SB Nation, Beyond the Box Score blog, Bill Thompson from
If a couple of years ago, you figured we’d be entering the 2021 Major League Baseball season ardently hoping that Trevor Rosenthal signed with your team you would likely be the only one. Following a disastrous 2019 season, it all but seemed that the once-dominant closer’s career was finished. He was still throwing as hard as ever, his fastball velocity was in the 98th percentile, but he wasn’t fooling any hitters and couldn’t find the strike zone. It was shocking going into 2020 that the Kansas City Royals were willing to take a flier on the bearded wonder.
Across 13.7 innings Rosenthal put up a 2.99 ERA and 0.7 bWARP. Most encouraging was the fact that he struck out 21 and only walked 7. That was a drastic change from 2019 when in 15.1 innings he walked 26 and only struck out 17.
It was enough for the San Diego Padres to trade for Rosenthal and install him as their closer as they marched towards the playoffs. Going from the non-pressure situation of summer baseball in Kansas City to the closer for a team chasing down a playoff spot it felt like there was a chance Rosenthal would crumble.
SB Nation, Indy Cornrows blog, Mark Schindler from
… On today’s episode of the Indy Cornrows podcast, I’m joined by Brian Sutterer MD. After an unprecedented season culminating in the Orlando Bubble, now leading into a 72-game season after the shortest off-season in major sports history, there are a lot of discussion points swirling around resting, injuries, and the idea of load management.
I’ve spoken on it a few times, but found it pertinent to bring on an expert in the sports medicine field to talk about the Victor Oladipo, the Pacers, the NBA at large, and the changing world of sports science and performance!
Unlike the old days, NHL players generally arrive at training camp in great shape. That will be even more important this season because of a shortened camp.
University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus from
College football players may underestimate their risk of injury and concussion, according to a new study published today in JAMA Network Open.
Christine Baugh, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and member of the CU Center for Bioethics and Humanities, is the corresponding author of the article, “Accuracy of US College Football Players’ Estimates of Their Risk of Concussion or Injury.”
Baugh and co-authors report on survey results of 296 college football players from four teams in the Power 5 Conferences of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Athletes were surveyed in 2017. The researchers found that between 43 percent and 91 percent of respondents underestimated their risk of injury and between 42 percent and 63 percent underestimated their risk of concussion.
If you think breathing is just a relaxation technique, think again, breathing is the foundation of for Dana Santas’ work in pro sports.
“That’s the thing that really makes a huge impact, it’s a massive game changer,” Santas said. “How they perform really comes down to how well they move and control their bodies.”
From the way Victor Hedman takes a hard hit, to Andrei Vasilevskiy’s incredible saves, Santas has helped. She’s called the “mobility maker” and works exclusively with pro athletes.
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley News from
UC Berkeley researchers have created a new device that combines wearable biosensors with artificial intelligence software to help recognize what hand gesture a person intends to make based on electrical signal patterns in the forearm. The device paves the way for better prosthetic control and seamless interaction with electronic devices.
This is the first paper of the INTERLIVE® Network addressing the validation protocols for consumer wearable and smartphone devices. In this paper, the INTERLIVE® Network provides an expert statement on the best-practices for the validation of devices for measuring step counts. These recommendations are designed for device manufacturers, scientific institutions, healthcare providers and members of the general public who are interested in the transparent and rigorous validation of these devices. Adherence to this validation standard will help ensure methodological and reporting consistency, facilitating comparisons between consumer devices and the amalgamation of standardised open datasets.
College scouts preparing for the NFL draft, sporting directors of European soccer clubs evaluating the transfer market, and youth baseball coaches have all faced the same problem. While video of players in competition is plentiful and high quality—from what’s broadcast on television on down to what’s captured by a smartphone—comparing what they see to an objective data source has been challenging, if not impossible.
For years, most major pro sports leagues have utilized enterprise solutions for gleaning optical tracking data or analyzing biomechanics. ChyronHego, Hawk-Eye, Second Spectrum, STATS Perform’s SportVU, Simi Motion, Track160, and KinaTrax are a sampling of the providers of these camera-based data providers.
To determine the incidence and characteristics of injury and illness in English men’s and women’s senior and youth international football. Methods
Time-loss injuries and illnesses, alongside match and training exposure, were collected across 8 seasons (2012–2020) in youth (U15, U16, U17, U18, U19) and senior (U20, U21, U23, senior) English men’s and women’s international teams. Analysis of incidence, burden, and severity of injury and illness was completed. Sex-specific comparisons were made between the senior and youth groups, and across the 8 seasons of data collection. Results
In men’s international football, 535 injuries were recorded (216 senior; 319 youth) during 73,326 h of exposure. Overall, match injury incidence (31.1 ± 10.8 injuries/1000 h) and burden (454.0 ± 195.9 d absent/1000 h) were greater than training injury incidence (4.0 ± 1.0 injuries/1000 h) and burden (51.0 ± 21.8 d absent/1000 h) (both P < 0.001). In women’s international football, 503 injuries were recorded (senior: 177; youth: 326) during 80,766 h of exposure and match injury incidence (27.6 ± 11.3 injuries/1000 h) and burden (506.7 ± 350.2 days absent/1000 h) were greater than training injury incidence (5.1 ± 1.8 injuries/1000 h) and burden (87.6 ± 32.8 days absent/1000 h) (both P < 0.001). In women’s international football, a group × season interaction was observed for training injury incidence (P = 0.021), with the senior group recording a greater training injury incidence during the 2015–2016 season compared to the youth group (14.4 vs 5.7 injuries/1000 h; P = 0.022). There was no difference in injury severity between match and training for men’s (P = 0.965) and women’s (P = 0.064) international football.
Conclusions
The findings provide a comprehensive examination of injury and illness in English men’s and women’s senior and youth international football. Practitioners will be able to benchmark their team’s injury and illness incidence and characteristics to the match-play and training information provided in the present study. [full text]
Early on, universities from across the country realized COVID-19 could have an impact on even the healthiest of elite student-athletes.
As athletic departments worked to create guidelines on when it would be safe for their players to return, team doctors discovered lingering issues even after the symptoms were gone.
“In addition to doing the usual tests that we do, we decided we would also do a cardiac MRI in our athletes before they went on to play competitively,” Ohio State University cardiologist Dr. Saurabh Rajpal said.
He says the more sensitive testing allowed doctors at OSU to detect a potentially dangerous form of cardiac inflammation, or swelling in the heart, in about 15 percent of its recovered athletes.
Things are dark now. Hope is on the horizon but so are obstacles.
As one expert said: “Think about next summer as a marker for when we might be able to breathe again. But there’s almost a year’s worth of work that needs to happen in those 6 months.” 2/
… “We are trying really to build a new sports model and we knew we would make mistakes,” Gazidis said. “We wanted to make the club more efficient financially while increasing the performances on the field which everybody says basically can’t be done. The basic mantra in football is you have to spend more money if you’re going to be successful.”
That pressure particularly comes from fans.
“Every day, people are vilified and attacked if they’re not spending more and more,” Gazidis said. “There are some winners in that environment and there are many, many losers. I just don’t think that’s healthy for football.
“I would much rather see a stable, self-sustaining environment for the game where the competition on the field is every bit as ferocious and as exciting and more and more exciting than it’s ever been but we don’t have the same kind of destructive pressure to spend, spend, spend that seems to be such a relentless and ultimately futile demand.”
… After [Mike] Forde left Chelsea in 2013, [R.C.] Buford asked him to join San Antonio in an advisory capacity. Forde spent the season with the Spurs, who ended up winning the 2014 NBA Finals. It was there that Forde became close with Sean Marks, who was an assistant coach on Popovich’s bench at the time.
“What impressed me about Sean was not only was he a hardworking guy, but he also had a high IQ and an innate ability to work with different departments,” Forde said. “When RC promoted him through the ranks (to assistant GM), I thought it made him a tremendous asset as a future GM because he could also see the NBA world through the coaching paradigm.”
Forde, who told Marks that he’d make a great top executive in the future, decided to make a career change, moving to New York and co-founding Sportsology, an advisory business designed to help sports organizations create strong cultures and make smart hires in leadership positions.