tom-scocca Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Who Was The Actual Best Player In The NBA Every Year During Kobe Bryant's Career?
Kobe Bryant’s career spans a remarkable amount of NBA history, from the late years of the Chicago Bulls dynasty through the rise of the Golden State Warriors. If there’s been one constant through all those years, it’s that the best player in the league has never, ever been Kobe Bryant....

Regular-Season Baseball Team Victories, Ranked
1. Win No. 1 (We’re not going to lose all our games)...

Here Is What "Stuff" Means in Baseball
What is “stuff”? The New York Times devoted part of its Sunday front page to the question of what, exactly, the term means in baseball. It is, John Branch of the Times reported, an underexamined mystery of the game. ...

No Hitter Has Ever Been More Terrifying Than Albert Belle In This Game
July 25, 1999. Orioles versus Angels in Turn Ahead the Clock Day at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, hence the hideous monochrome sleeveless trashbag novelty jerseys. Albert Belle batting cleanup. ...

TK Is For Tommy Kraggs
You could tell Craggs thought he was the best writer at Deadspin because he never wrote, and when he did write, it was on the crappiest subject possible. Roll back through his scanty archive (by the time you get to page two, you're already in August): It's Peter King Quarterly, little pull-top cans ...

"Dear...Hero": Dan Gilbert's Comic Sans Letter, Edited For 2014 LeBron
LeBron James is back on the free-agent market for the first time since he left his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. Doesn't all that summer's bitterness seem so long ago now? Might James want to try playing with a star guard who has two working legs? He might, right? He hasn't said h...

Rafael Palmeiro Was The Ideal Steroids Scapegoat
Rafael Palmeiro was going to stroll into the Hall of Fame. It's sort of unbelievable to remember this fact, as we try to gaze back over the ruptured fault line between the Steroids Era and the Steroids Recriminations Era. There wasn't really anything to argue about, back then. He was in....

ESPN Asks: When Will Anyone Pay Attention To A Famous Football Player In This Super Bowl?
OK, now that two different reporters have battled for the chance to drag the mother of a victim in the Ray Lewis murder case to the graveyard, what else can the members of the press corps do to demonstrate that their Super Bowl coverage is about the unexpected and unappreciated angles? Looks like it...

Tell It To Your Analyst: The Raging Genius Of Earl Weaver
The first and obvious thing about Earl Weaver, for me, was that he was terrifying. I lived about seven blocks from Memorial Stadium, depending on how you walked it, and Junior Orioles packages were cheap, so my parents took my older brother and me to games all the time, from our youngest days. This ...

Hot Stove: Deadspin, Gawker Swap Managing Editors
Deadspin has traded managing editor Tom Scocca to Gawker for managing editor Emma Carmichael. The sign-and-trade deal makes Scocca the deputy editor at Gawker, second in command to new editor John Cook, and it returns Carmichael to the franchise where she made her professional journalistic debut....

Deadspin Nature Moment: Right Now, There Is A Hawk Hunting Rats Outside The Office
Craggs came back in and said there was a hawk outside, looking at the rats. He was flustered, because Craggs does not do well with nature. People followed him out onto the fire escape and there it was, perched on the fire escape of the Bowery House hotel behind our building, right beside a mop hung ...

A Season Of Miracles In Washington: The Redskins Reappear, And The Owner Vanishes
Dan Snyder didn't even show up to his team's annual turkey giveaway before Thanksgiving. Somebody clearly told Snyder, the Redskins' unbeloved owner, that he couldn't win until his team won. And dang if he didn't listen. And dang if the team didn't win....

How My Foolproof Scientific System Got Us Onto <em>The Price Is Right</em>
And now I'm going to tell you exactly how to get onto The Price Is Right....

Andy Reid: Good Enough To Make You Hate Him For How Bad He Was
So of course when the clock at last ran out on Andy Reid in Philadelphia, nobody knew what the heck was going on. He was fired before the final game Sunday and coached anyway. No, he wasn't fired till after the game Sunday. No, not that either; he wasn't fired till Monday morning. One last utter cl...

Down With Toy Apartheid: The Gender Apocalypse Of The Playroom Can't Come Soon Enough
Every toy is in some sense educational, though we tend not to think about this much while buying toys, and people always become excited when there's a struggle over the curriculum. So last week, in response to a protest campaign, Hasbro announced that it would be expanding its Easy-Bake Oven line: I...

James Naismith's Original Rules Of Basket Ball, Ranked
13. "6. A foul is striking at the ball with the fist, violation of Rules 3, 4, and such as described in Rule 5."...

Luncheon Meats, Ranked
24. Bologna 23. Head cheese 22. Swiss cheese 18. (tie) Olive loaf 18. (tie) Pickle-and-pimento loaf 18. (tie) Dutch loaf 18. (tie) Chicken loaf 17. Sopressata 16. Chicken breast 15. Boiled ham 14. Genoa salami 13. Smoked turkey 12. Turkey 11. Liverwurst 10. Braunschweiger 9. Hard salami 8. Virginia ...

AP: Upstart Regional School Has The Honor Of Playing Notre Dame For A National Title
Yes, there is no higher merriment in college football than making fun of Notre Dame. But let's not overlook the joys of taunting the other side of the BCS championship matchup. If only there had been a giant sphygmomanometer hooked up to the deep Confederacy last night, to record the mass blood-pres...

Democracy In The <em>Raw</em>: The WWE Comes To Post-Revolutionary Egypt
CAIRO—Outside the International Cairo Stadium complex, there were maybe a dozen policemen on horseback greeting the crowd for World Wrestling Entertainment's first visit to Egypt. Families had brought little kids, and vendors hawked national flags and SpongeBob SquarePants t-shirts....

Deadspin NBA Shit List: Antawn Jamison, Captain Of Failure
A celebration of the NBA's most infuriating players, both past and present. Read other NBA Shit List entries here....