Baseball is 90 percent mental, according to Hall of Famer Yogi Berra. It’s the impetus behind Ned Yost’s Baseball Academics mobile app, which Retain Train developed with the help of the Kansas City Royals manager. Of course, as Berra infamously said, the other half is physical. But other apps can deal with that. Baseball Academics is like a zombie – it just wants your brains.

While Yost is the face of the app, Mike Socha — owner of Retain Train — is the medulla oblongata. He operates the most essential functions to make this whole thing work.

“The goal is to get kids thinking,” Socha said. “There are always going to be mental mistakes. We can’t cure that. But we want to get the kids thinking.

Essentially, the app is a quiz for each defensive position to help players learn which base to throw to. Socha described the app’s system, which is geared towards youth, as a perfect intersection between speed and accuracy, through repetition in a flash card format, to commit scenarios to memory.

Yost described the game to The Kansas City Star as a baseball IQ test. It’s a test that Socha hopes the baseball community will use to evaluate players, along with their stats and physical skills. He said he’s working with Perfect Game and Baseball Factory to have them adopt his Baseball Academic Rating (BAR), which is the score a player earns by playing “official games.”

Users start out on level one, which simply informs where the runners are, how many outs and what inning the game is in. In each game, the user scans the scenarios and touches the base to throw to. As users advance through the training and official games (trainings are required before playing an official game, which is used to calculate a player’s BAR), they level up. Level two adds the score and eventually your positioning is detailed as well. Socha said the game is currently built to level four, but the plan is to reach level seven. However, I wasn’t able to determine what differences the advancing levels offered.

I played five official games as a shortstop on level one before I lost interest. In between each official game are required training games. I aced the official games, as you can see below, and was left wondering where I stood out among all shortstop BARs. But I can’t locate my BAR, or level up. When I asked Socha about advancing to level two, he said 30 official games with a score of 850 or better is needed to move up. And maybe because I’m not a 7-year-old boy anymore, and therefore the game wasn’t designed for a 30-something trying to prove himself as shortstop that could’ve been,  I’ve lost interest.

At shortstop on level one, the only real options to throw to are first base or second base. I learned to watch for runners at first, no matter the outs, and throw to second. If no one was on first, always throw to first, because my decision to throw home with a runner at third and less than two outs always resulted in an incorrect answer — likely because I didn’t know the score or if my shortstop was playing back or in at the grass.

I’m interested in the depth of the app as players continue to level up. Socha said there are leader boards and plans for contests. And if I had an ounce of perseverance in me, maybe I’d keep playing to see if I could school all those kid shortstops across the country for top BAR. The app is worthwhile to train baseball players on the fundamentals on where to throw the ball. However, it’d provide a better value if it expanded to include more complex scenarios, such as bunt defense or base running. There are other mental aspects to the game besides where to throw on defense.

The app is free for Android and iOS devices, however the free version only offers training exercises on level one. To jump further in to the experience, a premium membership is required, which costs $10 a month, or $100 for a one year subscription.

If you’re a fellow cord cutter then no doubt you’ve been just as giddy as myself at the thought of a standalone HBO service — dubbed named HBO Now — ever since it was announced it was in the works. Catching things like Last Week Tonight, Real Sports and more all without paying a premium cable television bill seemed too good to be true. Today HBO may have shaken me out of my dream scenario as today the company announced at an Apple event that the service will debut next month…specifically on Apple TV.

To their credit, HBO Now will be able to be streamed from any web browser, but only with Apple TV will the customer be able to see the premium programming on their televisions. No Roku, Chromecast, Fire TV or other service will be available at launch. CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter reported the HBO/Apple exclusive deal will last three months though that is yet to be confirmed by either company. On the hardware side of things, Apple is reducing the price of Apple TV from $99 down to $69,

Statista shows Apple TV holds a clear lead among streaming services, nearly double the share of the second place Roku.

With almost 60% of the streaming market shutout of utilizing HBO Now to its full potential or be forced to make an additional upfront hardware purchase, I’m struggling to maintain my previous enthusiasm.

(Header image via HBO)

Apple once again took the tech news industry hostage today, as their Spring Forward event promised to bring new insights into a few of their current products as well as the much anticipated Apple Watch. They announced an HBO partnership with the (now cheaper) Apple TV, an incredibly thin new MacBook, and also previewed ResearchKit — a new way for health professionals to crowd source medical research. But the biggest buzz leading up to the event was Apple’s new wearable, and the folks from Cupertino certainly made that a highlight of the presentation. We don’t know all the specifics yet, but sports fans and fitness nerds should have at least a few things to look forward to.

The biggest fitness app really isn’t an app at all, but a built-in feature to the watch. Apple Watch is chock full of fitness and activity tracking options including a workout app, basic step and burned-calorie counters, and will even feature reminders alerting you when it’s time to stand up and walk around a little.

Third-party apps will also be available for tracking fitness. Offerings from Nike+ Running, Strava, and Runtastic are also being featured on Apple’s web site. Data from Watch will be synced with these services, allowing users more access to and control over their data.

So far, only two apps for sports fans have been announced — MLB At Bat and ESPN. Both will feature team-/game-based notifications and general scoreboard functions, while the At Bat app promises player stats, news, and even highlights. I have to admit, watching highlights on a watch would be pretty cool.

Apple has released the iOS update that features the Apple Watch app, but as of this writing access to the Watch App Store was not available. Nevertheless, the Watch API has been out for some time, so it’s easy to assume there will be plenty more offerings above what has been announced today. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we get any more info.

The Apple Watch will be available for preorder on April 10th, with units becoming available on April 24th.

Since we last visited with startup i1 Biometrics, developers of the Vector mouth guard which measures the level and location of each hit on the football field, the demand and the market for their product has grown significantly. Yesterday i1 announced a new partnership with Texas A&M football. Already partnered with the University of Kansas, Louisiana State University as well as the University of South Carolina, i1 Biometrics is making strides to measure potentially concussion inducing levels of impacts.

The Vector mouth guard itself measures rotational and linear impacts and then sends the impact data in real time to to the coaching and training staff where it is stored in their cloud computing for easy access. Notifications can be sent to mobile devices for immediacy or the information gleaned from the mouth guards may be accessed online through a phone or computer.

In a joint study between Harvard University and Boston University last year covering 734 NCAA football players from the 2013 season, the concussion numbers are jarring, and not just the speed of the impacts. The players claimed six potential concussions and 21 “dings” for each confirmed concussion.

Given what is already known about the long-term effects of concussions — and even more alarming is what is unknown — seeing front-line collegiate football teams taking things more seriously is a step in the right direction.

In case you weren’t already aware, the Associated Press has real, human journalists. You’ve read those AP stories on your go-to sports news site. They’re usually results of a yacht race, highlighting a badminton tournament in another country, or a WNBA game story. They are the wire service stories that ESPN, CBS Sports or FOX Sports use because they don’t want to pay a staffer to write about the sports that don’t draw in enough clicks. They’re typically straight forward, succinctly written and dull. And those stories are written by flesh and blood — until now.

According to an article at The Huffington Post, the AP announced Wednesday that it will team up with a technology company to create automated game stories from NCAA college sports based simply on statistics. Starting this spring with Division I baseball, instead of a human writing straight forward, succinctly-written, dull stories, robots will now write straight forward, succinctly- written, dull stories. The AP robots will also cover D-1 woman’s basketball and division II and III men’s basketball and football.

Lou Ferrara, the vice president and managing editor at the AP, told Huff that once a game is over, its robot will spit out a story onto AP wires and NCAA web sites.

“At AP, we have been looking at automation with anything involving data, as we did with corporate earnings reports,” Ferrara said. “Sports have been in our DNA for a long time and automation for certain sports seems like a logical move, particularly for sports not receiving much widespread coverage yet in demand in certain markets.”

The AP has produced robot writing before. It teamed up with Automated Insights initially to draft quarterly earnings reports for its business section, which surged reports from 300 up to 3,000 each quarter. Three thousand straight forward, succinctly written, dull stories.

Philana Patterson, an assistant business editor at the AP, told The Verge earlier in the year that the system is producing less errors than the humans the news company employs. The humans it pays thousands of dollars a year to, along with full benefits, vacation and two weeks during March Madness that absolutely nothing gets done.

Which brings us to TechGraphs. David Temple, our esteemed managing editor, *must* be drooling at the thought of a soccer piece that doesn’t refer to the sport as football. Imagine how much more time he could devote to his wife’s roller derby team when he’s not spending thirty minutes cleaning up our typos or correcting our run-on sentences.

And no, TechGraphs readers, Michael Tunney is not a robot cloaked with a human byline. He’s indeed a real staff writer who just happens to excel  at cranking out info-filled pieces with a fantastic ability to write tightly.

In addition to Temple, fellow writer Bradley Woodrum benefits the most from his future colleagues. Woodrum’s history with robot dogs, robot turtles and drones reflects an adoration and healthy fear of the unavoidable robot revolution. And really, the robots can’t write a first-person piece about consuming a liquid meal. So I’m sure they’ll keep Bradley around for that.

Until the robots arrive, we’ll keep churning out error-laden sports tech stories at a human pace. Enjoy us while we last.

(Image via Mirko Tobias Schafer)

For such a small piece of tissue, the ulnar collateral ligament can do a lot of damage when it tears. According to Jon Roegele, 90 professional baseball players underwent Tommy John surgery to repair a damaged UCL in the last calendar year, costing teams tens of millions of dollars and months of lost service time. Young prospects, grizzled veterans, pitchers, catchers, outfielders, flamethrowers and junkballers: all went under the knife and emerged with the infamous long, curved scar.

The high stakes go a long way to explain why Glenn Fleisig, Ph.D., research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute, was invited to speak on the epidemic at last weekend’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Fleisig — who also serves as chairman of USA Baseball’s Medical and Safety Committee, an advisor for Little League Baseball, and on Major League Baseball’s Elbow Task Force — presented “Analytics of the Tommy John Injury Epidemic” Saturday morning to discuss the ASMI’s research, dispel some common myths, and talk about the “Pitch Smart” guidelines he helped develop.

Even in the few months since the Pitch Smart guidelines were released, Fleisig said he was “blown away” by the amount of positive feedback he’s received.

“For 20 years, Dr. [James] Andrews and myself have been giving guidelines that have been pretty well received in general by those in medicine,” he said in an interview. “Since the Pitch Smart guidelines came out, we’ve seen the same kind of response from coaches and parents across baseball.”

But Fleisig still devoted a significant amount of time to clearing up misconceptions about the surgery’s success rate (only two-thirds of MLB pitchers who underwent Tommy John surgery made it back to the majors and stayed there) and effect on pitchers (pitchers do not see a bump in performance immediately after the surgery).

The highlight of Fleisig’s talk was a discussion of the risk factors associated with UCL injuries. Fleisig reported the results of a recent study into the biomechanics of 80 minor league pitchers — 40 of whom had returned from Tommy John surgery, and 40 healthy controls. The paper looked at a number of potential risk factors (including amount of arm abduction, stride length, and the infamous “inverted W“), but found no difference between the mechanics of the previously injured and healthy pitchers. Fleisig admitted, however, that the study was not predictive: by looking at the biomechanics of only those pitchers who successfully returned to pitching, the study overlooked any mechanical flaws that had since been corrected, as well as any biomechanical issues in those pitchers who were unable to make a successful comeback.

A better predictor of UCL injuries, Fleisig said, was overuse. A recent ten-year study of 476 adolescent baseball pitchers found that pitchers who threw over 100 innings in a year were three times more likely to be injured; those who regularly threw over 80 pitches in a year more than four times; those who pitched for at least eight consecutive months five times; and those who regularly pitched fatigued 36 times more likely to suffer a UCL injury.

“I hear people say that throwing isn’t a natural motion,” Fleisig said during his presentation. “Throwing is natural. Pitching at max effort, 100 or more times in a game, that’s what’s not natural.”

Fleisig believes overuse of young pitchers is largely responsible for the rise in professional pitchers getting Tommy John surgery, even as organizations are placing increasingly strict limits on prized prospects like Dylan Bundy and Joba Chamberlain.

“A lot of the time, the damage has already been done by the time they get to pro ball,” Fleisig said. “When you pitch, you produce lots of microscopic tears that can heal with rest, but if you pitch too much, then [the UCL] is like a frayed rope, and there’s not much you can do.”

Fleisig’s group has calculated that a 90-mph fastball puts as much as 100 newton meters (N-m) of torque on the elbow. Fortunately, this force is instantaneous or UCLs would be tearing on virtually every pitch. But the ligament still absorbs a significant part of that force; as muscles tire, the amount absorbed by the UCL can increase, leading to the dramatic increase of UCL injuries in pitchers who regularly throw when fatigued. Fleisig said that strength and conditioning can help reduce the risk of injury, but stressed the importance of the entire kinetic chain, from legs to trunk to arm muscles.

“I wish I could say there was one key to avoiding injuries — and that would make a good article — but that’s not reality,” Fleisig said. “The secret isn’t the legs, the secret isn’t the arms, the secret isn’t the trunk, it’s the whole body.”

In addition to his work with ASMI and the sport’s governing bodies, Fleisig also serves as a consultant for Motus Global, a movement analysis company whose mThrow sleeve for pitchers will be available to the public this spring. The headline number produced by the system will be a measurement of workload, derived from the sum of the torque put on the elbow across all throws a player makes, including pitching in game situations, warmups, and drills such as long toss. The sleeve (and the metrics it provides) are still in the early stages, but Fleisig is confident that it represents an improvement in teams’ understanding of workload.

“We don’t know what the right exact formula [for workload] is,” Fleisig said. “For instance, if you throw two throws at 50 N-m, is that the same amount of danger to your elbow as one throw at 100 N-m? Probably not. But before the Motus sleeve, workload was just added up by people counting how many throws someone did.”

Fleisig admits, however, that users will rely too heavily on the system’s workload calculation, especially at the amateur level where coaches, trainers, and players may lack the rapport to establish when a pitcher is truly fatigued.

“The potential customers for the Motus sleeve are not only pro pitchers but also high school kids,” Fleisig said. “I would hope that the pro teams would click through to see the extra data the sleeve produces, whereas I think the summarized information might be the best for many of the amateurs.”

A number of companies aim to improve further on Motus Global’s innovation, and are working on systems that can automatically capture full-body kinematic data without markers. Fleisig does not consult on any of these projects, but has seen some of them in action. Most, including the system Sportvision presented at Saberseminar last summer, require manual digitization, where a human observer annotates the location of the pitcher’s joints at every frame. But despite the demand for automated systems, Fleisig stressed that these technologies are only a tool in the arsenal of coaches, trainers, and pitchers to prevent injuries and improve performance.

“Biomechanics experts and technology are not the keys to optimizing pitcher safety and performance,” he said. “The key will be the expertise of coaches to use this new information.”

Exclusive video broadcasting rights for the World Cup of Hockey 2016 has officially been awarded to ESPN. The Cup is to be held at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto from September 17 through October 1st, 2016 and will pit eight countries against each other in a round-robin format, followed by a semi-final bracket. The finals will be decided by a best-of-three series for the title of best hockey country in the world, at least until the 2018 Winter Olympics.

The press release specifically cites games will be shown on TV via ESPN and ESPN2. It also mentions live access available via the WatchESPN app, though of course that requires a cable subscription. ESPN nailing down major international sporting events is nothing new — see the 2014 World Cup and 2015 Women’s World Cup — but it is curious to them take hockey. The NHL Network and NBC own the US hockey rights as ESPN bowed out of bidding in 2004.

Last month word broke that unofficially ESPN beat out Fox and NBC for the World Cup, though it is doubtful NBC feels threatened. They probably feel secure in their 10-year broadcast deal running through the 2020-21 season. The Worldwide Leader has come under criticism for trending away from hockey, though President of ESPN, John Skipper disagreed:

Look, I don’t think it’s [the criticism] fair,” Skipper said. “I see SportsCenter every day and we cover hockey every day. We do not have a significant differential between highlights of hockey now and when we had it. The only difference is we are not there [as a rights holder]. If we were there for the playoffs, we’d be throwing to the guys calling the game. We can’t do that, but we are at hockey games. We are doing hockey highlights.

Apparently hockey highlights weren’t enough anymore.

(Header image via NHL)

ESPN released their “Great Analytics Rankings” last week, placing the Houston Astros second behind the Philadelphia 76ers as the most analytically-minded pro sports organization. In their profile of the Astros, ESPN speculated that the Astros were the mystery MLB team that purchased a Cray supercomputer last year, but the company responded on their blog this week that the team that bought it won more games than the Astros, declining to what team purchased for confidentiality reasons.

Nick Davis, PR manager for Cray, wrote on their blog, “While I’m not going tell you here who the team is, I can tell you that it’s not the Astros. We think it’s great the Astros are ‘all-in’ on analytics according to ESPN, but unfortunately they are not all in with Cray. At least, not yet. I will say this — we applaud the Astros for their adoption of analytics, but the team with a Cray won more games last year.

According to The Economist, 95 percent of all MLB data has been created in the last five years.  With MLB’s award winning Statcast system projected to be installed at all 30 MLB parks, this kind of computing power may become necessity for analytics departments to process mountains of data quickly.

For any sleuths out there trying to find the mystery team, Pete Ungaro, Cray’s CEO, said that the team who purchased the supercomputer is an organisation that five years ago people would not have guessed would want one.

(Image via clockwerks)

Minecraft, the open sandbox style game Microsoft purchased — along with the entire Mojang company —  for a staggering $2.5 billion could be entering a new competitive phase. Given the recent attention towards esports from ESPN, theScore et al, it should be no surprise that Minecraft, the best selling PC game of all time, is getting some love. Over at Kickback.gg (though the site is still just an open Beta) Minecraft players have an option of going against each other either for free or with money on the line.

Between the 34 million player base on computers and consoles plus an additional 30 million mobile users, Minecraft could be on the eve of new multiplayer day. The registration at Kickback is free, though in order to win money you’ll have to deposit some cash in order to wager it. If you’re not quite ready to put your money where your mouth is, there are free games as well. For just $1 per game, any confident player will probably take a crack at it.

The player vs player matches (PvP) will take place on pre-made servers in order to prevent cheating or any suspected tampering. In a world where bets at CSGO Lounge reach millions of dollars per day on Counter-Strike matches, it was only a matter of time before competitive Minecraft cashed in. Unlike other games like ESEA, CEVO and FACEIT, there is no league entry fee  — the the latter two companies do offer free competitive ladders and leagues. It seems as though Kickback is looking to fill the cravings of a competitor on the short-term. Rather than be obligated to compete in official matches, it is a simple as joining the site and jumping in-game.

Think of it in terms of fantasy sports — rather than signing up for six months of a fantasy baseball league, Kickback is a daily sort of thing with minimal commitment. If the success of DraftKings and FanDuel is any indicator in terms of short-term entertainment, Kickback could be something big.

(Image via postapocalyptic)

The biggest media company you’ve never heard of won an Alpha Award for Best Analytics Innovation/Technology at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last week for their player tracking system called Statcast.

Statcast was introduced publicly by MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) during the 2014 season in a limited number of ballparks. At the Sloan Conference, Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that all 30 ballparks will have the Statcast system installed by Opening Day this year.

Statcast uses cameras installed in multiple areas around the park to track player movement throughout the game. As you can see from the videos below, the data Statcast can analyze is staggering, spitting out everything from batted ball and player speed to reaction times and pitcher extension.

Dave Cameron, our esteemed head honcho at FanGraphs, was part of a panel at Sloan this year and also reported on the most interesting parts of the panel Manfred was a part of with MLB Network’s Brian Kenny. In a wide-ranging interview with Kenny, Manfred said that Statcast would provide real time data through the premium version of the MLB At Bat App as well as some data on MLB.com. More importantly, Manfred intimated that the model for Statcast data would eventually resemble the PITCHF/x model, with the data being publicly available instead of hoarded by teams.

With estimated revenues of $800 million on 2014, streaming video deals with WWE and Turner Sports, and Statcast technology available in all 30 ballparks in 2015, MLBAM will soon be a media giant that everyone has heard of.

(Image via Gabriel Argudo Jr)