Not so long ago (2009), the New York Mets opened a new stadium in Flushing. It was supposed to be a classy, exposed-brick-and-green-steel tribute to the franchise's ascendance. Instead, Citi Field has been a monument to the Mets' modern futility and clumsiness.

Bridgehampton, N.Y., out on the East End of Long Island, is Red Sox territory. The bars along Main Street are decked out in red and will only show Yankees games if there's nothing else on. TVs receive the Hartford network affiliates. Carl Yastrzemski was born on a nearby potato farm and still holds a handful of records …

The Andover rap video that made the rounds this week is tacky and annoying, yeah, but to those of us who went to the school, there's more to it than the saccharine entitlement on the surface. When my class graduated from Andover two years ago, we marveled and fretted about the place: The kids are smart, the teachers …

Adapted from Tom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future, available at your favorite bookseller.

It's been fascinating to watch ESPN roll out its new, proprietary Total Quarterback Rating over the past few days, and not just because we got to see Tirico, Gruden, and Jaws huffing and grunting and puzzling over the thing as if it were the first stone tool. ("This new measure of stats," Tirico called it, while Gruden…

As Alex Rodriguez stays in the headlines because he's Alex Rodriguez (even though he wasn't actually at the high-stakes poker game mentioned in the tabloids since he was playing in the World Series at the time), the real story is the re-emergence of baseball's complicated relationship with gambling. But if MLB were to…

The following piece originally ran in The Nation's sports issue, on newsstands now.

Matt Stairs, who on Wednesday announced his retirement, was the character actor who had a few decent roles in the 1970s and played solid bit parts ever after. He was a Ned Beatty of a player. He had a fine career. Always on the roster for his offense, he delivered above-average results with the bat in nearly every…

During the years 1962-64, 13 women in the Boston area were molested and then strangled by an assailant who came to be known as the Boston Strangler. In 1965, Albert DeSalvo, a convicted sex offender and patient at a local mental institute, began telling people he committed the murders. With the help of superstar…

Jurgen Klinsmann was introduced to the media this week as the new coach of the U.S. men's soccer team, a development in the making ever since the U.S. Soccer Federation batted eyelashes at Klinsmann before the 2006 World Cup. The coach spurned the USSF then, and instead led Germany to a third-place finish in the…