The Little 500 has been a mainstay at Indiana University for decades, inspiring a movie and the entire campus. Here’s how this year’s dramatic race unfolded.

From The People’s Elbow to The Manhandle Slam, here are five finishing moves you might see at WrestleMania 40 — performed in stop motion.

A few months ago, I discovered a new genre of YouTube video. It’s called the “extended highlight,” and it typically takes the form of a video somewhere between eight and 18 minutes long, with rapid-fire jump cuts between all the most important parts of a game.

NCAA rules prohibit dunking with less than 20 minutes until tip, and Rohleder’s dunk came with 19:58 showing on the clock.

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/recap?gameId=400546928

Tatís signed a contract with Big League Advance, an unusual investment fund that pays minor-league players money up front in exchange for a share of their future MLB earnings.

The Big League Advance payouts aren’t loans. If the player never reaches the majors, he doesn’t have to reimburse the money, and Big League Advance loses its stake. When a player turns into a MLB star like Tatís, Big League Advance receives a huge payout. In effect, Tatís is now funding a bunch of minor-leaguers who will never make it. It’s similar to a venture capital fund that backs lots of startups that fail, in return for a gigantic payday from getting in early on a company like Facebook or Uber.

Venture capital for all the things.

This is a column about curse words, and the deployment of curse words in sports. Don’t worry: I’m not going to use a curse word here. At least none of the really good ones. I might use a drat, a rats, a Fudgesicles, or a phooey, or, if I get really agitated—and this is just a warning to the kids at home, curled up reading a print newspaper, as kids do—a gadzooks. But I’m not going to say $*#$@!. Or %&#*!, *#$#@, or #*$!(@%. And definitely not #$*#@*^!.

To punt is to give up, and in the 21st century, NFL teams have given up nearly 50,000 times. Most of those punts were reasonable decisions. But a few were so cowardly, and in such defiance of all reason, that they must not be forgotten. In this episode of Chart Party, it’s our mission to find them.

Before his team had such grand expectations, Brown would use these “hermit” trips, as he calls them, to watch the last two minutes of almost every close game played in the NBA. His video coordinator would cut footage for him so he could study how these games unfolded from an offensive and defensive perspective.

A high school wrestler from Kansas spent four years fighting to give girls the opportunity to compete in an official state sport.

The Flyers made a run to the Stanley Cup Finals nearly a decade ago, but the team hasn’t made it out of the first round since 2012, and the team finished 16 points out of a playoff spot last season. For those fans who can’t deal with the prospect of finishing behind the Penguins in the Metropolitan division, the team has opened what it calls a “Disassembly Room,” where fans can pay to expel their rage by smashing a TV with a sledgehammer.

The move came amid growing pressure from legislators, a month after California passed a law requiring schools in the state to allow college athletes to earn endorsement money, and represents a stark shift in policy.

In a concession the NCAA had long resisted, the organization’s governing board directed its three divisions to immediately consider changing the rules governing such benefits for athletes, and to make all such changes no later than January 2021.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill allowing college athletes in the state to earn endorsement and sponsorship money, ending weeks of suspense over whether he would go head-to-head with the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its vow to fight the law in court and possibly bar state schools from its competitions.

Analysis: https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-will-allow-college-athletes-to-earn-endorsement-money-heres-how-it-could-change-college-sports-11569855827

Also: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/sports/college-athletes-paid-california.html

And: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/sports/should-college-athletes-be-paid.html

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

source: MR

Recent research has shown Major League Baseball (MLB) players that bat left-handed and throw right-handed, otherwise known as sinister right-handers, are more likely to have a career batting average (BA) of .299 or higher compared to players with other combinations of batting and throwing handedness.

Since the inception of the MLB, the relative proportion of Canadian-born sinister right-handers is at least two times greater than players from other regions, although being Canadian-born does not provide a direct offensive advantage. Rather, results showed evidence of a significant indirect effect in that being Canadian-born increases the odds of being a sinister right-hander and in turn leads to greater performance across each offensive performance statistic. Collectively, findings provide further support for the hockey influence on batting hypothesis and suggest this effect extends to offensive performance.

source: MR

I round out the bat-and-ball sports in my “minimum you need to know about a sport in order to watch a match and not be completely confused” mini-series by covering pesäpallo, also known as Finnish baseball.

Also: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190718-01/?p=102695

Brännboll is a Swedish bat-and-ball game. The name is pronounced “brennboll” and literally means “burn-ball” because the term for being “out” in Nordic countries literally translates as “burnt”.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191009-01/?p=102976

The “minimum you need to know about a sport in order to watch a match and not be completely confused” mini-series continues with kabaddi, an ancient sport popular on the Indian subcontinent and surrounding areas, but not well known outside it.

And rugby: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191014-01/?p=102994

Chestnut, a Northern Californian with a placid demeanor, also stars in “The Good, the Bad, the Hungry,” a new ESPN documentary about his surprisingly complex relationship with longtime rival Takeru Kobayashi. And the ESPN marketing machine had gone into overdrive to burnish the hot-dog champion’s image. They arranged to have Chestnut arrive at Citi Field with his sausage posse to throw out the first pitch and later hand out hot dogs — presumably the nonhuman kind.

In Jeopardy James’s case, the dominance was pretty fascinating. Holzhauer was a disruptive force who had turned the game upside down with all-in, aggressive tactics. The quants were losing their minds. There was genuine rumination over whether or not Holzhauer “broke” the game. Would Holzhauer actually be defeated—or would he have to be dragged off the set by “Jeopardy!” producers?

The 2018 season was the first in history in which strikeouts outpaced hits, a trend that has accelerated so far in 2019. The ball is in play less than ever, with a record 35.4 percent of plate appearances in 2019 resulting in a strikeout, walk or home run. Teams are using an average of 3.3 relievers per game in 2019, just below last year’s all-time record of 3.4. The leaguewide batting average of .245 in 2019 is the lowest since 1972 and a drop of 26 points from 1999, at the height of the steroids era. The leaguewide strikeout rate of 8.78 per nine innings, also a record, is higher than the career rate of Roger Clemens.

Who knows what the planet will look like in 13 years? It’s entirely possible we’ll all be living in space, drinking space juice and eating space pizza. The robots will have taken all of our jobs. The President of the United States will be Bill Belichick. The Marlins might be good. Or playing on an island.

On any given day, there are roughly 40,000 tweets with the goat emoji, according to Twitter data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. There were 333,665 tweets with the goat emoji the day after Mr. Brady’s last Super Bowl win. The uptick of goat emojis amounted to a nearly 750% increase.

The history of the goat emoji is shorter and stranger. The etymology dates back to 2010 when it was introduced to the lexicon with other livestock emojis. An update to Apple’s operating system in December 2016 included a goat makeover. What was a white Saanen goat is now a brown Toggenburg goat with a bushier tail.

Another version of the goat emoji underwent its own round of cosmetic surgery last year with an update to Google’s Android operating system. “Our goat is no longer so angry,” said Jennifer Daniel, the company’s emoji designer, who drew the goat herself.