… It is the innings tank that the Cubs have to to start planning for right now.
[Adbert] Alzolay logged 21 1/3 innings in the Majors last season and had 81 2/3 innings between MLB and the Minors in 2019. In no professional season has the righty — impacted by some health setbacks along the way — exceeded 120 1/3 frames. Targeting 120 innings in the season ahead would seem realistic.
So, the Cubs will need to find ways to control Alzolay’s workload, while still keeping him working consistently. Maybe that will be via shorter starts, or piggyback appearances out of the bullpen. If Alzolay gains a fourth Minor League option (the Cubs are still awaiting clarity on that front), he could stay on a schedule between levels.
“Man, it’s always fun when you go home,” Strop said. “That’s what I consider the Cubs. This is my home. This is my house.”
The reunion between the Cubs and Strop began in September when he signed with the organization after the Cincinnati Reds released him. He reported to the alternate site in South Bend, Ind., but an injury to his hip and groin area ended his hope of pitching in the majors again in 2020.
The recovery process would have taken too long for him to help the Cubs late in the season. Strop admitted he got a little depressed watching the team head to the playoffs. He went home to the Dominican Republic and focused on preparing his body for 2021.
… Like many women – from those involved in elite sport through to amateurs at the opposite end of the scale – [Kelly-Jo] Robson is making a mockery of the myth that women should not train during pregnancy.
Still, she cannot escape the commonly-held view that she is committing a taboo. The sight of a heavily pregnant woman sitting on a spin bike, jogging up a hill or pushing weights is enough to prompt heads to shake and disapproving mutters. Thankfully, such a way of thinking is slowly being consigned to the past.
While comprehensive research on the subject is relatively thin on the ground, and currently represents another underfunded area in female sports science, almost all evidence points to the benefits of exercise during pregnancy.
… She was fourth in the 1500m at the 2013 World Youth Championships, crowned European junior champion two years later and made the Great Britain under-20s team when she was just 15. Three years later, she was diagnosed with osteoporosis, a result of years of overtraining and undereating.
That merciless combination meant her body had been deprived of oestrogen, the female sex hormone which is crucial for bone density.
Clay first realised something was wrong after fracturing her foot in a swimming pool doing a tumble turn. On another occasion, her shin snapped when she sat down in the gym. Both were clues that she was suffering from Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-s) Syndrome – formerly known as ‘the female athlete triad’ – which can cause devastating effects due to low energy availability.
The New York Jets are dipping into East Tennessee for a key off-the-field hire, multiple sources tell FootballScoop.
East Tennessee State University Assistant Athletic Director for Sports Performance, Dr. Brad DeWeese, has emerged as the Jets’ primary target for their top strength and conditioning position under first-year coach Robert Saleh.
Sources confirm to FootballScoop that DeWeese has accepted the position and is finalizing a deal. He will become the Jets’ Director of Performance.
Micro-Doppler radars could soon be used in clinical settings to predict injury risk and track recovery progress, according to Penn State researchers.
Being able to view subtle differences in human movement would allow health care workers to more accurately identify individuals who may be at risk for injury and to track progress precisely while individuals are recovering from an injury. In an effort to find an accurate, reliable and cost-effective way to measure these subtleties in human movement, College of Engineering and College of Medicine researchers teamed up to develop a radar in front of which athlete study-subjects could jump.
“My students and I designed and constructed the radar system to characterize the micro-Doppler features of human gait, developed and tested various classification algorithms to separate patterns from different gait types and validated our hypothesis using measured data from athletes mimicking different gait patterns,” said Ram Narayanan, professor of electrical engineering in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
To empower outdoor sports teams at all levels to prepare, compete and livestream, Hudl today announced the launch of Hudl Focus Outdoor, a hands-free smart camera that automatically captures and uploads games and practices to Hudl and sends video to livestreaming platforms.
The cutting-edge technology builds upon the impact of Hudl Focus Indoor – which allows teams to capture HD video from the perfect angle using A.I.-powered player tracking technology. More than 15,000 basketball and volleyball teams have used Focus Indoor cameras to capture 190,000 games, and stream over 70,000 of those games to fans—all automatically with no cameraperson required. With the launch of Hudl Focus Outdoor, those participating in outdoor sports such as football and soccer will now be able to access the same capabilities, regardless of weather conditions.
Objectives: This study aimed to assess how menstrual cycle phase and extended menstrual cycle length influence the incidence of injuries in international footballers.
Methods: Over a 4-year period, injuries from England international footballers at training camps or matches were recorded, alongside self-reported information on menstrual cycle characteristics at the point of injury. Injuries in eumenorrheic players were categorized into early follicular, late follicular, or luteal phase. Frequencies were also compared between injuries recorded during the typical cycle and those that occurred after the cycle would be expected to have finished. Injury incidence rates (per 1,000 person days) and injury incidence rate ratios were calculated for each phase for all injuries and injuries stratified by type.
Results: One hundred fifty-six injuries from 113 players were eligible for analysis. Injury incidence rates per 1,000 person-days were 31.9 in the follicular, 46.8 in the late follicular, and 35.4 in the luteal phase, resulting in injury incidence rate ratios of 1.47 (Late follicular:Follicular), 1.11 (Luteal:Follicular), and 0.76 (Luteal:Late follicular). Injury incident rate ratios showed that muscle and tendon injury rates were 88% greater in the late follicular phase compared to the follicular phase, with muscle rupture/tear/strain/cramps and tendon injuries/ruptures occurring over twice as often during the late follicular phase compared to other phases 20% of injuries were reported as occurring when athletes were “overdue” menses.
Conclusion: Muscle and tendon injuries occurred almost twice as often in the late follicular phase compared to the early follicular or luteal phase. Injury risk may be elevated in typically eumenorrheic women in the days after their next menstruation was expected to start.
… for states that regularly see high heat and high humidity, a similar lack of rules could prove disastrous. And as temperatures rise across the globe, states that previously haven’t experienced dramatic heat waves will need to adapt their policies as well.
“Heat is one of the leading weather killers,” said Andrew Grundstein, a professor and climate scientist in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. “It’s one of the top three causes of death in sports, and we have a lot of states that are not prepared for heat right now.”
University of California-San Diego, UC San Diego News Center from
Our brains are non-stop consumers. A labyrinth of blood vessels, stacked end-to-end comparable in length to the distance from San Diego to Berkeley, ensures a continuous flow of oxygen and sugar to keep our brains functioning at peak levels.
But how does this intricate system ensure that more active parts of the brain receive enough nourishment versus less demanding areas? That’s a century-old problem in neuroscience that scientists at the University of California San Diego have helped answer in a newly published study.
Newly developed brain maps with unprecedented detail are helping answer critical questions about brain blood flow. These new maps offer resolution finer than a millionth of a meter, reconstructed here with high microvessel density areas in red, intermediate density areas in white and low density areas in blue. Credit: Xiang Ji and Edmund O’Donnell, UC San Diego
Studying the brains of mice, a team of researchers led by Xiang Ji, David Kleinfeld and their colleagues has deciphered the question of brain energy consumption and blood vessel density through newly developed maps that detail brain wiring to a resolution finer than a millionth of a meter, or one-hundredth of the thickness of a human hair.
… A key aspect is the personalisation of each athlete’s hydration based on their physique, the intensity of the exercise they do and the environmental conditions. A simple method to tell you whether or not you need to drink is to look at the colour of your urine before you start a training session or a game. If it is light yellowish or transparent, hydration is adequate. If, however, the colour is darker, then you need to hydrate more.
Eating fruits and vegetables throughout the day increases hydration, while a protein-based diet causes dehydration. It is important to identify each player’s type of diet and fluid intake, because muscles have a tendency to tear when dehydrated.
Black players in the NBA have 30% greater odds of leaving the league in any given season than white players who have equivalent performance on the court, a new study finds.
The results were driven mostly by bench players, who are the majority of those in the league, but who average less than 20 minutes of action per game.
These findings suggest that even in the NBA – a league in which Black players make up 70-75% of those on the court – African Americans face discrimination, said Davon Norris, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in sociology at The Ohio State University.
Lured by the chance to fix a troubled franchise while having full control of the football operations, Ron Rivera began to revamp the Washington Football Team last season with his eye first on the team’s culture and, more recently, by creating his own team of executives at the top. The result is a fresh spin on an old front-office model: Rivera is in charge of all football matters and has final say over the roster, but personnel decisions will be made collaboratively by a team of experienced executives.
But in the coming weeks, with the start of free agency and later the NFL draft, Rivera’s football brain trust, with General Manager Martin Mayhew and executive vice president of football/player personnel Marty Hurney, will face the first — and perhaps the toughest — test of its viability.
… The 2020 season, with it’s compressed schedule and frequent COVID-19 issues, forced many teams to push players to the big leagues who they didn’t expect to before spring training was shut down. I watched it up close with an Astros pitching staff that saw 10 hurlers make their major league debut. Facing a nearly two-decade long playoff drought, Seattle finished just two games behind Houston for a playoff spot in last year’s expanded format, and whatever tweaking he might still need to do, it’s nearly impossible to argue Kelenic wouldn’t have been an improvement over the Mariners’ left field situation, centering as it did around players like Tim Lopes, José Marmolejos, Dee Strange-Gordon, Sam Haggerty and Dylan Moore.
There’s nothing wrong with a team making a pre-debut offer per se. In Kelenic’s case, it would have provided him with what was almost certainly tens of millions of dollars of insurance against all sorts of things that can go wrong between now and when a player with no major league service time enters free agency. Kelenic turned it down, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Mather indicated that Kelenic was going to “bet on himself,” a phrase used frequently in such negotiations. I love players who bet on themselves. It speaks to confidence, and confidence is a big part of makeup. The problem comes when not signing the contract — rather than readiness — results in Kelenic not playing in the big leagues.
SB Nation, Pride of Detroit blog, Erik Schlitt from
The 40-yard dash can be very exciting. People love to watch speed and players can create exciting, near-mythical stories with displays of athleticism that will follow them beyond their careers.
From Calvin Johnson’s 4.35-second 40-yard dash in someone else’s shoes to Deion Sanders’ running 4.27-seconds and leaving the building because he had done enough are fantastic stories, but they really only proved what everyone already knew—they were really fast players.
The 40-yard dash has been the highlight of NFL Combine coverage for the last several decades, but its value has been steadily decreasing in front offices across the NFL, and that includes the Detroit Lions now that Brad Holmes is the general manager.
Holmes comes from the Los Angeles Rams organization, and they have leaned on different methods to determine a player’s speed. First, they use the eye test. Does a player play fast during the game when they are scouting his film? Then, they will lean on newer pieces of technology, like GPS tracking data, to help expand their evaluation.