Just Finished: Scorecasting

I just finished an enjoyable read of Scorecasting.  It’s kind of like Freakonomics applied to sports.  It’s fully qualified name is:

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

I found out about it through a plug on the Freakonomics blog and since I loved both Freakonomics books and read the blog daily I thought getting a new copy of this was worth it.  I put it on my Amazon wishlist and the birthday fairy put it underneath my pillow.

While nothing can match that first time you read Freakonomics in shear nerdy pleasure Scorecasting has made the best attempt so far.  It’s at least as good as SuperFreakonomics if not slightly better.  The authors are sports iconoclasts and statistics are their tools.  They go through all major sports: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer challenging conventional wisdom.  They follow the Freakonomics format where each chapter starts with asking about a conventional wisdom like “is there a home team advantage and why” and then explore why it may or not be true.

In general they do a very good job of explaining their statistics to justify their conclusions.  This is the biggest difference between the book and how sports commentary or news use statistics without justification.  There are a couple chapters I found weaker, maybe 2 out of about 20.  In these I thought they took the form of long essay with more assertions than explanations, but those were the shortest chapters and were greatly out weighed by the strength of the other chapters.  Some highlight chapters for me were “Are the Chicago Cubs cursed?”, “Whistle Swallowing” and “Rounding First”.  IN the plug on the Freakonomics blog they were really hyping up the home field advantage analysis, but I thought it dragged on a little too long in the book.  Still I got the book so it did its job.

Highly recommended.  An easy fun read and good conversation material.

Next up up on the reading list is fiction, since I alternate, and I’m going to read Spindrift.  It’s the last in a series I started a while back.  Stay tuned.

Supreme 90 Core Dynamics

Today I continue my review of each workout from the Supreme 90 Day program.  Like all S90 work outs it uses a common warm up and cool down.

Work out: Core Dynamics

Length: 18:07

Equipment: Dumbbells

Format:

5 sets of 5 30-second exercises with 45 seconds break between sets.  Only one time through each set.

Review:

Pretty good core work out.  I expected of all workouts this one would use the ball, but I was wrong.  Nice variety of exercises and they were grouped well. There was a hilariously useless visual timer that counts down only the last 5 seconds of each exercise.  It just reminded you that it needed a more useful display like a CNN news banner across the bottom to show the current and upcoming exercises.  I would definitely do this again, maybe after a run or another work out.

Score (out of 10): 8

Compared to P90X:

Core Synergistics is very similar.  CS has more “fun” exercises (Superman…. Banana!) and is an hour long were as CD gets down to business.  I think I give a slight edge to S90 on this one because I don’t think a whole hour of core exercises is really necessary.  I’d rather do the shorter core workout more often as an adder to others rather than a stand alone workout once a week.

 

 

-Steven