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The MLB Narcs Have Come For Willson Contreras And His Venezuela Sleeve
Cubs catcher Willson Contreras began wearing a Venezuelan-flag sleeve to honor his home country last summer, and it has become an essential component of his uniform. But as part of MLB’s recent efforts to crack down on uniform regulations, Contreras has been told by the league that he can no longer ...

A.J. Pollock Smashed His Thumb On What Wound Up Being An Inside-The-Park Homer
A.J. Pollock has been among the top National League players in WAR for much of this young season, but he also just cannot catch a break. In the ninth inning of the Diamondbacks’ 7-2 loss to the Brewers Monday, the outfielder laid the hell out for a Tyler Saladino line drive that turned into an insid...

The Braves Suddenly Own The Best Record In The National League
On Sunday night, the Nationals completed their four-game sweep of the Diamondbacks in a primetime thriller that featured a freeze-the-outfielder smash from Bryce Harper, two Mark Reynolds dingers (?), and the third solid start in a row from Jeremy Hellickson (??). This all means exactly as much as a...

Aroldis Chapman Threw This Season's Fastest Pitch Right Into Jackie Bradley Jr.'s Side
Last week, Cardinals reliever Jordan Hicks threw the two fastest pitches of the season (102.0 and 101.9 mph, respectively) during the same at-bat to White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson. He didn’t get his bat on either of them but somehow managed to draw a walk. Of course Hicks couldn’t last atop the le...

MLB Dorks Refuse To Acknowledge Precious Dingers In MLB Poll Of Favorite Stats
MLB.com recently polled a bunch of MLB players—35 position players and 35 pitchers—on one of the questions that’s always on the mind of nerdy baseball writers: “When you look at your stats at the end of a given year to evaluate yourself, what number do you gravitate toward and why?” The results were...

The Dodgers Are Preternaturally Fucked
Let’s do the good stuff first: The Dodgers notched an elusive combined no-hitter on Friday against a pretty wretched San Diego Padres team. Walker Buehler has one of the best baseball names I’ve ever heard, and has so far also excelled at throwing a baseball in three starts this season. Kenley Janse...

Your Band Photo Sucks
If you write about music online even once, something cool and unexpected happens: a handful of artists just like the one you originally covered will send you their music in the hope that you’ll write about that, too. Sometimes that doesn’t work and they’ll pursue other methods, like following you on...

Yangervis Solarte Smashed His Face On This Ugly Slide
It took Yangervis Solarte about eight hours at the ballpark on Thursday to notch eight hits during the Blue Jays’ doubleheader against the Cleveland Indians. That’s a lot of hits, and the performance is even more impressive when you consider that, before he got in too much of a rhythm, Solarte viole...

Ben Roethlisberger Is Totally Committed To Playing Now That The Steelers Drafted A QB
Last week, the Steelers took Oklahoma State quarterback Mason Rudolph in the third round, and they seemed convinced the draft’s sixth-ranked passer is their guy for the future. Starting QB Ben Roethlisberger, who is just the biggest fucking baby and rarely wanted to plan beyond the upcoming season w...

Blue Jays Player Achieves The Dumbest RBI Single
Twins pitcher Lance Lynn, who’s gotten off to just a cosmically bad start to the season with an 8.37 ERA, had some unlucky shit happen to him in Monday’s 7-5 loss to the Blue Jays. Caught in a bases-loaded jam, Toronto infielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr. got away with this tiny little swinging-bunt RBI s...

Pirates Pitcher Nick Kingham Had A Hell Of A Debut
Eight years after being drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates, Nick Kingham delivered one of the best major-league debuts of all time. He took a perfect game into the seventh inning against the Cardinals, before Paul DeJong knocked a single down the third-base line with two outs. Kingham retired 20 stra...

Ned Yost, Like The Rest Of Us, Was Shocked To Learn His Team Hasn't Lost 20 Games Yet
Ned Yost, brick-breaker and bee-tamer, can’t take things one game at a time because he isn’t sure how many games his team has played. Coasting on organizational goodwill from the Royals’ 2015 World Series win, he’s pretty firmly in autopilot, to the point where finding out they’re 5-17 instead of th...

Ronald Acuña, Who Should Have Been Here Weeks Ago, Flashed What He's Capable Of
On Wednesday night, baseball’s top positional prospect, Ronald Acuña Jr., finally made his long-awaited major league debut, after he’d struggled through weeks of service time with the Braves’ Triple-A affiliate. The sole, obvious purpose of this delay was so that the Braves could add an extra year o...

You Should Be Buying DVDs Instead Of Relying On Netflix
When you’re a kid, it’s perfectly fine to partake in an array of bizarre or grotesque behaviors. Whether you’ve decided to chop your own hair off, get married to a stuffed animal, or just to scribble nonsense all over the walls, you are set—this is the only time in your life when adults might even m...

Of Course Giancarlo Stanton Can Still Bash Gargantuan Dongs
Giancarlo Stanton’s had a rough go of it so far in the Bronx, recording a pair of platinum sombreros and striking out 32 times in 92 plate appearances, enough to turn Yankee Stadium into hostile territory. But during the fifth inning of the Yankees’ 14-1 victory over the Twins Monday, Stanton showe...

White Sox Reliever Danny Farquhar Is "In The Fight Of His Life" After Brain Hemorrhage
Friday’s Astros-White Sox game took a suddenly tragic turn in the sixth inning when Chicago reliever Danny Farquhar vomited and collapsed in the dugout. He was rushed to a local hospital, where tests confirmed that he’d suffered a brain hemorrhage and was in stable but critical condition. A few days...

Twins Minor-Leaguer Pulls Off The Hidden-Ball Trick
Bases-loaded jams can be tense, but Jermaine Curtis of the Rochester Red Wings found it to be the best opportunity to clown a baserunner. The Twins’ Triple-A affiliate was down 4-3 to the Charlotte Knights in the fourth inning Tuesday when Curtis tested out the hidden-ball trick on Kevan Smith, who ...

Jurickson Profar's Been Through the Damn Wringer
God, I feel so bad for Jurickson Profar. Once the consensus top overall prospect in baseball, Profar has spent the last few years sustaining and sort-of-recovering-from a series of increasingly strange injuries. That bad luck has reduced him from a franchise cornerstone to a guy who, at 25, mostly s...

The Mets Previewed A Dark, Mets-y Future Last Night
The New York Mets entered Monday night’s game against the Nationals with the National League’s best record, its sturdiest bullpen, and a way-too-early-to-matter 36 percent chance of winning their division. They carried a 6-1 lead into the eighth, then sent their fans home feeling awful thanks to the...

"Marlins Will Soar" Is The Only Anthem The Miami Marlins Will Ever Need, Or Deserve
When you follow a perennially shitty team like the Miami Marlins, change can feel both sudden and incremental. The single games or plays that torpedoed one season or another in variously spectacular fashion vanish from the memory, if only because there was never anything meaningful to lose in the fi...