… what [Vaughn] Williams saw was not merely a snapshot in time but instead a player evolving across it. It is one thing to see a player with obvious tools and skills that suggest sky-high major league impact. But that isn’t the type of player who is typically sitting on the board for the No. 43 overall pick, early in the second round.
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And so, other attributes — not just performance but also change over time, whether a player emerges as something more than he’s been or one who has a long-established track record but endures an underperformance in his draft year that knocks him down the draft board — represent critical elements in adding to the appeal of a player. And in the case of Cannon — the canon of Cannon — there is evidence of steady growth that increased the conviction that he is a player who can handle the challenges of pro ball.
“On the field, off the field, strength, maturity, baseball IQ, work ethic, character — all of it has developed significantly over three years, and I’m really proud he put himself in position to be the first player chosen [this year] by the Boston Red Sox,” said Arizona coach Jay Johnson.
… [Nick] Pivetta is a devotee of positive thinking and willpower, and he had to rely on those things during his demotion. Benefits accrue to those who stay level-headed and without panic, especially when you can light up a radar gun with a fastball touching 99 miles per hour. Just check out his Twitter bio, which includes the quote: “When you master your mind, you master your life.” His YouTube tastes are a little different from those of the average big leaguer.
“I watch a lot of Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk, motivational guys,” Pivetta tells OZY. [The interview was conducted before the sexual misconduct and racism allegations against Robbins surfaced — Editor.] “There is a mental side and you have to master your mind because once you know yourself inside and out and you’re comfortable with yourself, you are going to be able to accomplish anything you want.”
… England, though, was still on Daly’s mind. She’d not been involved with the national team at any level for a while. It was time to try something new, so after two years with Lincoln, Daly left everything behind to forge a new career for herself in the USA, specifically New York. “I’d seen enough and done enough. I wasn’t with England, I’d spent the whole time trying to prove I could play for England so at that point I needed to let go a little bit and not hold onto it quite so much.
“I also wanted a degree. It was weird though because I wanted to spend my whole school life not being there. I knew a few people in the US and I felt like I’d done everything [at home] to try and play for England. I think I got bored, I was set in my ways, everything was such a routine and it almost felt like I’d just had enough.”
She adds: “When you’re that age and you get to go and visit New York and this lifestyle. it’s like. ‘Woah, how can I turn this down’. I’d hit a brick wall at Lincoln.”
Despite that, things weren’t really getting much easier for Daly. She had to sit in the stands for her entire first year for her university team, St. John’s Red Storm, due to the fact she’d played professionally already in England. “Because the FA WSL was semi-professional, I wasn’t ineligible completely but I’d been paid to play so I had to sit the first year out. It was frustrating because they weren’t very good at the time and I couldn’t play. There were times I thought ‘what am I doing?’ – but it gave me more motivation to help turn the team around.”
As the U.S. women’s national team’s defense has evolved over the past four years, so has Becky Sauerbrunn.
Normally quiet and studious, the center back who is about to embark on her third Women’s World Cup has embraced her role as a veteran and has started to use her voice, both as a leader and as a mentor to the younger defenders.
“Obviously, she’s a player with tremendous experience and just a player that really kind of embodies what it means to be part of this team. She’s a great professional and very popular with her teammates because of how she contributes both on and off the field,” coach Jill Ellis said. “She’s a fierce competitor and one of the nicest people that you’ll ever meet.”
Ecological psychology suggests performer-environment relationship is the appropriate scale for examining the relationship between perception, action and cognition. Developing performance requires variation in practice in order to design the attractor-fluctuation landscape. The present study aimed to identify the effects of varying levels of familiarity and sensorimotor stimuli within the environment in runners’ speed and heart rate (HR) regularity degree, and short-term memory Twelve amateur runners accomplished three 45-min running trials in their usual route, in an unusual route, and an athletics 400-m track, wearing a GPS and an HR monitor. Sample entropy (SampEn) and complexity index (CI), over speed and HR, were calculated. Pre and post-trial, participants performed the Backward Digit Span task for cognitive assessment. Higher entropies were found for the 400-m track, compared to the usual and unusual routes. Usual routes increased speed SampEn (63% of chances), but decreased HR CI when compared to unusual routes (60% of chances). Runners showed higher overall short-term memory performance after unusual routes, when compared to usual routes (85% of chances), indicating positive relation to attentional control. The contexts of practice may contribute to change predictability from single to multiple timescales. Thus, by considering that time structuring issues can help diagnosing habituation of training routes, this study brings novel information to the long-term process of training. [full text]
On the May 21st episode of Real Sports, correspondent John Frankel explores “The Norwegian Way”. Frankel’s focus is to explore the question of how a country of 5.3 million people is becoming a global sports powerhouse. This includes everything from winning the most medals in the 2018 Winter Olympics to having top-ranked beach volleyball teams.
The answer from the segment is based on Norway’s empirical approach to youth sports. More specifically, Norway has changed or eliminated many of the standard practices used to develop top athletes in many other countries by looking at actual performance. The most stunning finding appears to be that the approach used by these other countries is fundamentally the wrong strategy to take with youth sports.
Central to Norway’s approach is essentially that children younger than the age of 12 should have as much fun playing as many sports as possible.
In their new book The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik explore how new data, technology, and training methods are revolutionizing player development throughout baseball.
As the book’s ambitious subtitle suggests, the authors present most of their analysis through the lenses of the game’s intellectual misfits. There are several benefits to this approach, most obviously that baseball’s nonconformists are a talkative and engaging bunch. Trevor Bauer, Justin Turner, Brian Bannister, and several other current and former players gave the authors excellent insight and plenty of memorable quotes: “Everything I learned about pitching development, I learned from Ansel Adams,” Bannister says by way of introduction.
Such colorful contributions from recognizable names provide helpful context in a book chock-full of granular baseball insights. It’s one thing to read about how Bauer now has the technology and coaching paradigm to add several inches of horizontal movement to his slider. But it’s far more illuminating to learn how hitting coaches characterize the potential for a broad application of this kind of pitching development: “Hitters could be fucked for the next ten years.”
This week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple executive Kevin Lynch announced multiple updates to WatchOS, the operating system that powers the company’s smartwatch. (Voice memos, a calculator, streaming audio, oh my!) But the most telling features were the new additions to the watch’s suite of health-monitoring tools.
Beginning this fall, Apple Watch will track your activity trends over time, help protect your hearing by alerting you to harmful levels of ambient noise, and allow users to track their menstrual cycles. Individually, these improvements might look small or trivial. But given the watch’s existing health and fitness features, this new bundle of capabilities underscores Apple’s push to make its smartwatch the control center for your personal health. Sure, calculating a tip from your wrist is neat. But a personal companion that monitors your well-being everywhere you go? That, Apple is betting, is the future.
Harvard Business Review; David De Cremer, Jack McGuire, Yorck Hesselbarth, Ke Michael Mai from
… Our results suggest that people think of humans and algorithms as good at providing different types of information, including about who to trust. Humans are seen as a better source of intuition, better at social skills, and better at taking another person’s perspective. But algorithms can provide information about who to trust in cases where that information is less intuitive and more factual. In other words, participants considered humans to possess more appropriate skills needed to take the perspective of other humans in social interactions than AI does. In further support of this idea, the algorithm was regarded as a more rational and less intuitive approach in evaluating individual’s trustworthiness. Our participants, however, also indicated that if an algorithm could deliver information about the trustworthiness of a human, this would not make them feel more uncertain about the reliability, authenticity, and accuracy of the information provided compared to a human delivering this information.
So, although humans were judged to possess the necessary social skills to assess someone’s trustworthiness, they did not feel that the use of an algorithm would reveal less reliable social trust information. This finding was further endorsed by the observation that, when participants were asked to indicate which assessment method they preferred to use, most participants opted to use AI (61%) rather than the judgments of the human (39%).
Polyphenols are produced by plants and fulfill a number of functions including pathogen and antioxidant defense. They contribute to the taste and color characteristics of fruit and vegetables, but ~90% of dietary polyphenols escape absorption in the small intestine and are subsequently made bioavailable by the actions of the gut bacteria in the colon.
Polyphenol supplementation produces antioxidant effects via inhibition of superoxide-generating enzymes such as nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase and increased synthesis of endogenous antioxidant enzymes via the antioxidant response element pathway. They also exert anti-inflammatory effects via inhibition of the cyclooxygenase enzymes that produce pro-inflammatory prostaglandins.
Consumption of ~300 mg polyphenols within the hour prior to exercise appears to enhance performance of endurance and repeated sprint exercise in recreationally active participants, mediated via vascular mechanisms. However, only a small number of studies have been conducted to date and more research is needed to corroborate these findings, to determine the influence of training status, and to optimize the supplementation protocol.
A recent research study, published in the journal Nutrients, found that visitors to a university recreational center were more likely to select a healthier post-exercise snack when the choice was made pre-exercise. R
… If you can identify points at which a player’s performance changed in a manner beyond random variation, then further investigate as to why (again incredibly difficult), then hopefully yes that can assist you in predicting future changes in performance
It’s been nearly a year since StatsBomb announced free data for women’s football. During this time analysts, bloggers and fans have been brushing off their coding skills and navigating github to produce analysis, data visualisations and gifs all entirely focussed on women’s football.
This has been really enjoyable to watch for two reasons:
By removing barriers to accessing quality data we are enabling a promising data analytics talent pool to develop.
We are making inroads to address the gender imbalance in the football industry.
… In a make-or-miss league, these two teams are still standing because their stars make a ton of big shots. Let’s highlight the six shot types that will swing the NBA Finals — the most important looks for each each team’s most important players.