What I'm Reading
Entry posted by Parker Hageman ·
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Twins Video
The Minnesota Twins are hiring but it would seem that the industry as a whole might be in trouble.
However the next several years play out, it appears that the baseball industry is in a liminal space. Front office gigs, long glamorized, have become less desirable to those with options. The individuals who remain in the industry feel underpaid, undervalued, and overstressed. The most conscientious are concerned that an already exclusive industry is going to build larger gates, and become more homogenous and bland because of misplaced priorities. The industry, then, is in a bad place -- and it might remain there for the foreseeable future.
"A lot of people call it their dream job," the former senior analytics member said. "This was one of those things that makes you realize that a dream job sometimes is still a dream."
Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively:
Training with data will not impede a player’s ability to improvise during play.
Seeing the errors in how people intuitively think about the golf swing made Bryson question how other parts of the game were played. Having majored in physics at college, he operates like a scientist. He subscribes to Charles Dickens’ famous line from Great Expectations: “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
Where other golfers guess why they’re struggling at the driving range, Bryson brings two military-grade launch monitors so he can quantify his swing path to the tenth-of-a-degree. Where other golfers use standard grips, Bryson uses the world's largest commercially available grips so he can reduce wrist cock in his swing and hold the club with his palms instead of his fingertips. Where other golfers have a half-inch length difference between every iron, all of Bryson’s are cut to 37.5 degrees, the length of a standard 8-iron. Where other golfers change their putting technique based on how they feel that day, Bryson’s implemented a system called vector putting: he uses math to compute the break and determine how the ball will roll along the grass. Where other golfers hit 7-10 degree drivers, Bryson copied the world long-drive champion and put a 5.5 degree driver in the bag. Where other golfers use a 45-inch driver, Bryson’s experimenting with a 48-inch one.
Bryson showed that a determined contrarian, armed with the right data and a definitive plan, can upend conventional wisdom and prove that there’s a better way to do something.
Gophers Baseball PACK Mentality:
The University of Minnesota’s offense has been good. That’s owed partially to a cultural mindset.
One of the signature components of Gopher Baseball's offensive approach is the PACK Mentality, centered on four primary characteristics: performance, aggressive, consistent and knowledgeable. The goal of the PACK Mentality is to turn individual at bats into a team approach. As a unit, the offense is more effective than if at bats were attacked solely as individuals.
"The idea of this is like a pack of wolves hungry to hit," said Raabe. "No matter who is on the mound, we have a sense of 'no fear,' because you have eight other guys behind you if you fail… Everyone has an individual role in the PACK system."
{snip}
The PACK Mentality also drives Minnesota's success in these areas of emphasis, as the situational scenario of the game is different every time a player steps into the box. This requires absolute buy-in from every member of the offense, allowing each hitter to adapt to the unique situations that occur as they arise.
"We are all three-hole hitters that have many tools at our disposal in order to get whatever job done that needs to be done," said senior catcher
Jack Kelly
. "At the very least, be a tough hitter to pitch to by having quality at bats with lots of hard contact and good two-strike approaches."
Stock Up On Average Players ($):
Some teams have found success by loading a roster with “average” players.
Amid the welter of modern stat tools, one idea often gets buried: The difference between a great or near-great player and an average or slightly above-average player is enormous in terms of glamour, fan appeal, all-star and even Hall of Fame consideration. But the difference — on the field, in run differential and in the standings — often just isn’t that big.
The Mad Genius of Eddie Van Halen:
RIP.
The Van Halen family—father Jan and mother Eugenia, plus Eddie and Alex—left Holland for the United States in 1962; Eddie was 7 years old and spoke very little English when he arrived in Pasadena, California. Jan Van Halen was a musician—a working one, when he could find a gig. He played clarinet and saxophone, and in their teens, the boys would often join him in his various wedding bands. Eddie was an introvert, an inventor: He boiled guitar strings (for elasticity), dipped his pickups in hot paraffin, cut vibrato bars in half, transplanted the neck of one guitar onto the body of another.
One early El Dorado was something he called the “brown sound”—a distortion that was thick, sleek, organic, and unrelenting, but that didn’t blow up your amp. He pursued this brownness with endless mad-scientist tinkerings. “He tried aiming the amp at the wall,” writes the Van Halen biographer Ian Christe in his peerless
Everybody Wants Some
, “stuffing it with padding, and covering it with a plastic hood before discovering that he could overdrive it at a lower volume if he starved it for voltage using a Variac variable power supply.” Later, he would house a delay unit inside the hollowed-out body of a decommissioned U.S. Army bomb, to create what Christe calls a “big metal ordnance-cum-reverb-chamber” that he would face onstage while playing “Eruption.”
Telling A Great Bedtime Story:
Some excellent advice for the newer parents out there.
“Listening to the story without the benefits of the illustrations requires the child to picture the characters and the events in their own mind,” said
Rebecca Isbell
, Ph.D., an early childhood education consultant and professor emerita at East Tennessee State University. “They are creating the story for themselves. They are listening to it, and as they do they’re turning on that movie in their head.”
These mental movies are powerful — in her research, Dr. Isbell has found children understood (and retained) more of a story they were told out loud than having the same story read to them. “I think that’s something that gets lost with reading,” she said. “You’re focused on the words and the phrases, not the deeper meaning of it.” When you tell a story, there’s no book to focus on, for you or your child, so you can use gestures and eye contact to add drama, suspense and intrigue.
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