XM MLB Chat

Sunday, September 27, 2015

LA Angels Halo lights up after David Freese walk-off home run















To see Halo animation, visit Angels twitter. 9/26/15, "FINAL - Angels 3, Mariners 2 David Freese wins it with his first career walk-off home run!" Angels twitter, MLB

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Alex Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera reflect on business and baseball at Carnegie Hall, Thursday afternoon, Sept. 24

9/15/15, "Mariano Rivera and Alex Rodriguez Headline "Refections on Business and Baseball" September 24th," AthleteSpeakers.com, Carson Ingle

"Steiner Sports has put together another great night featuring New York Yankees legends.  Baseball’s all-time great closer Mariano Rivera is teaming up with current comeback success Alex Rodriguez for a great [afternoon] catering to Yankees fans and business professionals.

On (Thursday) September 24th, “Reflections on Business and Baseball” will take place at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York at 1:00.  Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Mark Lasry will also join Rivera and Rodriguez.

General Admission includes one mezzanine seat and costs $99.  To purchase tickets call 914-307-1065 or email CorporateMarketing@SteinerSports.com.

Rivera tallied an MLB record 652 saves during 17 seasons as Yankees closer. The 13-time All-Star won five World Series titles in pinstripes and holds postseason records with a 0.70 ERA and 42 saves.

In 2013, the Yankees retired Rivera’s jersey.  He has also devoted his efforts in retirement to the several charitable causes through the Mariano Rivera Foundation.

Rodriguez has been one of the biggest stories in baseball after missing the entire 2014 season.  He collected his 3000th hit this year and is currently hitting .257 with 31 homeruns and 82 RBI.

Currently, Rodriguez ranks fourth in baseball history with 685 homers.  The 14-time All-Star has long been a prodigy since being the first overall pick of the Seattle Mariners in 1993."... First image from Athlete Speakers, second image from CarnegieHall.org

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Friday, September 11, 2015

World Trade Center Jumpers, September 11, 2001

















Above, Jumpers, 9/11/01, Reuters photo

[<span class=


























 




















"The Falling Man," 9/11/01, ap photo by Richard Drew, via Esquire

  •  -------------------------------
9/10/11, "The 9/11 victims America wants to forget: The 200 jumpers who flung themselves from the Twin Towers who have been 'airbrushed from history'," UK Daily Mail, Tom Leonard
  • "Almost all of them jumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell."...
9/10/11, "Children of 9/11: Life with a parent missing," Newsday, Carol Polsky
9/9/11, "WaPo's Dionne: 'Time to Leave 9/11 Behind' as 'A Simple Day of Remembrance'," NewsBusters
A witness saw people jump to their death from the World Trade Center: "Then the crowd let out a collective gasp, I looked to see the first of many people falling through the sky. The television stations and the newspapers downplayed this aspect of a day already filled with enough shock and terror, but I place great importance on it because it immediately human-ised the situation for both myself and those around me. This wasn’t just a burning building; it was suddenly full of people, friends, and family. For me, it is the most haunting memory of the day. When I focussed on what the crowd had noticed, I too let out a cry so involuntary and so primeval that I barely recognised it as my own. It was not a piece of building falling to the ground, but a man, recognisable by his flapping tie and flailing arms and legs as he fell through the air. The situation was surreal no longer; my body shook with shock, my knees buckled and a light-headedness overwhelmed me with such severity that I thought I was either going to throw-up or fall down.
I sat down and looked up only to see more people jumping. I thought for a moment that they might have fallen, but there were too many people, their arms windmilling as they subconsciously tried to fight gravity and avoid the inevitable. Haunted by these visions numerous times since the incident, I have tormented myself by trying to imagine the extreme conditions that those people must have faced that they should choose certain death by leaping from the building over clinging to any hope of rescue. What were they thinking when they jumped; what did they think on the way down?...But my fear is that to forget is to fail the lesson and lose the opportunity. That’s why this raw wound will never completely heal and that things can never go back to ‘normal’. Because even as a simple bystander I have a responsibility to incite change for the rest of my life or I watched all those people die in vain."
  • --------------------------------------------
[Sept11AP3.<span class=

[Sept11AP2.<span class=

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Wednesday, September 09, 2015

Testing eyes to see if they predict future sports stars-BBC

9/9/15, "Eye test to spot future sports stars" BBC, by Susanna Jolly

Top sportspeople often seem to possess visual "superpowers", making near-impossible rapid reactions look easy.

Researchers in Bradford are looking for the link between visual processing and sporting performance. Their research could lead to a lab-based test that finds hidden talent and the cricket stars of tomorrow.

It could also help elite sports teams to place individuals into their optimum roles within the team, or plan specific vision training to improve performance.

In cricket, fielders in the slips often have less than half a second to respond and catch a ball travelling towards them - all with the added pressure of a match- or series-winning, or losing, moment.

This skill of tracking a trajectory, such as that of an oncoming ball, and coordinating your movement to catch or intercept it, is called "coincidence timing". It is pivotal in fast, dynamic sports like cricket, football and tennis.

A team at the University of Bradford, led by Dr Brendan Barrett, secured a £500,000 grant from the BBSRC to see if there is any scientific link between vision and coincidence timing. They have put elite cricketers and rugby league players through a battery of dynamic visual tests....
Members of the public were also tested and divided into "sporty" and "non-sporty" groups; over 400 participants were tested overall.
 
Eye on the ball

This is not your average visit to the optician. Tests included repeatedly attempting to count the number of dots on a screen after glimpsing them for just 150 milliseconds (0.15 seconds).

Another involved trying to catch a tennis ball travelling towards you at 35mph, wearing goggles programmed to increasingly restrict your vision, while your movements were tracked by infrared motion-capture technology.

This was a feat at which most of the elite cricketers excelled.

Dr. Barrett commented that a couple of "non-sporty" people had unexpectedly high levels of attainment.
However, no hidden talent was discovered among the assembled journalists today at the British Science Festival in Bradford.

With collaborators from John Moores University, Liverpool and St Andrew's University, as well as links with the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), the team has collected all its data and started the lengthy task of analysing the results, which should be available in the next year.

Dr Barrett said: "Our belief is - we have some preliminary evidence - that faster pickup of visual information is extremely important in sports like cricket. Better performance on the counting task and better performance on the catching task, matched with evidence from the kinematics, [would be] strong evidence that the two are linked."
If there are particular aspects of visual processing that improve performance and are specific to the elite players, such super-vision might be a natural or an acquired ability. "We don't know whether this is an innate skill," Dr Barrett explained, "because [they have done] many thousands of hours of practice. Once we find the link then we will be able to explore it."

This research could pave the way for finding hidden talent amongst children and encouraging them to pursue sports in which they are likely to succeed.

It could also help team selectors identify the best position for a player - for example a player with excellent dynamic visual skills may be placed in the slips rather than the deeper field.

Trying to gain that extra 1% or 2% at the top end of elite sport is crucial, and being able to identify which players would benefit most from focussed training could make the difference between winning or losing a match…or the next Ashes series."

Image caption: "The researchers used infrared motion-capture sensors to observe the catching hand and arm," copyright University of Bradford, via BBC



Stumbleupon StumbleUpon