Happy Election Day! Please accept this digital "I Voted" sticker - and by digital sticker, I actually mean my virtual admiration - if you submitted your ballot early or will take care of it sometime today.
Also, my colleague Mollie Cahillane used this week's SBJ Media newsletter to breaks down the Big Ten's West Coast ratings lift. - Ethan Joyce
In today's edition of Power Up:
- TMRW Sports partnering with Fastbreak.ai
- Teamworks Wallet launches for NIL
- UPenn study: MLB mud enhances friction
TMRW Sports partnering with Fastbreak.ai
TMRW Sports will later today announce a partnership with automated sports scheduling platform Fastbreak.ai. The multi-year deal will see Fastbreak manage TGL’s schedule beginning with its 2026 season and TMRW Sports make a strategic investment in Fastbreak. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Fastbreak provides scheduling optimization services to more than 35 professional and collegiate sports properties – including the NBA, NHL and MLS – and 35 youth sports tournament operators as of its September acquisitions of fellow schedule-maker Optimal Planning Solutions and youth sports tournament management platform Tourney Pro . Those acquisitions added more than a dozen staff to Fastbreak’s headcount, including two key executive hires in Chief Scheduling Officer Rick Stone, from OPS, and GM/Youth Products Ray Glassman, from Tourney Pro.
In addition to expanding its partner roster, Fastbreak is also investigating new scheduling approaches that would factor in viewership projections as well as working to build an enterprise software platform for youth sports tournaments that includes scheduling and management services.
Digital banking solution Teamworks Wallet launches with college athletic programs and NIL collectives
Teamworks has begun piloting a new digital banking solution, called Teamworks Wallet, with college athletic programs and NIL collectives, including Purdue and the Boilermaker Alliance and Georgia and the Classic City Collective.
Launched in beta in September and expected to release widely in 2025, Teamworks bills Wallet as an athlete-focused financial hub for banking services and compliance reporting for NIL earnings. Crucially, it also registers payments instantly and does not charge processing or platform fees.
“All those fees that other companies were assessing the athletes, let’s call it what it is, it’s an additional tax on the athlete,” said Teamworks CEO Zach Maurides, a finalist for Technology Executive of the Year at the 2024 Sports Business Awards: Tech . “Internally, we’ve coined the phrase, ‘the athlete tax.’ Our goal when we created Wallet was to eliminate the athlete tax, and to give collectives and schools the opportunity to opt-out of the athlete tax.”
In addition to those personal savings, Wallet also offers services geared towards demystifying athletes’ finances.
The platform offers high-yield savings accounts and Visa debit cards (which can be added to one’s Apple wallet, a feature Teamworks says 95% of Purdue students with access to Wallet have used). NIL transactions that flow through Wallet are automatically disclosed to their respective athletic departments, then routed to the NCAA via the NIL Assist platform. There is also a mechanism within Wallet to automate contributions to a tax reserve account.
“In a Purdue case study, we had a football player tell us that Teamworks Wallet, ‘transformed how I think about my personal finances,’” Teamworks SVP/Business Development Kevin Barefoot said. “Because we are building this – and have built it – specifically for college athletics, we can include features that are specific to college athletics.”
Teamworks currently uses Stripe as its payment vendor, which Barefoot says typically requires four-to-seven days to process payments and takes a one-to-three percent processing fee. Wallet will eventually integrate directly with Teamworks’ suite of applications, including Influencer, the company’s NIL management platform for services such as delivering content to athletes and facilitating brand deals.
For now, Teamworks’ focus for Wallet is on facilitating payments made to athletes via NIL collectives, but Maurides envisions it as a well-positioned product for a time when athletic departments directly share revenue with athletes, a roadmap for which was outlined in a framework deal between the NCAA, Power Five conferences and plaintiff attorneys in the House, Hubbard and Carter cases earlier this year.
“We’re expecting that between January and July of next summer, we’re going to need to onboard over 100,000 athletes,” Maurides said. “We are preparing for that rush.”
UPenn study demonstrates that the mud MLB uses for game balls does enhance friction
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have completed the first study demonstrating that the special mud Major League Baseball uses to rub all of its game balls does, in fact, enhance friction and ensure pitchers have a consistent grip.
While questions remain about the compositional qualities of the South Jersey mud that create this effect, the new paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that the Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud — harvested by the Bintliff family for generations — spreads like skin cream and grips like sandpaper.
“The non-complicated headline, is that, in general, the friction is enhanced with the mud on the ball,” said Douglas Jerolmack, a Penn professor of engineering and environmental sciences, who said the combination was "kind of magical" how it spreads smoothly and still has grit. “The thing, though, that makes it delicate and complicated is that the sliding speed matters.”
The lead author of the paper is Shravan Pradeep, a postdoctoral researcher working in Jerolmack’s lab. He worked closely with a student, Xiangyu Chen, to design the experiments. Jerolmack and Paulo Arratia, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, supervised the work.
Much of their recent, grant-funded work studies the behavior of natural mud in debris flows — “catastrophic landslides,” as Jerolmack put it — but the baseball mud became a passion project after learning of its existence when approached by a journalist for comment in 2019.
The Bintliff’s mud is a quirky but essential part of baseball lore and logistics. It used to prepare every baseball to ensure the proper tack and feel of the ball. MLB has previously contracted with material science giant Dow to create pre-tacked baseballs, which were tried in the minor leagues but didn’t behave the way a traditional baseball does.
Mud procured by the Bintliffs is found along the Delaware River and is unique, even if it initially looks and feels the same, with Pradeep explaining, “When you try to spread it between your fingers, it looked and it felt like a face cream, like these clay masks we have you put on the face.”
“It allows you to spread a very thin and fairly uniform coating because it spreads so well,” Jerolmack added. “It makes this exquisitely thin layer.”
Based on published reports, the Bintliffs do treat the mud some, draining some water out to a certain consistency, sieving it to remove a particular fraction of larger particles and putting in a secret additive. The Penn researchers did some compositional analysis that identified the concentration of elements but not how they are combined. An area for further research is to examine the biological materials. They did not the product included “little bits of twigs and leaves and stuff because it's actually natural mud from a real creek,” Jerolmack said.
“It behaves like a material that's been optimized to do this,” he added. “They must have a very good working knowledge of this mud. . . . It appears that the ingredients don't seem special, but the proportions of these ingredients are dialed in perfectly to make it have this behavior.”
The first of three tests conducted by Penn was the use of a rheometer, which measured its viscosity and found that it behaved similar to commercial skin creams. The second involved an atomic force microscope, which is essential a pin prick that measures the resisting force needed to pull the needle away — it assesses the stickiness of the substance, which Pradeep saying the Lena Blackburne mud-rubbed baseball was twice as sticky as an untreated ball.
The third test was the novel one involving the creation of artificial fingers for consistent force application. Pradeep and Chen used a silicone polymer called PDMS that has the same elasticity as human skin. They then added squalene, a fish oil that replicates what’s naturally found on fingertips. The scientists applied pressure on the baseball with these fingers and then created a shearing force by sliding the ball at various velocities.
What they found was that the mud created only a small amount of friction at slow sliding speeds and that the friction disappears at very fast speeds, presumably because the small sand particles in the mud are knocked off the ball’s cover. But, in the Goldilocks zone in between the extreme speeds, the friction is notably enhanced by the mud.
“Over the past decade, we have worked with many types of cohesive mud, frictional mud, different type of muds that are out there,” Arratia said, “and in our experience, none of them has those properties that we saw with this particular mud.”
The researchers bought the mud and the baseballs on the internet and were not in touch with the Bintliffs to avoid any conflict of interest. They were just keenly interested in how the mud works more than any business implication of how their findings might affect the family business or the progress of a chemically enhanced, tacky ball.
But Jerolmack said his team ultimately did develop a stance — which was to endorse the continuation of the Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud.
“It seems like the consistency of this mud has been more consistent than any other aspect of the manufacturing of these balls,” he said. "And our take now is that it's 2024 and there's a lot of people in material science and chemistry and other industries that are looking for sustainable and green solutions to replace synthetic and petroleum-based things. And here is a baseball tradition that is a material sustainably harvested, that's replenished with the tides and takes very little of it to have this desired effect, and it's a consistency for the pitchers — and I'm like, why would you try to change this?”