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He’ll probably get picked up by another team though.
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Michael Sam, Who Is Better At Football Than You Will Ever Be At Anything, Has Been Cut By the Rams
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A few days ago, a Chicago Cubs game was called in the fifth inning after the grounds crew had so much trouble spreading a tarp that the field got soaked during a rain delay and play couldn’t be continued. The Corner reveals what really happened:
Insiders at the ball club report that the real culprit is Obamacare. Because the Affordable Care Act requires offering health benefits to employees who work more than 130 hours per month or 30 hours a week (“full time”), the Cubs organization reorganized much of its staff during the off-season. Sources that spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that, on Tuesday night, the crew was drastically “undermanned.”
Huh. What do you think of that, Dean Baker?
The problem with this story is that employer sanctions are not in effect for 2014. In other words, the Cubs will not be penalized for not providing their ground crew with insurance this year even if they work more than 30 hours per week. Apparently the Cubs management has not been paying attention to the ACA rules. This is yet another example of the skills gap that is preventing managers from operating their businesses effectively.
Quite so. My guess is that this is just another installment in the long-running effort of American corporations to use Obamacare as a scapegoat for everything under the sun. Usually this has to do with raising copays for their employees or something like that, but the ingenuity of American capitalism knows no bounds. Why not blame a rain delay on Obamacare too?
For a more likely cause of penny pinching on the grounds crew, the Wall Street Journal has you covered.
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On Friday, a federal judge made college sports history when she ruled that the NCAA could not deny players from profiting from the use of their likenesses on TV or in video games. In doing so, Judge Claudia Wilken laid down two rules: (1) Schools can put up to $5,000 a year in a trust for athletes; and (2) they can offer more comprehensive scholarships that cover the full cost of attending college.
Many NCAA watchers have argued that the ruling in O’Bannon v. NCAA doesn’t change much, contrary to what some thought a year ago. For example, schools in the rich, successful power conferences already were moving to beef up scholarships. In the sense that the NCAA suffered a manageable setback, some have argued that it actually came out on top. But, they say, the NCAA might not be so lucky the next time around.
That’s because its upcoming legal battle could kill the governing body as we know it. Representing four former college athletes, big-time sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler is targeting the NCAA and its five biggest conferences—the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific 12, and the Southeastern—in an effort to dismantle the NCAA’s “amateur” system entirely. In a powerfully worded claim, he writes that the defendants “have lost their way far down the road of commercialism,” adding that their refusal to pay student-athletes is “illegal,” “pernicious,” and has brought “substantial damages…upon a host of college athletes whose services have yielded riches only for others.” The offering of scholarship money, he writes, is not nearly enough. “This class action is necessary to end the NCAA’s unlawful cartel, which is inconsistent with the most fundamental principles of antitrust law.”
The athletes represented in Jenkins v. NCAA—all onetime Division I basketball and football players—aren’t seeking damages, but rather an injunction that would make the status quo illegal, open up athlete compensation to market forces, and basically blow up the NCAA as currently constructed.
Michael McCann, director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire, finds that outcome unlikely. “My personal belief is that none of these cases are going to be a death blow to the NCAA,” he said over the phone. If anything, he says, the outcome of O’Bannon boosts the NCAA’s chances in the Jenkins case, especially since Wilken’s decision highlighted the limits of antitrust law and didn’t come out in favor of endorsement deals for high-profile players. “My instinct is that the NCAA probably feels better about winning the Jenkins case than it did before the O’Bannon decision.”
Still, Jenkins is by far the broadest and boldest challenge to the NCAA’s amateurism system yet, and Kessler’s involvement is an enormous boost to the cause. He’s a giant of sports law, having won the fight to secure free agency for NFL players in 1992, and his clients have included the players’ associations of the NFL and NBA, Tom Brady, and Michael Jordan. The NCAA, not to be outdone, has spent $240,000 on its congressional lobbying efforts this year, already shattering past spending records with months left to go in 2014.
Sports Illustrated‘s Andy Staples figures that the outcome of Jenkins, and the future of the NCAA, will come down to the “lifeline” Wilken tossed the NCAA: her opinion that paying college athletes more than a small amount (like $5,000 per year) could harm college sports. If the NCAA’s lawyers can make the case that fans would abandon college sports if athletes were paid pro-level salaries, the association will likely survive. If Kessler can persuade otherwise, then the NCAA as we know it could be history. “The ultimate winner,” Staples writes, “will be the one with best lawyers.”
McCann suggests, however, it may not even come to that. “This is the kind of case that could get settled,” he says. “Maybe it is resolved internally. Maybe the NCAA and conferences will get together and make some changes. The O’Bannon case took five years. This case was filed earlier this year…There may not be a resolution on this for a long time.”
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The Latest Court Case Didn’t End the NCAA As We Know It. The Next One Might.
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The Minnesota Vikings’ new football stadium was supposed to be a point of pride for fans. The $1 billion state-of-the-art facility in the heart of downtown Minneapolis is set to be completed in 2016, and will put the crumbling Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome out of its misery. But a number of groups are getting angrier about a darker side to this dream project: The stadium’s shiny glass walls, which are almost certain to pose a lethal hazard to migrating birds.
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The Minnesota Vikings’ New Stadium Will Be a"Death Trap" For Birds
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At the 1964 Winter Olympics, Eero Mäntyranta won the 15 kilometer cross-country skiing competition by a whopping 40 seconds—a margin of victory that has never been equaled. That same year, he won the 30 kilometer race by a full minute. So what made this legendary Finnish skier such a success?
According to sports journalist David Epstein, Mäntyranta became the “greatest endurance athlete” of his generation in part because of a single mutation to his erythropoietin receptor (EPOR) gene, which helps regulate the production of red blood cells. Remember Lance Armstrong’s blood doping scandal? It turns out that because of his DNA, Mäntyranta had a similar advantage over his competition—but without ingesting or injecting a single cell. Mäntyranta “produced about 50 percent more oxygen-carrying red blood cells than a normal person,” explains Epstein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “So he essentially was naturally what…Lance Armstrong was through doping technology.”
Epstein says Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation is the clearest example of a “sports gene”—a single genetic variant that has the ability to turn someone into a superior athlete. But these genes are rare. More often, says Epstein (whose recent book is also called The Sports Gene), “we’re talking about networks of genes and suites of traits that make people better suited to some sports than others.”
Saying that some people are “better suited” than others sounds a lot like the idea that some of us are born more talented. But in recent years, much of the sports community has embraced the notion that achievement in athletics is attributable largely to logging 10,000 hours (or so) of dedicated training. The “10,000 hour” rule also permeates education in other domains, such as music and chess, where complex skills need to be developed. But with athletes like Mäntyranta in the competition, can this status quo idea possibly still hold true? And what, exactly, is the scientific recipe for building an elite athlete?
Here are a few of the key factors that Epstein lays out:
Start with the right genes. Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation isn’t the only gene variant that can make or break an athletic career. On chromosome two of the human genome, there is a gene that codes for a protein called myostatin. (Myo meaning “muscle,” and statin meaning “to halt.”) For most people, this gene does exactly what its name suggests—it stops the production of muscles. But in rare cases, says Epstein, “someone has a mutant version, and it basically doesn’t tell their muscles to stop growing on time, and they end up being really, really muscle-bound.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, explains Epstein, the first adult determined to have this mutation was a professional sprinter. But it’s been detected in young children, as well. In 1999, for instance, a bouncing baby boy with seemingly superhuman strength was born in Germany. Unlike his roly-poly peers, this baby was ripped. The muscle mass in his lower limbs was off one end of the charts, while his limited body fat was off the other end.
When this “Superbaby” was tested for the presence of myostatin, none was detected in his blood. And other babies with similar mutations have begun to pop up, including Liam Hoekstra, who apparently could do a difficult gymnast move called the iron cross by the time he was 5 months old and could do a pull-up at eight months.
But if one gene can have such a significant effect, what other gene variants might be combined in a person to optimize athletic performance?
In his book, Epstein cites Alun G. Williams and Jonathan P. Folland, scientists in England who are studying 23 gene variants strongly linked to athletic endurance. The chance that any single individual currently on the planet has all 23 variants is incredibly small—less than one in a quadrillion (one thousand million million). The most any one of us can hope for is about 16 of these 23. The chance of having none of these variants, or very few of them, is also extremely small. Most of us have some but not too many. The end result? We need to train to build up endurance.
But genetics can also make a big difference when it comes to that training. “No two people respond to the medicine of training the same way because of differences in their genes,” says Epstein. “And so it’s turning out that the talent of trainability—the ability to get more biological adaptation out of your one hour of training than the next guy or the next girl—is really the most important kind of talent.”
But if we can’t change our genes, what can we do to become better athletes?
Learn to to predict the future. When it comes to professional baseball, says Epstein, “keep your eye on the ball” is useless advice. That’s because Major League pitches take far less than half a second to reach the plate—they’re simply moving faster than the eye can track. What batters are actually keeping track of is a specific pattern of movements that the pitcher is making.
Ted Williams in 1957, on his way to the Major League batting title. AP
The ability to predict where the ball will go based on how the pitcher releases it is the real talent of an all-star hitter. That’s why Mariano Rivera could strike out batter after batter with one pitch: a 90+ mile-per-hour cut fastball whose final destination was very difficult to predict. With just a subtle difference in how much pressure he put on the ball with two of his fingers, he could alter its course dramatically.
That’s also why no amount of trips to the batting cage will turn you into a slugger like Albert Pujols or Ted Williams. “We’ve only just realized that pitching machines are totally worthless for baseball practice,” explains Epstein, “because they don’t teach you to read body movements the way that you need to.”
Putting this idea to the test, softball pitcher Jennie Finch struck out Pujols and other Major League batters during the 2004 Pepsi All-Star Softball Game—her windup and delivery confounded their ability to predict where the pitch will go, despite the fact that she threw a bigger ball.
To understand how complex skills like hitting a small projectile traveling at speeds of over 90 miles per hour are performed, consider a famous study in which chess players of different levels were given a few seconds to study a chess board. What separated the experts from the amateurs was the fact that grand masters could memorize the location of pieces on the board after looking at it for just three seconds. At first, it seemed as though they had superhuman memory skills. But when the scientists asked them to memorize the placement of pieces on a board that didn’t conform to the rules of the game, they were no better than novices. In other words, what grand masters have actually developed is the ability to organize the board into meaningful units in their mind’s eye—what psychologists call “chunks”—that they can then easily recall.
Major League Baseball players can’t hit Jennie Finch’s pitches. C5813/Wikimedia Commons
We all use chunking to remember complex things: “If I gave you 20 random words right now, you’d have a lot of trouble repeating them back to me,” explains Epstein. “But, if I gave you a 20-word meaningful sentence, you might be able to repeat it back to me or very closely.” Why? Because “you’ve learned a system of grammar and groups of words and phrases that you can break down into meaningful chunks. So, you don’t have to…rely on your working memory.” And, adds Epstein, “it turns out sports works in a very similar way.”
So it’s not that MLB players have superhuman reflexes; instead, over the course of many years of training, they learn to “read” a pitcher’s upper body movements and predict where the ball will end up. “It’s really this kind of cognitive expertise that they’ve learned that allows them to look as if they’re reacting faster than is humanly possible,” says Epstein. “They are judging the field—their version of the chess board—and seeing what’s going to come in the future.”
Sample many sports in childhood—don’t specialize too early. As every parent knows, elite athleticism comes at a high price in the US, with many coaches pressuring talented children to start specialized practice immediately—often to the exclusion of other sports and activities. “AAU basketball has a second graders’ national championships now,” notes Epstein. “This is like kids who are over-hand heaving a ball at a 10-foot rim. They’ve convinced parents it’s like an important part of the scouting pipeline and their kids will get behind if they don’t go.”
Epstein argues that this push towards specialization—which he attributes to the popularization of the 10,000 hours rule—has been a “disaster.”
“There’s now a pretty strong body of evidence that we’ve over-specialized kids too early, and it actually makes them worse athletes,” he says. What Epstein is getting at is that there seems to be a critical “sampling period” before puberty, during which many eventual professional athletes play a variety of sports. Hyper-specialization makes it harder for kids to find the sport that is best suited to their biology. As an example for parents to follow, Epstein points to two-time NBA most valuable player Steve Nash, who didn’t start playing basketball until he was 12 or 13.
Grow up in a small town. The trend towards hyper-specialization might even explain why professional athletes come disproportionately from small towns, far away from elite training programs, instead of from major metropolises. If you’re from a city with a population of more than 5 million people, you’re actually less likely than the average Joe to make it to the NBA. If you come from a town of 50,000 to 99,000 people, your chances are 11 times greater than average of making it to the NFL or the NBA. These towns “are vastly over-represented for producing elite athletes,” says Epstein, “because they’re big enough to have a team, and small enough to avoid all of the hyper-specialization that the 10,000 hours has caused.”
Take a scientist’s approach to your own training. Ultimately, as scientists learn more about the biology of athletic prowess and the skills we need to excel at specific activities, what’s becoming clear is that training needs to be more individualized. Given the highly variable nature of our genes, what can you do to make sure that you’re using those training hours most effectively? Think like a scientist: test and retest your assumptions constantly.
“In studies of kids who go on to become elite, whether it’s in chess, sports or music,” says Epstein, “they tend to more often exhibit that self-regulatory behavior where they’re almost taking a scientist’s view of themselves…and continually evaluating and evaluating. And they better figure out what works for them.”
This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion with skeptical pediatrician Clay Jones.
To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.
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Cheer on your baseball team through a “fan-bot” set in the stands as you watch and tweet on your phone. Excerpt from: New Approach to Being There: ‘Fan-bots’ Will Cheer Korean Baseball Team Related ArticlesScientists Begin to Demystify Hole Found in Siberian PermafrostMiami’s Coastal Climate Calamity – in Super Slo-MoChina Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions Peak
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New Approach to Being There: ‘Fan-bots’ Will Cheer Korean Baseball Team
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The National Football League handed Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice an unexpectedly lenient punishment Thursday following his offseason arrest for assaulting his fiancée back in February: a two-game suspension for violating the league’s personal conduct policy. Rice allegedly hit Janay Palmer (now his wife) so hard she lost consciousness—and then security cameras caught him dragging her out of an elevator in Atlantic City. Aggravated assault charges eventually were dropped against both of them (Palmer allegedly hit Rice, too), and the two later held a bizarre joint press conference addressing the whole incident.
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The NFL Was Harder on These 6 Players for Smoking Pot Than It Was on Ray Rice for His Assault Arrest
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We have no words. Just watch:
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Stuart Scott’s Deeply Moving ESPYs Speech About Beating Cancer Will Leave You Speechless
The state is experiencing the worst drought in its history. Find out just how bad the situation is getting and what it means for you. Excerpt from: California’s Extreme Drought, Explained Related ArticlesReactions to Hurricane Approaching N.C.Obama Mocks Congress on Climate ChangeScienceTake | Navigating Air and Water
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