Tagged: sports

National Girls and Women in Sport Day began in 1987 to honor the life of Olympic Volleyball Player Flo Hyman, who dedicated her life to sexual equality in sports.  Twenty-six years later, the day is celebrated in all 50 states, promoting and honoring female participation in athletics.  Reporter Pat O’Rourke has more.

    After the fall of Lehman Brothers, Joe Peta needed a new employer. He found a new job in New York City but lost that, too, when an ambulance mowed him down as he crossed the street on foot.

In search of a way to cheer himself up while he recuperated in a wheelchair, Peta started watching baseball again, as he had growing up. That's when inspiration hit: Why not apply his outstanding risk-analysis skills to improve on sabermetrics, the method made famous by Moneyball--and beat the only market in town, the Vegas betting line? Why not treat MLB like the S&P 500?

In his book, Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball (Not Necessarily in That Order), Peta shows how to subtract luck from a team's statistics to best predict how it will perform in the next game and over the whole season. His baseball "hedge fund" returned an astounding 41 percent in 2011-- with daily volatility similar to funds he used to trade for.

It’s been the best of times, and the worst of times for the University of Miami athletics. On the one hand, the Hurricanes have the number two men’s basketball team in the country, which is quite something for a school that usually sees basketball as simply a bridge between bowl season and spring football.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Danica Patrick has won the Daytona 500 pole, becoming the first woman to secure the top spot for any Sprint Cup race. 

It was the biggest achievement of her four-year NASCAR career.

Patrick went out eighth in the qualifying session Sunday and covered the 2½-mile superspeedway in 45.817 seconds, averaging 196.434 mph.