Today, Americans around the world will do the thing we rarely have time for in an ever-changing world: sit down together and share a moment with friends and family. At the Thanksgiving dinner table, conversations will spiral through all manner of subjects, but one question likely to be repeated time and again is “What are you thankful for?”
To spur some thoughts and to celebrate the past year of sports technology, SportTechie’s staff picked out a few of the things we’ve been most grateful for. Happy Thanksgiving!
Baseball Analytics
Andrew Cohen, Staff Writer
Last week, despite only finishing with 10 wins this past season, New York Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom was crowned the 2018 NL Cy Young Award winner by members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. He received an almost perfect 29 out of 30 possible first-place votes. As a Mets fan, I am thankful that an increased acceptance of analytics across baseball circles helped MLB to correctly crown the National League’s best pitcher, and of course that the pitcher in question was a Met.
deGrom’s 10 wins are the lowest win total for any Cy Young Award winner in MLB history. But the right-hander was nonetheless historically dominant. His 1.70 ERA led the majors. He also led in allowing the lowest opponents’ slugging percentage (.277), opponents’ OPS (.521) and fewest home runs per nine innings (0.41).
Advanced stats showed deGrom was the easy choice for the award, but not too long ago, voters would have been far more inclined to pass over him because of deGrom’s mediocre 10-9 win-loss record. The Mets’ anemic offense and the team’s bullpen frequently blowing leads late in the game—two things that deGrom had no control over—might have doomed him. Take the 2005 MLB season for example. Bartolo Colon (21-8, 3.48 ERA, 157 strikeouts) beat out a superior pitcher in Johan Santana (16-7, 2.87 ERA, 238 strikeouts) to win the AL Cy Young award.
The way the game is played and the way athletes are evaluated has evolved tremendously in recent years, so much that Santana likely would have won the award over Colon had the voting standards of 2018 been widespread 13 years ago. Virtually every team front office is now stacked with an analytics department that dictates the way a roster is built and influences how a manager makes in-game decisions.
Mets fans do not have much success to remember from a disappointing 2018 season, but we can all at least be thankful that analytics ensured that baseball’s best pitcher won the highest honor a pitcher can receive. And perhaps the deceiving win-loss stat will never again rob a star pitcher of acclaim.
Skydiving Technology
Jen Booton, Senior Writer
Having logged nearly 80 jumps this skydiving season, I’m thankful for the technology that continually saves my life. To the untrained eye, skydiving may look like a free-for-all where people toss themselves from perfectly good airplanes and hope their parachutes open and that they land somewhere safe. The truth is, the sport is far safer than people imagine, and that is because of technology.
Every time I board a plane, helicopter, or hot air balloon to jump, I’m carrying with me two altimeters: a wrist device that I can glance at to see exactly how high off the ground I am and another one tucked into my helmet that gives me audible cues at key altitude levels. I use both of these to make critical decisions during freefall and under canopy, such as when to deploy my parachute and when to enter my landing pattern.
An automatic activation device is tucked into my rig. This AAD is a mini-computer that will automatically deploy my reserve parachute if it detects that I’m still in freefall at a dangerously-low altitude. I’ve never had to rely on my AAD, but its existence in my equipment puts me at ease. Skydivers can lose altitude awareness when distracted, say, by a malfunction they’re trying to fix, or can even be knocked unconscious during freefall.
Skydiving has been made safer because of apps, weather forecasts, and GPS technology as well. Easily accessible and precise readings on winds can help skydivers plan landing patterns in advance from the ground. GPS helps pilots to drop jumpers in the best location to increase their chances of landing at a target destination.
And now, even virtual reality is becoming part of skydiving. A VR experience with mock toggles and a harness system is giving students the ability to practice landing before they board the plane for the first time. Students pull down on their steering toggles and shift their weight in their harnesses to control the direction of their canopies. Novices and experts alike can practice piloting in winds and landing with accuracy, making the real-world skies safer for everyone.
Polar H10 Heart Rate Sensor
Tom Taylor, Senior Editor
Heart rate sensors aren’t new. In fact, neither is the Polar H10, which was released way back in February 2010. But I discovered this wearable in late September this year, and since then I’ve started to gain insight into my workouts that was never easy before.
The H10 chest strap stands out because of one key feature: It can internally record a training session, and sync that to your phone later on. Well, that and because it is waterproof enough that you can swim with it.
I mostly don’t use wearable devices because the act of wearing them annoys me. I don’t wear a watch, so I’m not going to wrap a clunky strap around my wrist whatever the data might reveal. I do use a bike computer, but that just attaches to my handlebars where I have the option to forget about it. On my bike, I also don’t mind wearing a chest strap, since those are totally hands-free, and the data is sent straight to my bike computer. But I split my time pretty evenly between cycling and rowing, and there are few good wearable options for rowing.
Most devices are likely to fry themselves if you flip a rowing boat and end up in the Pacific—yup, I’ve done that—and many need to sync straight to a phone that also won’t survive that encounter. A company called Nielsen-Kellerman does make rowing specific technology, but syncing that data to platforms like Strava or TrainingPeaks is a manual process with so much friction that I gave up trying months ago.
But with the H10, I finally have data on what my heart does during rowing practices. I can see how high my heart rate peaks on sprints, how quickly it drops back during recovery, and where it settles during steady state pieces. Interpreting that data and determining how that might affect my training is still a work in progress, but being able to get that information to start with is what I’m thankful for.
Sports Streaming
Joe Lemire, Senior Writer
After my nephews went to bed at the end of the third inning of the Red Sox-Yankees’ ALDS Game 4, my brother, our friend Colby, and I walked five blocks to his local pub. With Boston’s No. 9 hitter at the plate—light-hitting catcher Christian Vazquez—to lead off the fourth, there was little concern about missing an important moment.
As a recent cord-cutter turned YouTube TV subscriber, however, loading TBS on my iPhone for the short walk was easy. Lo and behold, Vazquez hit an only-in-Yankee-Stadium home run: a 338-foot cheap shot over the short right-field porch. Though the three of us were pacing down a residential Brooklyn block, we didn’t miss a pitch. We saw the preposterous, game-deciding home run live.
What I’m thankful for this year is the accessibility of sports through the burgeoning OTT and skinny bundle streaming sector. I can now take a major broadcast network on a sidewalk stroll or tune into international or niche sports that never used to reach the U.S. (ACC football may only be “niche” when compared to the SEC, but given how poor Virginia’s record has been over the past decade, finding my alma mater’s football games on TV in my New York City home used to be a real challenge.)
Funny story: My in-laws are Kiwis, and during my father-in-law’s toast at my wedding, he noted my profession and suggested I wouldn’t mind a pop quiz about sports. The catch was that all of the questions were about cricket and rugby. I fared so poorly that, the next time we visited them, they cued up some live action of New Zealand competing in each sport. Thanks to the proliferation of services such as ESPN+ and FloRugby, my in-laws, who moved to the U.S. in the 1970s, can finally catch every All-Blacks match—that was unheard of even a decade ago.
Choice will only grow. That’s true of devices, sports, leagues, countries, and formats. MLB.tv offers 90-second recaps for games joined in progress. Amazon Prime Video offers alternate broadcast feeds for NFL Thursday Night Football, including one starring Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer. NBA League Pass offers new incremental action of games. Facebook has hinted at its own plans to enhance the viewing experience. DAZN promises a fresh take on nightly baseball coverage. Sports betting will spur further development. No other sports tech has made such a positive impact on my own life.
STEM Education and Sports
Taylor Bloom, CEO
In third grade, I was at the top of my math class. I breezed through long division. I dominated multiplication. I was naturally mathematically inclined and I set the tone for orange group (the advanced group in the class). I was on an early path to pursue a career in science, technology, education, or math.
In fourth grade, I fell to the middle of my class, and my math performance remained average at best for the rest of my education.
So what happened between third and fourth grade? Sports had become my life. I happened to also be ahead of my class when it came to soccer, basketball, and baseball, and they became my ultimate passion. Growing up in a San Diego suburb, I could play sports year-round; and that I did. The more energy I put into them, the less I put into school. But like so many other kids, I was a good athlete but not a great one, and was never close to making a career in professional sports. I spent the majority of my youth focusing my energy on athletic pursuits, or, better put, I spent the majority of my youth not preparing for the rest of my life.
Looking back on these formative years, I can’t help but wonder how my life, and so many other young American lives, could have been transformed had sports and academics been more symbiotic. Would I have stayed in the orange group while also playing sports at a high level?
Through my viewpoint at SportTechie, I have been intrigued and excited by the growing connection between STEM education and sports. We have covered a wide variety of inspiring people and educational programs who are using sports as a catalyst to teach kids critically important science and technology skills.
As our world world shrinks and becomes more complicated, athletes and sports can provide a much needed escape. But we ultimately need engineers, scientists, and technical problem solvers to forge our future.
What I’m most thankful for this year within the scope of sports technology is the intersection of STEM and sports and the fantastic people and organizations behind that movement.