Play Ball!

Play Ball!

Time to play ball.

WHAT IF BASEBALL WERE ORGANIZED LIKE SCIENCE? ASPIRING CATCHERS OR SHORTSTOPS, LIKE students of physics or molecular biology, would be trained by professional counterparts, and top prospects with dazzling skills would turn pro without learning that by combining their specialized talents, they could create an entirely different game. Managers, owners, and marketers would seek and reward individu...

Let’s Play Ball

I t's that time of year—frozen northern fi elds begin to show a little green as predictions of the upcoming season abound from spring training in the south. As spring leaps forth from the doldrums of winter, America's pastime consumes more of the newspaper sports section. Having grown up in an era when kids spent the most of their summer vacation around baseball diamonds, I watch with interest ...

Take your eyes off the ball: Improving ball-tracking by focusing on team play

Accurate video-based ball tracking in team sports is important for automated game analysis, and has proven very difficult because the ball is often occluded by the players. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to addressing this issue by formulating the tracking in terms of deciding which player, if any, M is in possession of the ball at any given time. This is very different from standar...

Girls can play ball: Stereotype threat reduces variability in a motor skill.

The majority of research on stereotype threat shows what is expected: threat debilitates performance. However, facilitation is also possible, although seldom reported. This study investigated how stereotype threat influences novice females when performing the sensorimotor task of bouncing a ball to a target. We tested the predictions of two prevailing accounts for debilitation and facilitation ...