half-beat to digest the question.
More coaches with indoor football experience are climbing the ranks in the NFL, in an era when more plays from far-flung corners of the football world are trickling up to the top level.
While we’d expect that when it comes to work, the greater the reward, the greater the effort and the better the performance, the truth is more complex. Scholars Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein, and Nina Mazar undertook a series of experiments in The Review of Economic Studies to examine the effect of reward on performance. What they found is that there’s a Goldilocks pattern to the size of the incentive offered and its effect on performance: Reward people too little, and they have no reason to put in any effort. Reward them just enough, and you’ll give them the necessary incentive to produce results. Raise the stakes too high, however, and while their effort might increase, counterintuitively enough, their performance might suffer.
One Thursday in January, I hit “send” on the last round of edits for a new book about how society undervalues generalists — people who cultivate broad interests, zigzag in their careers and delay picking an area of expertise. Later that night, my wife started having intermittent contractions. By Sunday, I was wheeling my son’s bassinet down a hospital hallway toward a volunteer harpist, fantasizing about a music career launched in the maternity ward.
A friend had been teasing me for months about whether, as a parent, I would be able to listen to my own advice, or whether I would be a “do as I write, not as I do” dad, telling everyone else to slow down while I hustle to mold a baby genius. That’s right, I told him, sharing all of this research is part of my plan to sabotage the competition while secretly raising the Tiger Woods of blockchain (or perhaps the harp).
… A research team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering led by the Institute’s Founding Director Donald Ingber has developed a solution to this problem using ‘organ-on-a-chip’ (Organ Chip) microfluidic culture technology. His team is now able to culture a stable complex human microbiome in direct contact with a vascularized human intestinal epithelium for at least five days in a human Intestine Chip in which an oxygen gradient is established that provides high levels to the endothelium and epithelium while maintaining hypoxic conditions in the intestinal lumen inhabited by the commensal bacteria. Their “anaerobic Intestine Chip” stably maintained a microbial diversity similar to that in human feces over days and a protective physiological barrier that was formed by human intestinal tissue. The study is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“The major paradigm shift in medicine over the past decade has been the recognition of the huge role that the microbiome plays in health and disease. This new anerobic Intestine Chip technology now provides a way to study clinically relevant human host-microbiome interactions at the cellular and molecular levels under highly controlled conditions in vitro,” said Ingber, M.D., Ph.D.
… Kirk Lacob, the Warriors Assistant General Manager, reaches to the classic Douglas Adams novel, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to explain. “They built the computer to tell them the answer to life, the universe, and everything. And that computer told them the answer but then told them you have to build a better computer to essentially ask the right question. So we’re always thinking like that – what is the right question to be asking?”
How to better utilize data?
One such question that is at the forefront of the Warriors’ collective minds is something that will be familiar to many businesses the world over – how to best use your data? For Lacob, who leads the charge for the Warriors on data analytics, that question of “practical application” remains the most critical issue, emphasizing “it really doesn’t matter how good your data is or how well you’ve done your analysis, but if you can’t get it to the person who needs it or it’s not actionable, it’s just not that useful.”
New initiatives announced Monday by the NFL and the NFLPA will require every team to employ a mental health professional to work in its building and could conceivably lead to a change in the league’s attitude toward marijuana as a pain management treatment.
The NFL and its players’ union announced Monday the establishment of both a comprehensive mental health and wellness committee and a joint pain management committee. The latter will conduct research into pain management and alternative therapies, which could lead the league down previously unexplored roads.
“We want to explore all of the strategies that help a player deal with acute and chronic pain,” Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said in a phone interview Monday. “Some of those efforts require medication, some don’t. With regard to marijuana, certainly there’s a lot of discussion about not only cannabis but cannabinoid compounds, CBD, and it’s something that health care providers are exploring outside of football. That type of research will certainly be part of the mission of this committee and this program.”
Traumatic anterior shoulder instability is a common condition affecting sports participation among young athletes. Clinical outcomes after surgical management may vary according to patient activity level and sport involvement. Overhead athletes may experience a higher rate of recurrent instability and difficulty returning to sport postoperatively with limited previous literature to guide treatment. Purpose:
To report the clinical outcomes of patients undergoing primary arthroscopic anterior shoulder stabilization within the Multicenter Orthopaedic Outcomes Network (MOON) Shoulder Instability Consortium and to identify prognostic factors associated with successful return to sport at 2 years postoperatively. Study Design:
Case series; Level of evidence, 4. Methods:
Overhead athletes undergoing primary arthroscopic anterior shoulder stabilization as part of the MOON Shoulder Instability Consortium were identified for analysis. Primary outcomes included the rate of recurrent instability, defined as any patient reporting recurrent dislocation or reoperation attributed to persistent instability, and return to sport at 2 years postoperatively. Secondary outcomes included the Western Ontario Shoulder Instability Index and Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic Shoulder and Elbow questionnaire score. Univariate regression analysis was performed to identify patient and surgical factors predictive of return to sport at short-term follow-up. Results:
A total of 49 athletes were identified for inclusion. At 2-year follow-up, 31 (63%) athletes reported returning to sport. Of those returning to sport, 22 athletes (45% of the study population) were able to return to their previous levels of competition (nonrefereed, refereed, or professional) in at least 1 overhead sport. Two patients (4.1%) underwent revision stabilization, although 14 (28.6%) reported subjective apprehension or looseness. Age (P = .87), sex (P = .82), and baseline level of competition (P = .37) were not predictive of return to sport. No difference in range of motion in all planes (P > .05) and Western Ontario Shoulder Instability Index scores (78.0 vs 80.1, P = .73) was noted between those who reported returning to sport and those who did not. Conclusion:
Primary arthroscopic anterior shoulder stabilization in overhead athletes is associated with a low rate of recurrent stabilization surgery. Return to overhead athletics at short-term follow-up is lower than that previously reported for the general athletic population.
The men competing in the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) are some of the most elite athletes in the world. But their death rates differ markedly, a new study of thousands of former pro athletes has found. Former pro football players had a higher overall death rate than baseball veterans and were felled by cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative illnesses at strikingly higher rates than their MLB peers. On average, the football players died 7 years earlier than MLB players, the research found.
The study “is a big step forward,” says Andrew Lincoln, an epidemiologist, and director of the MedStar Sports Medicine Research Center in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the work.
… In order to engage successfully in political advocacy, players would have to recognize the strengths of their opponent, in this case Major League Baseball. The strongest likely strategy for MLB is to leverage its innate advantages: it has an organizational structure that supports a communications department, legal and lobbying efforts, and financial expenditures toward those efforts. MLB can send a memo to all 30 clubs with talking points on why HB 2180 would be good for business, allowing them to align on messaging for the media or legislators themselves. Without an equivalent body representing minor league players, who is coordinating their resources? Are there communication structures to support it?
The level of organization MLB enjoys also creates built-in influence for ownership.
Last month, the NBA sent a memo to all its team owners detailing a series of new rules about owning sports betting companies and related businesses.
In a nod toward gambling, referee transparency rules have been gradually implemented over the past decade, including announcing officiating crews in advance of games and the publishing of the Last Two Minute Reports.
However, even as the NBA gets deeper into business with sportsbooks, the league has yet to take meaningful action when it comes to injury reporting.
The Sharks are facing elimination in Game 6 of the Western Conference final on Tuesday night, and are doing so without the help of Erik Karlsson, Tomas Hertl and captain Joe Pavelski.
All three of those San Jose stars are missing the game due to injury, but the latter two were injured as the result of what could generously be called borderline hits suffered in Game 5.
Both players were removed from Game 5 after taking hits to the head from Blues forward Ivan Barbashev and defenseman Alex Pietrangelo, respectively. However, the NHL Department of Player Safety deemed neither hit deserving of supplemental discipline.