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In this week’s episode of Slate’s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen, Slate’s Daniel Engber and journalist David Epstein guest host. Carl Bialik, host of the Thirty Love podcast, joins them to talk about automated umpiring technologies in tennis and baseball. The Gist’s Mike Pesca then stops by to discuss the scourge of tanking in the NBA. Finally, sports scientist Florentina Hettinga comes on the show to talk about the upcoming Paralympic Winter Games in South Korea.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned on the show:
- Follow David Epstein on Twitter.
- Check out Carl Bialik’s tennis podcast, Thirty Love: Conversations about Tennis. Also check out his other tennis podcast.
- Cindy Shmerler examined the possibility of fully automating line-calling in tennis in an article for the New York Times.
- Bialik wrote for FiveThirtyEight on what it’s like to be stat-tracked as an amateur tennis player.
- See CBC Sports’ video on how Hawk-Eye technology works.
- Listen to Mike Pesca’s daily podcast for Slate, The Gist.
- Mike’s book, Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History, comes out this spring.
- Visit Tankathon to track this year’s race to the bottom of the NBA.
- Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban called for radical changes to the NBA draft last fall. He was fined $600,000 last month for admitting that he’d told his players, “Losing is our best option.”
- ESPN reports on rumors that some teams are using “reverse analytics” to optimize their losing.
- FiveThirtyEight compiled some proposals to prevent tanking, including replacing the draft lottery with an end-of-year tournament.
- In 2015, Slate’s Seth Stevenson wrote that the NBA draft is broken but can be fixed.
- Follow Florentina Hettinga on Twitter.
- Hettinga wrote about race-pacing tactics in cycling for the Epoch Times, and explained how science is helping athletes with intellectual impairments to compete at the Paralympics.
- Alex Hutchinson’s recent book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, asks how athletes push themselves to their limits.
- One-handed linebacker Shaquem Griffin stunned scouts with his time in the 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine.
- Even the Paralympics can be hacked.
- The International Paralympic Committee put out a layman’s guide to its classification system for para athletes.
Hang Up and Listen’s weekly lone wolf miler:
Daniel’s Lone Wolf Miler: When 19-year-old tennis player Aryna Sabalenka deployed her repertoire of grunts at the Australian Open in January, it caused a stir. Can a recent paper on the science of gruntology tell us whether on-court vocalizations should count as cheating?
On this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment, Daniel Engber and David Epstein talk about the life and career of Sir Roger Bannister, who died last weekend at age 88. In 1954, Bannister became the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile.
Podcast production and edit by Patrick Fort.
Our intern is Jason Rosensweig.
You can email us at hangup@slate.com.
