Watching Sports Makes Us Fatter

For those of us who never played in college and didn't have what it takes to make it to the pros, playing pickup games at the park and watching the real deal on televison is as close as we will ever get to being an elite athlete. It is no question that American culture over-watches television in general. In 2010, a man named Jeff Miller was lauded for setting the world record for consecutive hours spent watching sports on TV, 72 hours.

Professional sports leagues will never tell you to get off the couch and stop watching their broadcasts, but they do have programs that push for healthier children, like NFL Play 60. Despite mixed messages of health and team loyalty, people watch hours of sports every week. Are we as a society hurting ourselves by watching the sports we love instead of playing them?

There is ample research that shows less television watching is healthier for your mind and body. This article from The Telegraph suggests "every hour of TV watching shortens life by 22 minutes." Mathematically, if a person watches 3 hours of sports a week for 50 years, she'll have shortened her life by approximately 119 days, almost 1/3 of a year. Plus, she will have spent 7800 hours watching sports in those 50 years.

This graphic from statista.com shows, during football season, 31% of adult males in the U.S. watched 6-10 hours of just football each week. If you throw in women as well, that number only drops to 27%! Our society loves watching sports but it's clearly better to play sports than to sit on the couch and watch them.

As sports fans who want to watch our favorite teams, how do we drop the remote, get off the couch, and get to work on getting ourselves in shape?

My answer is, maybe we don't have to miss the big games in order to better use our time for exercising. I believe it is possible to both support your favorite team on game day by watching the game and get a good workout. Below is an image I created featuring a baseball-themed workout.

This is just one baseball-related example, but you could search for or create your own workout to help you better utilize your television watching time regardless of the sport. So go to your living room, turn on the game, get off the couch, and get your sweat on while cheering for your favorite team.

- Isaac M. Comelli (6/6/13)

"Quickly" Explaining Cricket to Americans

As a sports enthusiast, I appreciate learning new and foreign games from time to time. Cricket has always intrigued me, but its lack of presence on American television makes it difficult to learn and to get excited about. I finally resolved to batten down the hatches and learn the rules. While I'm at it, I might as well write down what I learned so other Americans can have a quick and dirty explanation of the rules.

There is a lot of terminology which may be foreign even to baseball fans. As such, I will try to follow any unclear terms with definitions in parentheses. I will also try to make comparisons to baseball whenever appropriate and helpful for clarity.

Let's first talk about the players. Each team consists of 11 players and 1 substitute. On the offensive side, each player will be a batsman during the match. On the defensive side, the players are separated into three main categories: bowlers (like pitchers), fielders, and a keeper (like a catcher). At any time, there is only one player bowling and one player keeping. The other nine players roam the field, trying to catch any balls hit toward them.

When on offense, a team sends two of its batsman to the area where the bowling (pitching) is done, called the pitch. One batsman stands on the opposite end of the bowler and the other batsman stands on the same end as the bowler. The batsman who is opposite of the bowler (also called the striker) is tasked with "protecting the wickets" which are three wooden stakes that are hammered into the ground behind him. If the bowler is able to break the wickets by hitting a stake with the ball, the striker is dismissed (out) and is then replaced by a new batsman. Note: There is another set of wickets directly behind the bowler.

In order to score runs, the striker and his opposite batsman must successfully cross the pitch (measuring about 60 feet) and cross the crease (essentially a batter's box) with either his body or his bat (they both carry their bats with them while running). Each time they manage to swap sides, they earn their team 2 points. After the ball has been bowled, the batsmen must together decide whether they will risk leaving their creases to attempt to score runs. If the ball looks as if it will not be caught in the air or picked up off the ground and quickly returned, the batsmen will take off running. They will continue to run back and forth, scoring two runs each time, until they feel as if they cannot safely cross again. Should the fielders or keeper return the ball and knock over a wicket while a batsman is not safely in the crease, that batsman is dismissed. Until dismissed, he and his partner continue batting.

As I said before, the batsmen can continue to run as long as they believe they will safely cross the pitch. Scoring one to three runs per batsman is common when crossing the pitch, but more than that is unlikely. Similar to baseball, there is a boundary around the pitch (which is generally shaped like an oval). If the batsman hits the ball and it bounces across the boundary (like a ground rule double), the batsman earns 4 runs and needs not cross the pitch. If the ball manages to clear the boundary while flying through the air (like a home run), the batsman is awarded 6 runs.

The format of a Cricket match can vary greatly, but the match is most commonly divided into innings. An innings (Cricket adds an "s" to inning for both the singular and plural form) continues for the offensive team until 10 out of the 11 batsmen have been dismissed. Not all 11 are required to be dismissed to end an innings because each striker needs a non-striker batsman to run opposite himself. When a team's innings is over, the fielding team and batting team swap sides.

Also important to note is the idea of "overs." Each bowler may only bowl one over, which consists of six consecutive balls thrown. After a bowler finishes his over, another bowler must replace him for no bowler may throw consecutive overs.

Finally, and I'm sure I left out some important details, I will cover the four most prominent ways of being dismissed as a batsman:

1. "Bowled" - The bowler successfully gets the ball past the striker and "breaks" the wicket, which means it has either literally broken or one of the small pieces of wood sitting on top and essentially connecting the wickets together has been dislodged.
2. "Caught" - The batsman's batted ball has been caught out of the air by one of the members of the other team.
3. "Leg Before Wicket" - In the simplest sense, if the ball hits the striker when it would have hit the wickets, the striker is dismissed. Think of this rule as sort of an anti-goaltending rule. It prevents the batsman from purposefully getting hit to avoid being "bowled."
4. "Run Out" - If a member of the defensive side breaks a wicket with the ball while the batsman nearest that wicket has not crossed the crease to safety, that batsman is dismissed.

A batter that has been "bowled"

The other six ways are less common and include rules about obstructing a fielder or mishitting the ball.
Note: There are also other ways of scoring runs that I have not mentioned for the sake of brevity.

So that's the basic gist of Cricket. If you have any questions or clarifications, feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to provide an answer or look it up!

Sources: Wikipedia, Cricket-Rules.com, Learn-Cricket.com

- Isaac M. Comelli (5/22/13)

A Computer Is Smarter Than Me

Or maybe it was just luckier?

Almost a month ago during my regular playing for ESPN's game Streak for the Cash, I started out horribly. I began the month with an 0-9 record. It was terrible, disgraceful, and degrading. So I said to myself, "Forget this. I don't need to humiliate myself this way." Then I decided to delve into my fascination with pseudorandom number generation and chance. So, I put my computer to the test and let it take over all of my Streak for the Cash choices for the rest of the month.

I always looked for picks where the percentages weren't seemingly blowouts to attempt to maintain as much of a "coin flip" atmosphere as possible. Sticking as closely as possible to the 50-50 ratios, I let my computer simulate a luck-of-the-draw choice and the results are rather interesting. As one might hope to find, the computer did a pretty good job (with such a small sample size) of remaining close to 50% wins and losses. After starting 0-9, my end of the month results totaled 34 wins and 36 losses. Subtracting out my 9 losses that aren't attributed to the computer, that gives a final computer-generated result of 34-27 (55.7% win percentage). That's right about what I could have hoped for and expected.

So, it was fun while it lasted and I'm glad the results came out how I had thought they would. Alas, it's time for me to get back to choosing my own picks. Here's hoping I'll do much better than I was before I started this experiment!

- Isaac M. Comelli (5/1/13)

P.S. If you want to see my other blog posts related to this experiment, here they are:
The Beginning
The Middle
and this is The End.

Random Chance: Halfway Update

To update the progress on my randomly generated picks on ESPN's Streak for the Cash game, I bring you this picture which proves my monthly total to be 16-22. That means the "coin flip" has achieved a record of 16-13, a relatively expected total (just above 50%).

We are halfway through the month of April and the random numbers are proving to be much more average than I. Hopefully mediocrity follows it through the month.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please see my earlier post)

- Isaac M. Comelli (4/15/2013)

Random Chance

Some of you sports enthusiasts out there may be aware of the game on ESPN.com called Streak for the Cash. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's a guessing game in which contestants try to pick results from sporting events throughout the day. If you guess correctly, your streak goes up by one. If you guess correctly five times in a row, your streak climbs to five (W5). If you guess incorrectly, your streak goes to negative one (L1) and you have to start over. At the end of every month, the person who compiles the longest win streak wins $50,000 in cold hard cash. But don't quit your day job just yet. This is no simple task. Habitually, the monthly winner has a preposterous streak of W20 or higher. I've been playing Streak for the Cash (or Streak, as I like to call it) since January 2010 and my best streak ever is a mere W10. But if you think you can win, give it a shot.

Anyway, the point of my blog entry today is to vent frustration and to attempt a new method. The month of April has started out miserably for me on Streak. In only 3 days, I've managed to collect a whopping nine losses in a row!

Normally my monthly rate for correct guesses is between 50 and 60 percent so I'm a far cry from that. I'm not one to give up, but the mathematician in me wondered, "Couldn't you be doing better if you let a pseudorandom number generator pick your choices for you?"

Now I know what you might be thinking. You probably doubt that a computer could come up with a better guess than I could with a little bit of research before making my selections. And you're right. Yet, my thought was, what if I were to take the picks that I would normally pass up because they were too close to make a decision and let the computer take a 50-50 guess at it? Over the course of the month, I ought to get at least close to half correct, right?

So, that's what I'm going to do. From April 4th until the end of this month, a computer will be choosing my picks for me. I'm interested to see what will happen and I hope to have some mediocre numbers to report, thus confirming my hypothesis.

For the mathematicians/programmers out there who might be curious in the code I used to generate my picks, I've included it below. I used Wolfram Mathematica and a simple Module function. If you have any questions about the code, feel free to ask in the comments.


WhichPick[ ] : = Module[{a, b, c, d},
  a = RandomInteger[{0, 1}, 1000000];
  b = Count[a, 0];
  If[b >= 500000, Print["Go with the favorite."],
   Print["Underdog for the win!"]]
  ]

- Isaac M. Comelli (4/3/2013)