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The last time we played around with sportswriter analytics, we wondered if we could algorithmically determine a column's author based on his favorite words. (We could!) For a followup, I decided to look at the readability of different writers. Reading level is a nebulous concept and hard to define precisely, but we have a statistical measure known as the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to give us a rough benchmark. More »
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So, fantastic news. ESPN will announce at today's upfront that they will roll out a second series of sports documentaries under the 30 For 30 umbrella, even though it's no longer the network's 30th anniversary and there may not be 30 of them. The first one will premier this fall, and new films will roll out over the next two years. The first go-round varied in quality, but produced a number of honest-to-god classic sports documentaries, often from relatively unknown filmmakers. We're thrilled that ESPN is using its money and airtime for a worthy cause. More sports films can only be a good thing. More »
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If you've never seen the film Eight Men Out, by all means rectify that and watch it as soon as possible. It's based on Eliot Asinof's celebrated book about the 1919 Black Sox scandal and directed by John Sayles, who, in a bad-ass bit of self-casting, plays the legendary sportswriter Ring Lardner that helps unravel the plot. The cast is stellar, from John Cusack to David Strathairn, and everything about the film evokes the era of bygone Chicago. We also become witnesses to how the eight Black Sox players were exiled from the sport, even for the most tangential of connections to the scandal. More »
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ESPN.com's Page 2 is closing today. What that means for you depends on how old you are. More »
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Let's return to the Bill Simmons Archive, a collection of Boston Sports Guy columns salvaged from the defunct AOL Digital Cities. In honor of Red Sox opening day, let's look at an old column calling for the demolition of Fenway Park—and the construction of something totally new and different in its place. More »
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For two days, Cuban vs. Simmons was billed as the marquee event at last weekend's MIT Sloan Sports Analytic Conference, sponsored by ESPN. It certainly didn't disappoint as the two took the stage late Saturday and engaged in an hour-long discussion ranging from the NBA lockout to how teams can engage more with fans. But just past the midway point of the talk, things got weird. Or offensive. (Probably both.) More »
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Game six, the deciding game of the Lakers' 1985 championship, saw Los Angeles's Michael Cooper carried to the dressing room with an injury. Despite the rivalry, most of the Boston fans gave Cooper a nice hand. But 15-year-old Bill Simmons, sitting in the fourth row from the court, merely waved—the most tentative taunt ever taunted. More »
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As you might have heard, Bill Simmons finally scored an interview with Barack Obama this week. Now, we at Deadspin are obviously part of the Giant Liberal Gay Media Deathship, but that doesn't mean we can't at least try to strive for balance on occasion. That's why, as a favor to all the remaining GOP candidates, we'd like to present the following list of talking points you can use to assault the president for his decision to confer with the Sports Fella: More »
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Bill Simmons recently sat down with President Obama for his podcast, which is up now on Grantland (and which has already spawned a delightful hashtag on Twitter). The last time the two were supposed to talk, ESPN ruined everything. Originally published April 16, 2008. More »
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Back we go into the Bill Simmons archive, where we rescue Simmons's AOL Digital Cities work from the internet aether. Today's long-lost column: "The 20 Most Annoying Sports Fans Alive," originally published June 4, 1999. More »
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We're diving back into the Bill Simmons archive, a previously undiscovered treasure trove of Sports Guy material from AOL Digital Cities. Today's is a special one, as it takes us more than two decades back in the Simmons oeuvre. It was originally written in the fall of 1989, when Simmons was a sophomore at Holy Cross. It never ran in The Crusader, the student paper, but Bill hung on to it: and republished it on AOL in the summer of 2000. It's called "DORM SPORTS: Things you can do in college to pass the time." More »
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We've been dipping into the Bill Simmons archive, a salvaged cache of the Sports Guy's old columns from AOL Digital Cities, none of which survives online. Today's jaunt down memory lane is a field trip Simmons took to Bristol in 1997, under the auspices of his friend Gus Ramsey, a SportsCenter producer. It was an uneventful August day, with one minor news story and few highlights, and it's a fascinating look at how SportsCenter is assembled when nothing really happened in the sports world. And, as with a goodly number of Simmons's AOL columns, it takes the form of a running diary. More »
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ESPN's initial courtship of Bill Simmons has the air of an urban legend. Simmons wrote a column excoriating the bloated and self-congratulatory ESPY Awards, and that column was rapidly forwarded around Bristol, putting the Boston Sports Guy on ESPN's radar. Much like Aeschylus's lost plays, the ESPY diary was known only from a reference in another work. In one of his early Page 2 columns, Simmons wrote: More »
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It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. After seeing last week's newly unearthed column from Simmons's AOL Digital City days, a reader sent along another Boston Sports Guy entry rescued from the dustbin of history. If you've got any old Simmons columns lying around, please send them to us. More »
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It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. The formative years of one of the country's most successful sports writers are lost forever, all because AOL Digital City preserved nothing. But even then the "Boston Sports Guy" had fans devoted enough to save some material for future generations. At SonsOfTheSportsGuy.com, a message board devoted to all things Simmons, one reader dug up an old 3.5" floppy disk with a column from September of 2000. He posted it, and we're reprinting it here. More »
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ESPN's just one of the prominently featured supporters of SOPA, the law that has your favorite non-Deadspin sites going black today. More »
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He ruined Deadspin. He's no Will Leitch. He's the worst man in sports. He sat on top of a toilet for GQ. He dropped acid. And now he's taking his act across the room to ruin Gawker. Dick. More »
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He picked a fight with Charlie Pierce. He started Grantland. He scooped up our pal Katie Baker. He shamelessly hopped on the Bruins bandwagon. He told ESPN to go fuck itself. He expressed regrets about Grantland before it even launched. He almost poached the guy who's now running our little corner of the Internet. He hired Charlie Pierce. And he's been writing long pieces stuffed with references to Boston sports and movies for far longer than we thought. More »
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The internet's not written in pencil, it's written in ink, or something. If you've spent your entire writing life online, it's likely that some Googlebot has crawled your pages, archiving every word you've ever written. But older writers who were young hacks shouldn't have to worry: their words were printed, not posted. More »
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Drew Magary's Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Buy Drew's new book, The Postmortal, through here. Find more of his stuff at his Twitter feed. More »
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If you've been thinking, "Grantland is cool and all, but it would be so much more enjoyable in a $20 leather-bound quarterly published by McSweeney's," then holy shit, you should go work in publishing immediately. Comes complete with a running diary of Hoosiers from you-know-who. [McSweeney's, via Observer] More »
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Remember this (to which Bill Simmons responded thusly)? "In addition to leading Esquire's politics blog, Mr. Pierce will write a regular column for Grantland and contribute occasionally to The Triangle blog." Honestly, this is wonderful news. [Observer] More »
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In the absence of a comment space on ESPN's Grantland website, Deadspin continues to supply a space for Grantland readers to share their feedback. Please send corrections and comments to tips@deadspin.com, subject "Dear Grantland." More »
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Simmons debuted the above fuzz while guest hosting Pardon the Interruption today. More »
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While readers wait for ESPN's Grantland to provide a space for comments and corrections, Deadspin continues to help the startup by accepting and publishing feedback. Comments below reflect the opinions of Grantland readers and are not necessarily the views of Deadspin. Readers who have additional corrections or comments for Grantland can send them to tips@deadspin.com, subject line "Dear Grantland." More »
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ESPN's Grantland still lacks a forum for comments and corrections, so we are providing this space to help the site's audience share its thoughts—criticism, praise, or otherwise. Comments below reflect the opinions of Grantland readers and are not necessarily the views of Deadspin. Readers who have additional corrections or comments for Grantland can send them to tips@deadspin.com, subject line "Dear Grantland." More »
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As a public service, Deadspin will be supplying ESPN's Grantland with a forum for corrections, clarifications, and reader comments till the startup has a chance to produce its own. Readers who have corrections or comments for Grantland can send them to tips@deadspin.com, subject line "Dear Grantland." More »
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Well, this is embarrassing. Grantland had two heartening Father's Day stories up yesterday. Alas, the fathers could not read them at Grantland.com. The site was down, replaced by a picture of a smiling girl and Prince Harry's neck. From the look of things, the domain name registry had lapsed and hadn't been renewed. A registry search and some googling revealed the contact person for the domain to be a mysterious IT/communications expert out of Bali named Ken Grant, who does work for the Indonesian mining industry. I emailed Grant last night. He writes: More »
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With today's game six preview column, Plaschke has entered the pantheon of writers who write like Bill Simmons. More »
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If you haven't yet read Charlie Pierce's Grantland essay about his time at The National, you should, and not just because it's Pierce hanging out in Bill Simmons's house, and not just because it's the best appreciation of the much-appreciated National you'll find. You should read it because it's essentially the introduction to Grantland that Simmons never wrote. More »
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From the AP photo wire tonight. Here's your keepsake commemorative ESPN.com version: More »
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The countdown clock says we're mere minutes away from launch of the most heralded website subsection named for a long-dead hagiographer since Salon's ill-fated ÆlfricOfEynsham.com. We couldn't be more excited, because they've gathered a lot of talented people, many of whom haven't yet had the proper platform for their work. More »
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Anyone who pays even passing attention to sports journalism is familiar with Bill Simmons's populist everybrah schtick. No need to dwell on how to write like an over-caffeinated 17-year-old. What's worth noting is that Simmons has always been writing that way. He's stayed true to himself. He was The Sports Guy long before ESPN mainlined him into the arm of middle America. How do we know this? Back in 1994, Simmons was eating shit sandwiches as a Boston Herald reporter fresh out of BU journalism school when he wrote this lede: More »
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As you're no doubt aware from ESPN.com. We'll have more on this breaking countdown later. More »
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It's called "Can Bill Simmons Win the Big One?" and it's by The Bronx Is Burning author Jonathan Mahler. Never mind that his book was made into an ESPN miniseries and that's not disclosed in the piece. More »
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One of the most interesting characters to emerge from the ESPN book is the formerly inscrutable Bill Simmons, if only because we've never heard him be so (openly) self-aware before. He again whips out the big swinging dick in some more excerpts. More »
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Here's a fun passage from Those Guys Have All the Fun, addressing Bill Simmons's two-week suspension over his tweeting in 2009. More »
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Forget about all the in-house melodrama resulting from the project, please be sure to check out our girl Bakes do her thing. Yes, ESPN.com is sneak-previewing today. "The Garden of Good and Evil" is on my summer reading list, for sure. [Grantland.com] More »
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Approximately one month ago, Deadspin Senior Editor Tommy Craggs was approached by several fine folks involved in Bill Simmons' then unnamed editorial project, which we now know, thanks to Richard Deitsch's Twitter account, is called Grantland. ESPN issued a press release soon after that report and confirmed that Deitsch's hunch was correct and also revealed recent additions to its staff. But there's so much more to this story and it's about time our readers were let in on it. Please follow along closely, because the news about to be broken in the following paragraphs is both self-referential and tragically absurd. More »
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The Joke That Started It All More »
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