New for the 2008 NFL season: the NFL TV distribution maps that tell you which football games are going to be broadcast is which parts of the country. They're using zoomable Google Maps this year...here's what a typical coverage map looks like:
During football season in a TV market like NYC, which is dominated by coverage of two local teams (Giants and Jets), this is an essential tool for determining if you're actually gonna get to watch the game you want to on Sunday.
Not surprisingly, the players were significantly better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right 44 percent of the time.
It's thought that the brains of the players act as though they are actually taking the shot.
In other words, when professional basketball players watch another player take a shot, mirror neurons in their pre-motor areas might light up as if they were taking the same shot. This automatic empathy allows them to predict where the ball will end up before the ball is even in the air.
James Powderly, New Yorker and founder of the Graffiti Research Lab, was one of several Americans detained in China earlier this month for attempting to display protest messages related to Tibet during the Olympics. After 6 days in custody, he was released and sent back to the US. He's given a few interviews about his experience, all really interesting. From The Brooklyn Paper:
After more than a day of continuous questioning, cops drove the artists and activists - who assumed they were headed to the airport for deportation- to a Beijing jail, where they were stripped, photographed, screened, separated from each other, and placed in cells with other prisoners. Powderly joined 11 other prisoners in a cell with only eight beds, no potable water, and bright lights that illuminated the tiny room 24-hours a day to keep the detainees from sleeping.
Would you say the interrogations were torture? Well, I think probably, a lot of people might disagree, even some of my other detainees might feel like what they received wasn't torture. And relative to what someone might receive on a daily basis at a place like Gitmo it certainly is not particularly harsh. It's kind of like being a little bit pregnant, we were a little bit tortured. We were strapped into chairs in uncomfortable positions, we were put into cages with blood on the floor and told we would never live, we were sleep deprived the entire time. There was an interrogation every night and they kept us up all day. They never turned the lights off in the cells. We were fed food that was inedible, we were not given potable water. Any time you threaten and take the numbers of family members and take down home addresses, there's an element of mental torture there. There's physical torture in the form of us having to sit in uncomfortable positions all day long and spending the night strapped to a metal chair inside of a cage. We all have cuts and bruises from that, and some of my peers were beaten up a little bit.
Powderly also stated that before he left, $2000 was extracted from his bank account by the Chinese as a fee for his plane ticket to the US. I know James a bit from Eyebeam, and for whatever stupid reason, when I first read about his detention, it never occurred to me that the detained Americans would be interrogated...I thought the Chinese would just hold them until the Olympics were over and send them home. To be interrogated to the point of mistreatment...well, glad you're home, James.
Kristin Armstrong, the Olympic gold medalist in the women's individual time trial in road cycling, took a GPS unit along with her when she previewed the road course in Beijing in December 2007. When she got home to Idaho, she d/led the data, put it into Google Earth, and found a similar local loop on which to train.
This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race.
Update: Caveat to the links above: all the photos above are lifted from elsewhere. You may prefer the collection at Big Picture instead. I've got mixed feelings about sites that take photos from other sites without proper attribution. On one hand, the photographers are not getting their due credit and payment for those photos but on the other, the act of collecting and curating adds something new to the work and results in something worthwhile. I wish there were a way for sites to make groups of photos like these without the hefty licensing expenses...the photographers get more of their photos out there and we get all sorts of neat views through the lenses of the photographers and talented curators. (thx, josh)
My Olympics-themed New Yorker cartoon idea: Two men walk down the hallway of an office. One of the men, just laid off, carries a box with his things in it and says to the other man, "Don't worry, I'll work my way back through the repechage."
With a Russian athlete leading the javelin competition, Czech thrower Barbora Spotakova stepped up for her final throw and thought about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia forty years ago that day. After her victory, she described her goal with that throw in a wonderful turn of phrase:
I was wondering if I could turn the date.
I don't know if that's a translation or what, but non-native speakers of English often express ideas more beautifully than native speakers do (Nabokov for example).
Somewhat related...how perfect is the name of the US women's soccer team goalkeeper: Hope Solo.
Update: I need a do-over on this one. First of all, Nabokov is a native English speaker; in fact, he could read and write English before he could Russian. Second, the NY Times modified the quote in that article! When I read it, the selection above was a direct quote attributed to Spotakova. Now the passage reads:
"Aug. 21 is a very special day for the Czech Republic -- it's the 40th anniversary of the Soviet invasion in 1968," she said afterward. "I of course had a Russian competitor against me. She was winning with such a long throw," she added, and said she wondered if she'd be able to turn the date to her advantage.
That's much less poetic...I wonder if there was a translation misunderstanding or something. (thx, dan & nivan)
One of the best ways to watch the Olympics is to chase down all the references made by NBC's commentators on YouTube and watch them in addition to (or instead of) the regular telecast. Here are some of the ones I've found.
Olga Korbut's uneven parallel bars routine from the 1972 Olympics (above). Love that dismount! The skills done on the bars today are so much more athletic but Korbut's routine was a magical flowing performance. At the rate the women today are going, the uneven parallel bars will soon be replaced by the high bar used in the men's competitions...they barely use the bottom bar anymore.
My recollection of the men's 4x100m relay at the 1984 Olympics involves the US team trailing after three legs when Carl Lewis (still my favorite Olympian) seizes the baton from Calvin Smith and thunders down the last 100 meters, singlehandedly winning the race and smashing the world record. The reality was somewhat different. The American team was way ahead when Lewis got the baton but it still is amazing to watch him pull away from the rest of the field like that. Bolt-like, innit?
A similar pulling away occurred in 1996 by Michael Johnson in the 200 meters. No one even came close to threatening his world record for 12 years until the emergence of Usain Bolt.
In 1988, Greg Louganis hit his head on the board on his third-to-last dive in the preliminaries of the men's springboard. He returned to qualify for the next round and eventually won the gold medal in the event.
Speaking of tear-inducing performances, Kerri Strug hobbled up to the vault runway on a bum ankle and hit a 9.712 on her final vault in the team competition at the 1996 Games, landing more or less perfectly on one foot, clinching a victory for the US team. Or so the story goes. As with all mythology, the truth is present but not entirely adhered to. As it turned out, the US team had enough of a lead on the Russian team that Strug's last vault was unnecessary. But it hardly dimishes the moment for Strug. At the time, she thought she had to do the vault for the medal and she went out there and stuck it.
Getting a photograph of Phelps from above is priceless -- so it's all worth the hassle. Here he is winning gold in the 200 meter individual medley. This was shot with a 400mm 2.8 handheld--oh yeah, hand holding a 12 pound lens ain't easy. Luckily it was strapped to me -- and I to the catwalk with oodles of safety cables. We weren't allowed to being extra CF Cards or even a paper start list, which is pretty extreme if you ask me. We were patted down before we went up by the photo escorts, and we all tried to get things in -- even our credentials were left behind. While extreme, I agree with one of the photo escorts who said that if even one sheet of paper floated harmlessly down from the catwalk. it would be game over for everyone -- no more catwalk access.
You can keep up with Laforet's Olympic output at his blog. (thx, stacy)
Eyeballing the chart would suggest that the cutting edge of human achievement in the 200m is anything sub-19.7. A 19.59 at Beijing would be phenomenal. Then you scroll down -- way down -- and you hit Johnson's 19.32.
Johnson has stated that he's fully prepared for Usain Bolt to break his record.
Cavic seems like an interesting guy and is handling the close loss well. He wrote an entry on his blog entitled "Success!!!"
On winning a SILVER medal: I am completely happy, and still in complete disbelief that I was able to achieve this feat! I'm not joking... It's a tough loss, but I'm on cloud nine. I congratulated Phelps and his coach Bob Bowman. I'm just glad the race was fun to watch for everyone. It was a pleasure for me, really.
Cavic came to Beijing with the goal of winning the bronze in this event; he called his silver "the greatest moment of my life". I also liked this account of his pre-race routine:
Hall said he could tell before the race that Cavic was in the right frame of mind to challenge Phelps, when he adopted the same prerace routine as Phelps by putting one foot on the starting block and turning to face in his rival's direction.
"Most guys are trembling when they have to step up to Michael Phelps," Hall said. "But he did not fear him, and it showed."
Cavic said he was not "staring him down" before the race.
"Both of us had metallic goggles, so I couldn't see his eyes, and he couldn't see mine," Cavic said. "Maybe he was able to see the reflection of himself, and he was like, Hey, I look pretty good. I saw myself in his reflection and was like, I'm keeping this under control."
OMEGA touch pads and starting blocks are part of an integrated timing system capable of recording times to the nearest 1/1000th of a second. However, because it is not possible to build swimming pools in which each lane is guaranteed to be precisely the same length, Olympic and World Records are still recorded to the nearest 1/100th of a second.
Before each race during the Olympics, Michael Phelps is seen sporting those ubiquitous white iPod earbuds. But what's he listening to? A lot of rap and hip hop.
So is the broken bat mystery merely a question of maple vs. ash? As a woodworker, I doubt it. I will concede that the safety question is best answered with the choice of ash over maple because I'd bet the ash will be far less likely to break in two and send a hurtling projectile. More likely, ash will just crack or splinter.
Target panic, as the condition is known, causes crack shots to suddenly lose control of their bows and their composure. Mysteriously, sufferers start releasing the bow the instant they see the target, sabotaging any chance of a gold-medal shot. Others freeze up and cannot release at all. Target panic is akin to the yips in baseball and golf, when accomplished athletes can no longer make a simple throw to first base or stroke an easy putt.
Some researchers have asserted that there are two types of yips, neurological (when groups of neurons become worn from overuse) and psychological.
For the past few years, Mark Bottrell has been tracking how many players who have appeared in RBI Baseball (from 1988) and Tecmo Super Bowl (from 1991) are still active in MLB and the NFL. Sad news this year...only one player is still active.
The designation falls somewhere between insult and accolade. Mr. Vansevenant, who after Stage 18 sits in 150th place, some 3 hours and 45 minutes behind Mr. Sastre, is indeed the worst-placed rider in the Tour de France. But, in turn, he has outlasted those who abandoned the Tour through illness, injury or simple exhaustion; those who were eliminated for failing to finish within each day's time limit and are forced to withdraw; and those who were banned or withdrew for doping-related causes. From year to year, about 20% of the riders drop out. In other words, you can't simply coast to last place; you have to work for it.
Wim Vansevenant did hang on to become the first three-time winner of the Lanterne Rouge.
Yes, per the rules of the game, only five players are eligible to catch a pass during a particular play and seven players have to set up on the line of scrimmage. But in the minds of Bryan and Humphries, you can develop an infinite number of plays with an infinite number of formations.
Talk about confusing a defense.
"It presents a different set of challenges for defenses because they have to account for which guys go out or might go out," Bryan said. "Those guys who are ineligible to go down the field and catch a pass, they can take a reverse pitch or a negative screen or a hitch behind the line of scrimmage.
This 4-minute video provides a good look at how the offense functions and there's lots more at a11offense.com. (via clusterflock)
Ben Fry analyzes the data from an intelligence test administered to all incoming NFL players and displays the results by position. Offensive players do better than defensive players on the test, although running backs score the lowest (wide receivers and cornerbacks also don't do well). As Michael Lewis suggested in The Blind Side, offensive tackles are the smartest players on the field, followed by the centers and then the quarterbacks.
In his latest podcast, Bill Simmons apologizes (sort of) for his stupid article on why tennis is sucky and boring, calling it "maybe the dumbest column I've ever written". But then he goes on to say that what Wimbledon needs is a retractable roof on Centre Court and lights so that matches can proceed without fear of rain or night. Both of which are totally happening next year, unbeknowst to Simmons.
If you're a sports columnist, it helps if you're, you know, interested in sports. Many columnists are only interested in the big three sports -- football, basketball, baseball -- and treat other sports with a not-so-veiled disinterest or even distain. Competition, both against others and with the self, is at the base of all sports and if, as a so-called "sports fan", you can't find something of that to love about tennis or badminton or NASCAR, maybe you need to look elsewhere for work. Simmons needs to bring himself up to speed on tennis; he's missed a lot.
And if you're writing about a sport you don't know much about and argue that it needs to be changed in such a way that makes it more exciting for the short attention span generation, you should also be prepared to advocate for the 35-game NBA season, the 60-game MLB season, moving the pitcher's mound back to 65 feet, eliminating charging in the NBA, and 11-on-10 in NFL games.
In what was probably the weirdest soccer match finish ever, Barbados tied their match against Grenada with an own goal to send the match into overtime where they won by the 2 goals needed to qualify for the finals in the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup.
Needing to beat Grenada by two clear goals to qualify for the finals in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados had established a 2-0 lead midway through the second half and were seemingly well in control of the game. However, an own goal by a Bajan defender made the score 2-1 and brought a new ruling into play, which led to farce. Under the new rule, devised by the competition committee to ensure a result, a match decided by sudden death in extra time was deemed to be the equivalent of a 2-0 victory. With three minutes remaining, the score still 2-1 and Grenada about to qualify for the finals, Barbados realised that their only chance lay in taking the match to sudden death. They stopped attacking their opponents' goal and turned on their own. In the 87th minute, two Barbadian defenders, Sealy and Stoute, exchanged passes before Sealy hammered the ball past his own goalkeeper for the equaliser.
The Grenada players, momentarily stunned by the goal, realised too late what was happening and immediately started to attack their own goal as well to stop sudden death. Sealy, though, had anticipated the response and stood beside the Grenada goalkeeper as the Bajans defended their opponents' goal. Grenada were unable to score at either end, the match ended 2-2 after 90 minutes and, after four minutes of extra time, Thorne scored the winner for Barbados amid scenes of celebration and laughter in the National Stadium in Bridgetown.
1. The Federer/Nadal final at Wimbledon was epic. I was tense for the entire duration of the final three sets, which lasted about 2.5 to 3 hours. After years of sportswriters declaring that Roger Federer is the best player of all time, we might be faced with the possibility that he's not even the best player of his generation. Two data points: 1) Nadal has shown that he can win on any surface, including Federer's specialty, and 2) Nadal's head-to-head record against Federer is 10-5 (although many of those wins came on clay). The match also clearly reveals the idiocy of this lame Bill Simmons article about how tennis needs to change.
2. Joey Chestnut successfully defended his title this weekend at the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, eating 59 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. He needed a 5-dog overtime to hold off long-time champ Takeru Kobayashi, who has lost to Chestnut the last two years. Chestnut weighs 230 pounds while Kobayashi is only 160 pounds.
3. The US Olympic swimming trials are over and Michael Phelps qualified in 5 individual events and will likely participate in three relays as well, giving him a chance to break Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals won in a single Olympics. Overshadowing Phelps' achievements was "41-year-old mom" (that's how they kept describing her on TV) Dara Torres, who qualified in both the 100-meter freestyle and the 50-meter freestyle.
Update: Ok, Nadal can't consistently win on hardcourt. But he's 22...give him time. (thx, everyone)
Tim Lincecum is a 5' 10" 172-pound Major League pitcher with a 98-mph fastball. Such velocity out of such a small frame is attributed to his unique (but mechanically sound) pitching technique.
One key to Lincecum's delivery is to keep his left side, especially his left shoulder, aimed toward his target for as long as possible. "Don't open up too soon because then you lose leverage," Tim says. "If you twist a rubber band against itself, the recoil is bigger. The more torque I can come up with, the better."
Where Lincecum truly separates himself from most pitchers is the length of his stride. It is ridiculously long as it relates to his height. And just as his left foot, the landing foot, appears to be nearing the ground at the end of his stride, he lifts it as if stepping over a banana peel -- extending his stride even more. The normal stride length for a pitcher is 77% to 87% of his height. Lincecum's stride is 129%, or roughly 7 1/2 feet.
She's 41 years old, has a two-year-old daughter, and won her first Olympic medal, a relay gold, in 1984. Torres is training to make the 2008 US Olympic team, but it's not some casual attempt to relive the good old days: Torres set the American record in the 50-meter freestyle just a few months ago. As the photo above attests, part of Torres' continuing success is due to her training regimen.
Torres calls resistance stretching her "secret weapon." Bob Cooley, who invented the discipline, describes it in less-modest terms. According to Cooley, over a two-week period in 1999, his flexibility system turned Torres "from being an alternate on the relay team to the fastest swimmer in America." The secret to Torres's speed, Cooley says, is that his technique not only makes her muscles more flexible but also increases their ability to shorten more completely, and when muscles shorten more completely, they produce greater power and speed. "What do race-car drivers do when they want to go faster?" Cooley asks. "They don't spend more hours driving around the track. They increase the biomechanics of the car. And that's what resistance flexibility is doing for Dara - increasing her biomechanics."
The Olympic Trials are going on right now in Omaha, NE. The women's 50-meter freestyle preliminaries take place on July 5 with the final on July 6, broadcast live on NBC.
Runners in lane eight got off the mark on average about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane one, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates to about a metre's difference at the finish line.
In celebration of Euro 2008, public prankster and more-than-fair soccer striker Rémi Gaillard made the following video of himself using the urban landscape as a soccer pitch. Gaillard scores goals into police vans, trash cans, open windows, etc. to the annoyance of his oblivious goalies.
Something about the video seemed familiar and after a bit of searching, I discovered that the same fellow was also responsible for one of my favorite links from a few years ago, Rocky Recreated. There are tons of his videos on YouTube, most of them centered on Gaillard's brand of graffiti-esque performance art. I can't condone some of his actions but he's certainly amusing to watch. (via memeticians)
John Gruber, the sorest winner on the web when it comes to sports or Apple, points out that I was wrong in my prediction that the Lakers would win the NBA Finals this year. I didn't actually care about the series either way...but after rooting for him in Minnesota for all those years, it sure is great to see Kevin Garnett win a championship.
I was also wrong about Paul Pierce. I never liked him as a player; thought he was soft, lazy, & petulant, settled for the outside shot too much, and just didn't have what it took to be his team's star player. He's put all that behind him; in this series, Pierce showed that he's definitely one of the top players in the league, deserving of his accolades. Count me among the number of Paul Pierce fans.
"The main functional characteristic of mirror neurons is that they become active both when the monkey makes a particular action (for example, when grasping an object or holding it) and when it observes another individual making a similar action." In other words, these peculiar cells mirror, on our inside, the outside world; they enable us to internalize the actions of another. They collapse the distinction between seeing and doing.
This suggests that when I watch Kobe glide to the basket for a dunk, a few deluded cells in my premotor cortex are convinced that I, myself, am touching the rim. And when he hits a three pointer, my mirror neurons light up as I've just made the crucial shot. They are what bind me to the game, breaking down that 4th wall separating fan from player. I'm not upset because my team lost: I'm upset because it literally feels like I lost, as if I had been on the court.
The NBA Finals start tonight, pitting the LA Lakers against the Boston Celtics. Despite having finished with the best regular season record in the league, the Celtics find themselves underdogs against the Lakers, who ripped through the tough Western conference bracket with little difficulty. I'm going with the majority on this one: Lakers in six games (possibly even five) and continued heartbreak for New England fans after the high of the Red Sox's second World Series victory last season.
Every year or so, the same question is asked: how is the Moneyball strategy working out for the Oakland A's. This year's answer is: pretty damn good.
Additions like [Frank] Thomas, motivated by this incremental approach, help explain why the A's have won so many games in recent years even though they've consistently traded away or declined to re-sign their top players (Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, etc.), who demand top dollar--and largely on the basis of past performance. In short, Beane has bought low and sold high repeatedly and systematically, and as a result the A's have won more games this decade than every team in the league except the Yankees (whose team payroll is routinely two-to-four times larger than Oakland's).
The Griffey card was the perfect piece of memorabilia at the perfect time. The number the card was given only furthered the prospect of his cardboard IPO. Junior was chosen to be card No. 1 by an Upper Deck employee named Tom Geideman, a college student known for his keen eye for talent. Geideman earned his rep by consistently clueing in the founders of The Upper Deck, the card shop where the business was hatched, on which players would be future stars. Geideman took the task of naming the player for the first card very seriously. Using an issue of Baseball America as his guide, Geideman knew that card No. 1 would belong to Gregg Jefferies, Sandy Alomar Jr., Gary Sheffield, or a long-shot candidate, the phenom they called "The Kid." It's probably the most thinking Geideman ever did compiling a checklist, save for the 1992 Upper Deck set when he assigned numbers that ended in 69 to players with porn-star-sounding names. (Dick Schofield at No. 269, Heathcliff Slocumb at No. 569, and Dickie Thon at No. 769.)
I still remember when I got my one and only "Griffey card" (as everyone called it then). My friend Derek and I ventured out in a downpour in response to a call from Al, the owner of our small town's only card shop. Al ran his shop out of his mother's garage; he was maybe 30 years old at the time, still lived with his mom, and was one of the nicest, most generous people I've ever met. He had half a box of Upper Deck packs that he'd procured from who knows where. Derek and I bought the lot at a slight markup over retail and opened them right there in the cold garage. We both got a Griffey that night; I've still got mine sheathed in a hard plastic case.
When I think back on how precious those cards were to me then and consider my current purchasing power relative to my 16-year-old self, I feel a giddy power in the realization that if I wanted to, I could go out right now and buy 10 or 20 Griffey cards. Gah, where's that eBay login info?
Over at Stingy Kids, Adriana has a thoughtful and link-filled post about South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius. Pistorius is a double-amputee who runs on carbon fiber blades in place of his lower legs; here's a video of him running in a 400m race. Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Pistorius can compete for a spot in the Beijing Olympics against "able-bodied" athletes, which overturned a previous ruling that he could not compete because his blades give him a mechanical advantage.
What's clear is that the seemingly politically correct replacement of "disabled" with "differently abled" is not only warranted but perhaps doesn't go far enough. How about "super abled" or "superbly abled"? Lengthen or add a bit more spring to those blades and Pistorius may win every race handily and take first in the high jump to boot.
Pistorius is not the first athlete with super abilities. Steroids and HGH are outlawed in most sports because it's felt they give too much advantage. Baseball pitchers routinely opt for something called Tommy John surgery, many athletes get laser eye surgery to improve their vision, and many more potential augmentation schemes are right around the corner. And lest you think this is just about sports, maybe the guy in the next cubicle over is regularly taking Provigil to improve his memory, concentration, and his chances at that promotion you wanted.
Richardson's title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0). On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Coleman of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).
Picking a subject from his upcoming book, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the difficulty in hiring people in the increasingly complex thought-based contemporary workplace. Specifically that we're using a collection of antiquated tools to evaluate potential employees, creating what he calls "mismatch problems" in the workplace, when the critera for evaluating job candidates is out of step with the demands of the job.
To illustrate his point, Gladwell talked about sports combines, events that professional sports leagues hold for scouts to evaluate potential draftees based on a battery of physical, psychological, and intelligence tests. What he found, a result that echoes what Michael Lewis talks about in Moneyball, is that sports combines are a poor way to determine how well an athlete will eventually perform as a member of their eventual team. One striking example he gave is the intelligence test they give to NFL quarterbacks. Two of the test's all-time worst performers were Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, Hall of Famers both.
A more material example is teachers. Gladwell says that while we evaluate teachers on the basis of high standardized test scores and whether they have degrees and credentialed training, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.
When Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky hit her first career home run in one of the last games of the softball season, something odd happened. She missed the bag at first and when she doubled back to touch it, her knee gave out. Her teammates were unable to help her around the bases so it looked like her only career home run would turn into a single. Then a member of the other team, a senior with knee problems of her own, said:
Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance chart for the 2008 MLB season that compares team payrolls with winning percentage. The entire payroll of the Florida Marlins appears to be less than what Jason Giambi and A-Rod *each* made last year.
This season, baseball managers are being a bit more experimental in how they construct their batting and pitching lineups. For instance, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers started relief pitchers in games that they suspected might be shortened by rain in order to save the scheduled starter for the next game. The Braves shifted their pitcher to the outfield for one at-bat then brought him back to the mound for the next one.
The article is also notable for this quote from an Angels spokesperson, who said that Angels star Vladimir Guerrero is "somebody who's not affected by things". !!
MLB tracks every pitch thrown in a game using a system called PITCHf/x. You may have seen this system in action during televised games; it's used to show the viewer where the pitch was located when it crossed the plate relative to the strike zone. On his baseball statistics blog, Josh Kalk takes these stats and lets you slice and dice them however you want.
One of the most interesting statistics measured is the break of a pitch...how much up-and-down and side-to-side motion a pitched ball goes through after leaving the pitcher's hand. The break demonstrates why the knuckleball is such a difficult pitch to hit, particularly when used in conjunction with other pitch types. Here's a graph showing the break on knuckleballer Tim Wakefield's pitches so far this season:
The ball is all over the place...the hitter doesn't know where it's going. Compare that to the break on the three different pitches thrown by fellow Red Sox player Daisuke Matsuzaka:
Now take a look at the graphs on the player cards for Wakefield and Matsuzaka. Wakefield's pitches also have a wider range of velocities...Matsuzaka's pitches range in speed from about 77 to 95 mph while Wakefield's pitches range from 65 to 95 mph. And the graphs don't even account for the multiple breaks that a knuckleball can make during a single pitch. The uncertainties of speed and break of a knuckleballer's pitches combine to create a lot of trouble for batters...they neither know where the ball's going nor when it's going to arrive. (thx, fred)
P.S. So why is Wakefield not as effective as many other major league pitchers (his career stats aren't that impressive), none of whom throw the knuckleball? One guess is that sometimes the knuckleball doesn't break and essentially becomes a 60-65 mph meatball right down the middle of the plate, a pitch any decent hitter can put anywhere he wants.
Update: I thought that Wakefield's upper velocity range was a little high. I'm getting a lot of feedback saying that Wakefield's fastball is in the low 80s, not the mid-90s. Looks like we've got some screwy data here.
Also, another reason why knuckleballers are of limited effectiveness: it's difficult to throw a strike on command, which can be a problem when you're behind in the count and you have to throw your 80 mph fastball for a strike. (thx, jonathan & steve)
Few pitchers are able to throw the knuckler, giving those who can a cult-like status. It generally requires very large fingers. As Hall of Famer Willie Stargell explained it, "Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor's mailbox".
Yankees third baseman Wade Boggs once used the knuckleball to retire the side in an inning during a rare appearance on the mound. When he's got his stuff working, I love watching knuckleballer Tim Wakefield pitch.
A list of the top one articles by Neal Pollack about how sportswriters should stop writing about the NBA MVP race and, oh yeah, lists of stuff are dumb:
Sportswriters and pundits, on the other hand, are treating the MVP race with the gravitas of a presidential election. That's because they make up the Electoral College. When they're debating who's going to win the award, they're not really talking about who they think the best player is; they're talking about whom they should pick as the best player. It's the ultimate circle-jerk of sports-guy self-regard.
First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher's mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance.
Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.
The comments are entertaining as well; the level of erudition is higher than most blog comment threads, but the insults and arguments are still there.
Rather than returning to their original proportions, the muscles of the steroid users who'd stopped taking the drug looked remarkably similar to those of the subjects who were still using. They also had larger muscle fibers and more growth-inducing "myonuclei" in their muscle cells than the nonsteroid users.
Just got around to reading Ben McGrath's New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra, the former baseball All-Star who has, somewhat improbably, become rich post-baseball as a business owner and day trader.
Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach ("the best car") and a Gulfstream ("the best jet").
But maybe not so improbably...Dykstra has a canny sense for business:
Dykstra chose car washes, he says, because of the automobile-centric culture in California, and because "it was a business that couldn't be replaced by a computer chip." He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices-startup, high-mileage, various blends-from his inventory. "You get the shit out of the ground," he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, "or the shit made in the laboratory that's the perfect lubricant" (Syntec). "Meaning, it's either A or B. It's not about the oil. It's about the people. They got confused." He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee ("the good kind"), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores.
One of the characteristics of Dykstra the businessman is his constant use of baseball metaphors and comparisons. Here's a listing from the article:
The Players Club, in contrast to the television installation, would be "major league," he explained, and to that end he was assembling an editorial staff of ".300 hitters," and lining up sponsors to match.
Dykstra's business card gives an address for the "headquarters" of The Players Club, at 245 Park Avenue, which he describes as "big league-like, top five addresses in the world."
Next, he took a call from a designer he wanted to hire for the magazine. "You worked for Esquire and In Style," he said, delivering a pep talk. "That's called the big leagues. It's like in baseball. You can't go above the major leagues. There's not another league. We're teeing it up high, dude."
He quoted from Confucius, Dickens, and Billy Joel, and balanced straight stock picks ("Intel is the N.Y. Yankees of the chipmakers") with musings about fatherhood and current events, like the war in Iraq, seldom passing up the opportunity to draw extended sports analogies.
"My approach in investing is much the same as my approach to hitting," he wrote. "I would rather take a walk or single and reach first than shoot for a home run and strike out swinging."
Dykstra hopes the magazine will help players recognize the importance of marriage and family. He drew three stick figures and named them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Above Tom, he drew a man and a woman-two parents. Dick got a father but no mother, and Harry the reverse. "Do you know the studies and what they've proven?" he asked. "You should look that up, dude. Like, bad things. It's like the one-one count." The one-one count is another of Dykstra's baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on. If a batter falls behind, one ball and two strikes, he's in a hole from which, the statistics augur, he will not recover, even if he is Barry Bonds; and if he gets ahead, to two balls and one strike, he wrests control from the pitcher and takes charge of his own destiny. Having two parents puts you in control of life's count, and enables you to become a .300 hitter.
Speaking of the Yankees, Derek Jeter always seems to get a lot of credit for those four World Series victories in five years but a quick look at the OBP stats for those years shows that Bernie Williams was the engine driving that offense. Jeter's a little overrated maybe?
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums -- camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it's such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
Rather than think about the mechanical details of their swing, [expert] golfers should focus on general aspects of their intended movement, or what psychologists call a "holistic cue word". For instance, instead of contemplating things like the precise position of the wrist or elbow, they should focus on descriptive adjectives like "smooth" or "balanced". An experimental trial demonstrated that professional golfers who used these "holistic cues" did far better than golfers who consciously tried to control their stroke.
Related: a reader recommended George Leonard's Mastery as a good read about deliberate practice. (thx, jd)
Update: Another recommendation: Inner Tennis. kottke.org reader Stuart says:
Reading this book a couple of years ago quite honestly transformed my tennis game: I am good at deliberate practice, which had allowed me to become technically very sound, but until then I was completely unable to consciously enter a state of relaxed concentration and execute in a match situation: I was a classic "over thinker". Gallwey's book treats relaxed concentration as a skill to be deliberately practiced, and gives an approach to do so. Highly recommended, and fascinating for any (thoughtful) sportsman.
Stephen Dubner wrote a short article on one of my favorite topics of the recent past: deliberate practice.
This means that, your level of natural talent notwithstanding, excellence is accomplished mainly through the tenets of deliberate practice, which are roughly:
1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.
Around All-Star time a couple of weeks ago, Nike released a shoe called the Nike Trash Talk, "the first Nike performance basketball sneaker completely produced from manufacturing waste". The shoe, worn by Steve Nash in a recent game, looks a bit like Frankenstein's monster with all the exposed stitching; it's a beautiful shoe and I want a pair. The problem is that it's one of those limited edition deals...which means they're already all sold out and sitting on the shelves of sneaker collectors next to hundreds of other boxes of shoes that will never be worn. I looked on eBay and found two pair but not in my size. What are my chances of getting a pair of these at approximately retail price? I'm not looking for a collectors item...I just want to wear them!
a high-scoring scheme featuring four perimeter players and a host of innovations. Unlike Knight's classic motion offense (which is based on screens) or Pete Carril's Princeton-style offense (which is based on cuts), Walberg's attack was founded on dribble penetration. To Calipari, at least, it embodied two wholly unconventional notions. One, there were no screens, the better to create spacing for drives. Two, the post man ran to the weak side of the lane (instead of the ball side), leaving the ball handler an open driving path to the basket.
On average, suboptimal play-calling decisions cost each team .85 wins over the course of the season.
In particular, the world champion Giants should have won another game had they called the right plays at the right times. ZEUS also analyzed play calling in "hyper-critical" situations (those fourth-down decisions with five or fewer yards needed for the first down) and found that on average, teams made the wrong calls more than 50% of the time. Here's an interview on the results with the guys behind ZEUS.
At 1 o'clock on a bright October afternoon, I'm standing in a convenience store parking lot five miles east of Martinsville, Va. In the 24 hours before the green flag drops on the Subway 500, I need to find a ride to the speedway and a $75 ticket to the sold-out race. Problem is, all I have on me is $20, a cell phone and a camcorder. And I'm not allowed to use any media connections to get into the race-or so much as mention the letters ESPN (at least not in that order).
Thus, I can watch Roger Clemens striking out 15 Mariners in a brilliant one-hitter and place his frame right on top of Don Larsen pitching his perfect game (27 Bums up, 27 Bums down) in 1956. And I can admire the grace of Bernie Williams in center field, while my teenage memories see Mantle's intensity, and my first impressions of childhood recall DiMaggio's elegance, in exactly the same spot. I can then place all three images upon the foundation of my father's stories of DiMaggio as a rookie in the 1936 Series, and my grandfather Papa Joe's tales of Babe Ruth in the first three New York Series of 1921-1923.
Dueling Kickoffs: To begin overtimes, each team will kick off to each other on consecutive plays. The team that advances the ball furthest will have possession at the point on the field where the ball was advanced. Sudden death is preserved.
But if they lose -- especially if they lose late -- the New England Patriots will be the most memorable collection of individuals in the history of pro football. They will prove that nothing in this world is guaranteed, that past returns do not guarantee future results, that failure is what ultimately defines us and that Gisele will probably date a bunch of other dudes in her life, because man is eternally fallible.
Jill Lepore would likely agree with Klosterman. In her recent New Yorker article on Benjamin Franklin (the patron saint of bloggers, BTW), she argues that he failed to follow many of his aphoristic writings and in doing so became more interesting.
He carried with him a little book in which he kept track, day by day, of whether he had lived according to thirteen virtues, including Silence, which he hoped to cultivate "to break a Habit I was getting into of Prattling, Punning and Joking." What made Franklin great was how nobly he strived for perfection; what makes him almost impossibly interesting is how far short he fell of it.
It's also worth noting that, per Aristotle and Shakespeare, the hero in a tragedy always has a fatal flaw; it's what makes him a hero and the story worth listening to.
Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well -- about an extra stroke per tournament -- when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, "exempt" players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger's presence doesn't mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35th-there's not much difference between the prize for 35th and 36th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger's hot streaks, when his competitors' prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors' scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger's well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors' scores were unaffected by Tiger's presence.
Double-blind peer review, in which neither author nor reviewer identity are revealed, is rarely practised in ecology or evolution journals. However, in 2001, double-blind review was introduced by the journal Behavioral Ecology. Following this policy change, there was a significant increase in female first-authored papers, a pattern not observed in a very similar journal that provides reviewers with author information. No negative effects could be identified, suggesting that double-blind review should be considered by other journals.
In the journal Animal Behaviour, biologist Michael Steele at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania examines squirrels' caching of nuts. While the furry-tailed creatures made a show of digging a hole in the ground and covering it with dirt and leaves when watched, one time out of five they were faking and nothing was buried.
The squirrels' deception increased after their nut caches were raided.
Art Grand Slam would be the perfect name for a web site showcasing the tennis-related art of Martina Navratilova. And so it is.
Almost 20 years since her last grand slam singles title, Martina Navratilova is back in action on the circuit -- only this time she is turning tennis strokes into brush strokes as she helps to create a new form of contemporary art.
In its crudest and, perhaps, most joyful expression, it involves the player hitting paint-covered tennis balls at a canvas, usually marked with court lines and prepared to resemble a playing surface: clay, grass or artificial.
Who wins the Super Bowl of Food: New York City or Boston? Ed Levine says it's no contest: New York all the way.
What has Boston bestowed upon us, foodwise? Brown bread, baked beans, Boston cream pie, and Parker House rolls. Pretty slim pickins', don't you think? How far would you go out of your way for some baked beans or some brown bread? I'd only go a block or two at the most. Now if you expanded the geographic food purview of the Patriots to all of New England, that might be an interesting discussion, because then New England clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams would enter into the fray.
Ed's a bit hard on Boston here...there's some excellent food to be found in the city and its surrounds.
In their ongoing quest to be the world's greatest sports website—heck, the world's greatest anything website—The Wizznutzz "found" some "never-before-seen personal letters from Pres. Richard Nixon written to Kevin Loughery shortly after the Washington Bullets lost in the 1971 Finals to the Bucks." There's a long meditative section on watching crows in a field in winter that is particularly stellar.
After committing to a wave, the surfer must confront the sheer tonnage of hurtling water and hit a 10-foot-wide slot of the best spot to launch a ride with pinpoint timing, a maneuver that Washburn has described as akin to "trying to place a Dixie cup on the horn of a charging rhino."
Oher was named to the all-Southeastern Conference first team after the season and is considered one of the top offensive linemen prospects in the country. He has already shown the promise scouts predicted when he was a homeless 16-year-old who didn't know how to play football.
For the first time since 1982, an NBA team has won a game protest and the next time the Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat meet, they'll replay the final 51.9 seconds of the disputed game before playing the scheduled full game.
With a second major storm bearing down, four of the most experienced big-wave surfers in the world launched a boat and two Jet Skis toward Cortes Bank, an underwater mountain range whose tallest peak rises 4,000 feet from the ocean floor to within about four feet of the surface. The perilous spot, about 100 miles off the coast of Southern California, had been surfed only a handful of times in the past decade. With just the right conditions, its shallow waters turn huge ocean swells into giant, perfect breaking waves.
Cortes Bank veteran Mike Parsons returned from the voyage absolutely certain that larger sea monsters are awaiting around the spooky open-ocean shoal. "It's getting closer and closer now...I guarantee you there will be a 100-foot-wave ridden out there," said Parsons. "For sure. There were several big peaks that jumped up at the top of the reef outside of us that could not have been too far off that size. If you put yourself in the right place at the right time, it will happen. It's only a matter of time now."
For photos and a nice audio feature with the crew that took the trip out there, head on over to Surfline.
The legend of touching the top of the backboard has gone on for years, and it has been excitedly attributed to so many different players that it's commonly assumed any numb
