Neuroscience is The New Moneyball

I think it was Howard Cosell who first referred to sports at the “toy department of life.” Oftentimes player performance has been put down as people say that “it’s not rocket science.”

The fact is however, that we now know it is neuroscience, computer science, medical science, AI, and a whole lot more.

We often talk about the game of golf as being so much inside the heads of players. But now, new research show us that this is just as true for football, basketball, and especially baseball.

The metrics that drove Moneyball, have now been amplified to include new arenas of scientific data. This data may be the handicapping tools and tip sheets for the future of sports. Zach Schonbrun takes us inside this new science in The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius.

My conversation with Zach Schonbrun:

Play Ball....Laboratory Style

We are in the glorious first days of baseball season. And of course we hear the usual debates about tradition vs. the multiple efforts to bring young people into the game…. about the way it used to be, vs. the way it really is for 21st century baseball.

While few games cling to tradition more than baseball, the game IS changing. One of the ways is with respect to the cybermetrics we’ve all heard and read about. Some have embraced and others have pushed back on.

But imagine a living baseball laboratory in which numbers were the ONLY rule. Imagine if a whole team could be constructed not on a fantasy baseball program, but in real life and in real time. That what my guest Sam Miller got to do with a minor league time, the Sonoma Stompers.

He tells his story in The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

Beat L.A.

One of the ongoing conundrums in sports is whether it’s about the team or the individual? Back in the early days of the NFL, Pete Rozelle believed passionately, that in a game played only once a week, the team was the key to marketing. In Basketball, former Commissioner David Stern saw the value of individual stars as the draw for fans.

For Baseball it’s been a mixed bag. Even for iconic teams like the Dodgers or the Giants, the question of team vs. the individual is hotly debated.

For the Dodgers, at least the current team and its current ownership group, the answer is clear. With players like Yasiel Puig, Clayton Kershaw, Hanley Ramirez, Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford, stars outshine the team. The individual player is king, second only to the dollars they are being paid.

Looking at this team, a team that was in bankruptcy just three years ago, as a result of a a messy divorce, is my guest sports journalist and former ESPN reporter Molly Knight. She takes a hard look at this team in her new book The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse

My conversation with Molly Knight:

The Greats of the Game or why sports continues to grow

This weekend it was reported that movie attendance is at a recent low. Our interest in politics and politicians couldn't be lower. However the one area where where both attendance and interest continues to explode is the world of sports.

In part it's the clarity of the story, the colorful, volatile and often egotistical personalities and also a whole new perking order of quality sports reporting.  Perched atop that order is John Feinstein. The author of twenty-eight books, most notably A Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled,  he is also a commentator on NPR's Morning Edition, a regular on ESPNs The Sports Reporters, and is also a regular contributor to The Washington Post.

His new book, One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game is a look at his relationships with some of those legendary personalities in sports.

My conversation with John Feinstein:

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If you're a fan

As much as we think today's technology is changing everything, between the mid 70's and the mid '80 a series of companies were born that created a real seismic shift in entertainment.  In the mid 70's HBO forever altered the movie business.  In the early '80's MTV reshaped the music industry.  And in 1979, ESPN was born and would forever change the face of sports. ESPN The Company: The Story and Lessons Behind the Most Fanatical Brand in Sports, is leadership expert Anthony Smith's story of a network launched by sports junkies, funded by an oil company, marginalized by critics, yet it would ultimately transform sports into a global business. 

My conversation with Anthony Smith.Powered by Podbean.com