Demystifying the baseball yips: learn what they are, why they happen, and a practical four-week plan with mental skills and graded drills to restore smooth, confident throws under pressure.
Introducing DAVIES: A framework for Identifying Talent Across the Globe — American Soccer Analysis
In the world of sports, the search for an all-encompassing player evaluation metric is never-ending. Baseball was the first to develop its metric with Wins Above Replacement. Basketball followed suit with Player Efficiency Rating, and Hockey WAR has come into the fold within the past year. The US So
Expert consensus on skill acquisition in sport: A Delphi study
Skill acquisition is a rapidly evolving field in sport, but its definitions, roles and professional practices remain inconsistently articulated. Despite growing recognition of its importance, there...
Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime
Research on naps, meditation, nature walks and the habits of exceptional artists and athletes reveals how mental breaks increase productivity, replenish attention, solidify memories and encourage creativity
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game
A philosophy of games to help us win back control over …
Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game ; [with a new afterword]
Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and p…
Refusing to Be the Victim – How to Adopt a “Player” Mindset at Work
You can’t expect others to fix your problems. When you take responsibility for making the best of any situation, you have the power to make things better.
Inside Baseball: The Automated Ball-Strike System as an Object Lesson in Technological Rule Enforcement
Clearly-defined rules are often assumed to be straightforward to automate and evaluate. We challenge this assumption through an in-depth study of Major League Baseball's (MLB) seven-year experimentation with the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS). ABS is envisioned to call balls and strikes accurately: a seemingly straightforward use of technology to objectively determine the distance between a pitch and the strike zone. Although the strike zone is an area clearly defined in the rulebook, it took MLB seven years to figure out how to automate calling balls and strikes with ABS, showing how even seemingly straightforward rules require a complex translation process to operationalize via technological systems. In this paper, we trace the design decisions that led to the current implementation of ABS. Our case study reveals that "distance" exists even between a clear rule and its technological implementation. Using analytic frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), we show that such distance exists because (1) historically, the "ground truth" of the strike zone is contested: the rule in practice has always reflected a hybrid between the rulebook definition and umpires' enforcement decisions; and (2) the use of ABS is embedded in an existing eco-system, where the implementation of a technological enforcement system needs to balance multiple stakeholder values. This perspective challenges conventional evaluation paradigms that center on the distance between a formalized rule and its technological implementation, and instead calls for evaluating how such systems are experienced in practice. Addressing this question requires in-depth social science approaches, contributing to ongoing conversations in FAccT about the implementation and evaluation of sociotechnical systems.
‘Ugh Fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
Have you ever had a long-overdue task — a task which isn’t so bad in itself — but which you can’t even bring yourself to think about?
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Shape Up will help you break free of “best practices” that aren’t really working, think deeper about the right problems, and start shipping meaningful projects your team can celebrate.
We need more than a metaphor: here are testable diagnostics for comprehension debt
Do we understand our code? I think we need to get past symptoms and into causes. Here's a field-tested measure of one organizational condition that can erode comprehension (Overproduction Pressure) you can use to find out which world your team is living in.
Moneyball
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be 'the most influential book on sports ever written' (<em>People</em>), but 'you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it' (Janet Maslin, <em>New York Times</em>).<br /><br />One of <em>GQ</em>'s 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century • A <em>Kirkus Review</em> Best Book of the 21st Century (So Far), Moneyball, The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis, 9780393324815
Planning - The Core Reason Why Gameplay Feels Good
In this post I dig into planning, and how it is a fundamental part of what makes a game engaging. Planning affects many aspects of what is s...
Measuring Psychobiosocial States in Sport: Initial Validation of a Trait Measure
We examined the item characteristics, the factor structure, and the concurrent validity of a trait measure of psychobiosocial states. In Study 1, Italian athletes (N = 342, 228 men, 114 women, Mage = 23.93, SD = 6.64) rated the intensity, the frequency, and the perceived impact dimensions of a psychobiosocial states scale, trait version (PBS-ST), which is composed of 20 items (10 functional and 10 dysfunctional) referring to how they usually felt before an important competition. In Study 2, the scale was cross validated in an independent sample (N = 251, 181 men, 70 women, Mage = 24.35, SD = 7.25). The concurrent validity of the PBS-ST scale scores were also examined in comparison with two sport-specific emotion-related measures and a general measure of affect. Exploratory structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis of the data of Study 1 showed that a 2-factor, 15-item solution of the PBS-ST scale (8 functional items and 7 dysfunctional items) reached satisfactory fit indices for the three dimensions (i.e., intensity, frequency, and perceived impact). Results of Study 2 provided evidence of substantial measurement and structural invariance of all dimensions across samples. The low association of the PBS-ST scale with other measures suggests that the scale taps unique constructs. Findings of the two studies offer initial validity evidence for a sport-specific tool to measure psychobiosocial states.
One coach’s journey. “People learn most reliably when the environment does the honest work.” #SportsCoaching #EcologicalDynamics #coaching
Messier Sessions: A Coach’s Look Back
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