Carlos Vela is MLS’s top goal scorer this season, and is tied for second in assists, and a person doesn’t get to those positions in a professional league without being either a FIFA 19 creation or just comprehensively superior to 99 percent of the other people in the league. The numbers tell the latter story on the…

The Mets, not too long ago baseball’s hottest team, gave back a little of their late-summer mojo in a recent series loss to the Braves, and find themselves still tantalizingly outside of the second NL Wild Card spot. They’re still whole worlds better than they were in the first half, and as a result of their recent…

Professional athletes are known to enter some strange head-spaces in order to stay focused and conquer doubt and all the rest of it. Still, it must be said, Cubs outfielder Nick Castellanos is truly smelling the psychosphere these days. He was asked Tuesday night why he greets manager Joe Maddon with “Happy Opening…

Everything is fine in Toronto, because training camp doesn’t even start for another few weeks. But ... is it really? The negotiations between the Maple Leafs and their wunderkind RFA winger Mitch Marner have, perhaps unsurprisingly, plodded through the offseason with minimal progress, or at least with minimal progress…

SARASOTA, FLORIDA — The sun hadn’t yet risen over the Sarasota Kennel Club, and Deb Linn was wrist deep in 100 pounds of bloody meat. She had been been up since 4:30 a.m., when she made the 45-minute commute south from Ellenton, a small town where the rent is more affordable than in the wealthy beach city of Sarasota.…

An article over at CNN today formally advances a claim dropped casually by commentators, coaches, fans, and any crank with a taste for caricaturing a whole generation. Here goes: Smartphones are hampering tennis’s young players, which is why they can’t stop the Big Three in the men’s game, who enjoyed the advantage…

Baseball players are too damn horny. So says MLB, which had to send out a memo to its players on Monday telling them to stop using over-the-counter “sexual-enhancement pills.” The risk, beyond engorged wooden bats, is that these pills have substances in them that might get flagged on a drug test.

The second, flaghumpinger incarnation of the XFL is, it appears, truly actually happening next spring. Landry Jones is in and the league has real teams and everything! Unfortunately, these are those teams.

Artist Jules Muck recently painted a mural of Larry Bird in the Fountain Square section of Indianapolis, which features the image of Bird in his Indiana State jersey doing the “Shh!” gesture, similar to the Nov. 28, 1977 cover of Sports Illustrated. This time, though, Bird is doing the shushing instead of the Indiana…

Some people are fans of the Houston Texans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Houston Texans. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

The modern discourse is a never-ending cascade of Expanding Brain memes. Everyone plays their part, and when Deadspin is doing its job well, we provide takes that belong to one of the latter panels, ones hopefully more sophisticated than this but less out-there than this. Proving that our angle on the handball call…

Last time we checked in on Nationals pitcher Hunter Strickland, he was sending himself to the injured list for two months after punching a wall. While not as self-evidently stupid, his most recent injury is just as bizarre: in the run-up to Tuesday’s game against the Pirates, Strickland got hit in the face with a…

No.

Okay, yes, I know the answer to the question posed in this headline, but I’m not going to tell you what it is until you watch this clip from a minor-league baseball game and formulate your own theory: