Studying the limits of human perfection, through darts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
People will cry "steroids", but it's way deeper than that. Weight wasn't everywhere like it is today. It's hard to imagine baseball or basketball without significant weight training, but it seems obvious now. Golfers and runners incorporate weight training which would have been unheard of just 30 years ago (except for that one weird guy).
Nutrition has made huge strides. Also the concept of "off season" has largely disappeared. Football players no longer show up to preseason to get into shape -- that's what they were working on the whole summer.
Then there is data analytics. Teens have power monitors and more in cycling. Baseball players have pitch tracking and way more.
Then the internet. I played soccer in college in the late 80's. We had to learn everything from coaches or a "friend who saw this one thing from a guy they played with when travelling...". Now you can get a technique broken down -- in detail.
Coaching has abundant online resources and training on how to run a practice and drill skills, so 8 year olds are receiving a better training.
I'm watching this revolution take place right now in wrestling. The sport is getting bigger and better in the US. The difference between how a practice is run in soccer vs wrestling is stark. Wrestling is much more of getting thrown in the deep in and "find what works for you" where soccer is much more programmatic training of skills, raising the fundamental levels across the board. I suspect a lot of sports are going through this at the moment, catching up to the more formalized training methods of the biggest sports.
Along these lines, this year we saw a European player dominate the NBA playoffs. Lots of talk about how strong the fundamentals of his game are and whether US players brought up with the solo style (showing off?) system are actually falling behind a bit in technique.
Thanks to this, a cottage industry around improving performance and longevity has popped up as pro teams wanted to protect their investments. From there, you get people selling these techniques and lessons learned on all levels of sport, for athletes who want to invest in themselves, for parents who want to invest in their kids, for high schools and colleges wanting to get the notoriety through sport, etc.
On a side note, whoever is talking about US players losing a step is just trying to be a provocateur.
For example, I used to play soccer when it was thought that doing weights made one slow or "tied up." When using any form of data was inapplicable because "soccer is different." When using a psychologist was considered weird, queer or a waste of time. And me lifting weights (I watched volleyball players and baseball players coming to the same gym I was going to doing weights all the time), using the little data available to help me better understand the game (I am a scientist after all), and being interested in the psychology of performance was seen as the quirky guy who partly you tolerate, and partly you make fun of. I was right, but I was there too soon.
Now everyone lifts weights, everyone uses data to inform decisions, and most professional players use the services of a psychologist or are interested in the psychological aspects of performance.
One thing that has changed in a major way is that what was done by the 0.001% of athletes, with the Internet, social media, and the ubiquity of cell phones, has become visible, and even the most stubborn, conservative, and skeptical people have seen how the top-of-the-food-chain trained and operated. It became impossible to deny it, to say "but for us/in our sport, it is different". It was not.
Changing the goalposts with improvements in gear and engineering mask a lot of training improvements too in my opinion. In general I feel like maximal performance improves but why it's improving is often a mystery, and whether those improvements would matter to average athletes is also lost on people. There's kind of a shotgun approach to it all, and less so trying to sift through whether a particular thing matters and when.
I guess what's frustrating to me is this sense that people just kind of chase around the latest training idea, or latest marginal gear gain, ignoring that it will never make a practical difference to them in particular at their level of performance or setting, or might actually be harmful. My sense is it drives up product costs dramatically due to demand for (or supply limited to?) unnecessary things, and leads to a lot of confusion about what you "should" be doing and bad advice.
I think in the past people could also get stuck with bad ideas or worse gear, and would never want to go back in time in athletics, so I don't want to come across as a sort of sports luddite. But I do think the signal to noise ratio has gone way down even as the amount of information has gone way up, and as a result I'm not sure the changes are as beneficial as they could be, or are even harmful or wasteful.
In some fields it feels like the very top athletes are maybe performing 1-2% better or something, but we ignore that's due to changing the goalposts sometimes, and everyone else is getting worse or staying the same while spending way more money than they should, even when they're never going to podium at all, nor is that their motivation for being in the sport to begin with.
Some fields seem better about this all than others, too, which is kind of interesting to compare and contrast sometimes.
Note that perfection does not necessitate hitting a high percentage of triple 20s, since one is also constrained by having to throw a total of 501 points.
One way to achieve true perfection is to hit triple 20 + triple 19 + double 50 with every 3 darts, giving all 9 darters.
You could avoid triple 20 entirely, you can go for 8 triple 19s and a triple 15, for example.
Can you point to data supporting that claim?
I would think a simple model for throwing is:
- get the left-right direction right
- get the throwing angle/speed combo right
and do not rule out that some players are better at one of those than at the other, showing smaller variation. If so, those players would be better at hitting the (almost) vertical triples than the (almost) horizontal ones or vice versa.
I guess I would want to know the point-spread function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_spread_function) per player.
If you know that, you could devise an optimal strategy, weighing the number of points each target is worth (even if you can hit triple-10 with 100% precision, it most of the time isn’t a good idea to aim for it) and situation of the game (you’re maximizing the probability of winning, not the winning margin, so if you’re far, far ahead, that triple-10 may become enticing)
I personally don't have any data to support this, but it seems extremely intuitive and so I think the burden should be on you to show 19 is equally easy to hit if for some reason you think it is.
20 also has the advantage of getting you closer to 0 if you don't shoot a perfect game, which is pretty much always, so 20 is BETTER unless 19 is significantly easier to hit.
If I spent my youth playing darts 8 hours a day I would be considered rather foolish, nowadays not so much.
Well, of course not. There is better equipment, better training practices, and I imagine there are more participants doing cycling both on amateur and professional level. No wonder the results are better.
https://youtu.be/j3RgXKU0RsQ?si=Gbh7JPVoEgrmQJqR
And it is this very topic:
https://youtu.be/orDyHlnaFys?si=4BxQBBLaf7suk4XA
Star Trek explored many subjects!
Too bad I can’t find the darts scene that closed out the episode
Pitch clock, pick-off attempt limit, the shift being reined in a bit. The bases are slightly larger, which should tip the scale toward the runner.
You want to speed up the game? Turn off the screens. I know there's a tradition of taking baseball more like a picnic than a sport, but if cricket could come up with variations to shorten 2-3 days into 3 hours I'm sure baseball can do it too.
I have absolutely no recollection which team won or who was playing against my local sports team. But I remember having fun!
Of course it makes watching the game a worse experience.
> Early baseball or town-ball had many, many variants, as would be expected of an informal boys' game, and most differed in several particulars from the game which developed in New York in the 1840s.
All wikipedia pages point to baseball being invented in new england, USA.
Yes, other games that involve hitting balls with sticks were invented elsewhere, including great britian, and the influence can be traced to those, but the game we play today was invented in the USA.
In what ways is baseball violent or like golf?
Those rules have also been changed and those plays are extremely rare, and also frowned upon by players.
However, the pitcher intentionally throwing a ball 90 mph at a batter's head because of some perceived slight is still part of the game.
Indeed, smashing the catcher at home plate was common whether initiated by the catcher or the base runner. For over one hundred years, MLB has debated whether there is any place for violence at home plate between base runners and catchers, intentional or otherwise. It is a complex question that has been answered by rules and player attitudes with little consensus between rule makers, players, and spectators, which, of course, closely mirrors society at large.
I love baseball and golf and have participated in both, but only as a young player. To me, spectator sports that aren't the Tour de France, F1, or WRC are just not dense enough with action to sustain my interest, even if that action is enabled by wheels and sources of power that may not be human.
This tension between safety and freedom is a theme that has played a role for at least as long as the publication of Trevor Melia's book, "Lucifer State", more than four decades ago. I'm out-of-my-depth in classics but I'd be surprised if there weren't a much older reference to this tension in antiquity. The role of that tension in modern society most certainly divides the room whether we are talking about art, sports, or life itself.
MiLB isn't any more exciting than MLB games. At least the games are more affordable. You might find some NCAA games more interesting though, since the quality gap between teams tends be higher and home runs rates are higher than other levels. Allowing metal bats probably has something to do with it.
Juan Soto, who is currently playing, has a career .421 OBP.
A .333 OBP in MLB, depending on the player's position and what year it is, would be OK. Not great, certainly not the best.