samfels27 Page 13 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout are hurt — how else would the Angels season end?
Neil Young told us that it was better to burn out than to fade away. In the same fashion, some things are just meant to divebomb so hard into the dirt that they cause a smoldering crater that affects all life on the planet rather than just saunter out to the woods to die in peace. That quickly appro...

Elly De La Cruz and Shohei Ohtani are the same fans we are
Most baseball players, and really most pro athletes, will tell you that they stopped being fans long ago. It is a job now, and any star on another team becomes an obstacle eventually. They’ll tell you they respect other guys in the league, and that’s probably true, but they don’t see them as anythin...

Did Rogers Centre kill Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s power?
Whenever the post-mortem is compiled on this Toronto Blue Jays season — they’re still very much in the hunt for a wildcard spot — it won’t be hard to find culprits for how they didn’t quite manage to take the next step from a good team to a power that most in Ontario were expecting (feels like a the...

Alex Cora had himself a night
It’s starting to slip away from the Boston Red Sox. After an excellent July, the Carmines have run to nowhere in August with a 10-10 mark which has left them five games adrift of the last wildcard spot. Which isn’t a huge surprise, given that this team was built to basically win 84 games and give th...

Jerry Reinsdorf emerged from his crypt long enough to fire White Sox GM, VP
Not to turn this morning wake-up companion into Chicago White Sox Daily, but it’s a slow time of year. We’ll get through this together, I promise. ...

Man United prove a team can be shamed, as long as it's also incompetent
Make no mistake, Manchester United wanted to bring Mason Greenwood back. They wanted to follow the cynical path of pretty much every other sporting entity in the world, the calculation that fans will eventually forget what a player has been credibly accused of or has done as long as the totals on th...

Baseball owners prove the richest tend to be the dumbest, and the Christian Pulisic train is rollin’ again
The more you watch rich people these days, the more you wonder how it’s possible they got all that money in the first place, or how they’ve kept it, or how they haven’t just walked through one of their windows chasing a bird. And then the sobering realization that we’ve built a society specifically ...

Julio Rodriguez refuses to make any outs
Baseball fans can lose track of the Mariners, all tucked away down there, pretty easily. They’re on late at night, and they don’t come with any of the glamor of some of the other West Coast teams. Though they entered this season as one of the more promising units after last year’s exploits, a pretty...

What if Man City have Kevin De Bruyne II, but faster?
Hello again! This is the second iteration of something we’re trying every Monday, wrapping up the Premier League weekend through five things we learned or liked or bothered us or confused us (we’re always confused). Hope you like it, and if you do please share it around to that guy who supports the ...

Spanish FA President Luis Rubiales is a creep
Update Aug. 24: According to multiple reports, Luis Rubiales plans to resign....

World Cup Final: What if the managers switched brains?
There’s some lesson to be learned that Spain won the World Cup with a manager they reviled, while the USWNT faceplanted in the round of 16 with a manager who got hired mostly because all the players loved him. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but it probably has to do with what really matters is the...

OK, but what if Spain winning the World Cup is actually a good thing?
If you bounce around the non-Spain or England-based internet, you may find that this World Cup Final is a Final no one wanted. Australia would have been more exciting given the noise that would have accompanied them. One of the real upstarts like Colombia would have been a real story. USWNT fans don...

The voice of Buffalo Rick Jeanneret dies at 81
It’s mostly baseball announcers who become synonymous with a team and a city. They’re on the radio or TV every day for six months, so they can become more a part of a fan’s life than a good portion of the family. Whether that will happen again, with so many broadcasters now so polished, clean, rehea...

Vlatko Andonovski was bad at a very tough job
If one didn’t want to kick dirt on Vlatko Andonovski as he recedes from the USWNT manager job, and kicking dirt is kind of what we do around here, it would be wise to point out the size of the task he was faced with. He took over a team that had won two World Cups on the spin, so there was really no...

Northwestern football coach David Braun seems to think it’s a real challenge to not haze
At some point in the near future, football coaches are going to have to be relabeled into their own scientific category. It’s a real question if they’ve been human, or homo sapien, for a long time. Northwestern’s David Braun is only just the latest to prove it. ...

Boy, noise sure does follow CM Punk
In a sense, CM Punk can’t help it. Given every twist and turn and crash and surge his career has had, eyes are going to be on him wherever he is, even when that’s off camera. And if you believe there are those who still have knives out for him within AEW, well it’s not much of a surprise he’s being ...

The continuing adventures of Angel Hernandez, Leo Messi is doing that thing again, and charter flights in women’s sports rears its ugly head
If you haven’t been following the touring artist exhibition that is Angel Hernandez attempting to call balls and strikes, or simply trying to disprove the utility of rules and conventions in society at all, in various Major League parks this summer, you’re missing one of the truly great examples of ...

Do you know just how bad the Colorado Rockies have been?
It’s a baseball axiom that the Colorado Rockies are clueless, helpless, directionless. They don’t have any stars, they don’t have any prospects, and they don’t have any idea how to get or produce either. Their ballpark presents a unique set of problems, but the Rockies are certainly not the organiza...

World Cup Day 22: Spain overcome Sweden to reach their first Final
This is truly the business end of the World Cup, as we decide who will get to play for the whole Chimichanga. The first semifinal is in the books, and it was a true styles-makes-fights clash (as opposed to the staring contest England-Australia quite likely will be). Spain’s technical ability vs. Swe...

Juan Soto provides the perfect metaphor for the Padres season, and Neymar ends up where he was always meant to be
The San Diego Padres are running out of time. They seemed to know it, as Juan Soto blew up at them last week after another dispiriting loss. It’s clear that something is amiss below the surface for San Diego, and Soto was doing his best to try and get everyone focused on what really matters, closing...