Baseball Page 918 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Universe Rewards Home Plate Umpire For Defending His Crew Mate By Directing A Fastball Into His Junk

This delightful baseball sequence begins with Cardinals third baseman Matt Carpenter leading off the top of the 11th inning against Pirates hurler Steven Brault. With the count at 2–2, Brault threw a breaking pitch down and away, and Carpenter appeared to check his swing. Third base umpire Jordan Ba...

Fixing MLB's Broken Economics Is About More Than Free Agency<em></em>

There have been a number of significant hints that MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association are headed for some very combative collective bargaining in 2021, but the two sides being willing to talk about economics ahead of schedule will stand out to anyone who has ever been through thi...

This Blue Jays Fan Has Ice Water In Her Veins

The Blue Jays and Tigers split a four-game series to open the season. The primary highlight of the series came on Saturday, when Brandon Drury fouled off a pitch in the fourth inning. A fan behind home plate did not flinch with the ball headed straight at her head....

Joey Gallo Nearly Decapitates His Pitcher While Trying To Throw Out A Runner

I mean, yeah, nobody likes Joey Gallo for his defense. The Rangers outfielder is a man whose dingers are to be admired and whose mediocrity in the outfield is to be ignored if you want to fully enjoy him as a player. But somebody’s gotta play out in left for Texas, even if he represents a grave dang...

Christian Yelich Is On Pace To Hit 162 Dingers This Season

It’s easy to make a wisecrack like this article’s headline on Opening Day, when a player smashes one out of the park to begin the season. But when that statement still rings true by the time game four rolls around, the dad joke goes from silly to pretty damn special. ...

Dodgers Fan On Life Support After Man Attacks Him In Stadium Parking Lot

Rafael Reyna, a 47-year-old Dodgers fan, is on life support with a fractured skull and other head injuries after he was attacked in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium sometime after Friday’s game against the Diamondbacks. Cops say Reyna was punched in the head by another man and fell to the concrete....

MLB Presents A Championship Belt To The Team That Keeps Salaries Lowest In Arbitration

An agent mentioned The Belt to me once, and I thought he was joking. This is not me doing that thing where reporters try to downplay someone else’s scoop by letting you know they already knew a thing, even though they didn’t report it, which makes them completely useless. This is me trying to convey...

The Inside Story Of How The Ricketts Family Schemed And Feuded Their Way To Owning The Chicago Cubs

On October 27, 2009, the Ricketts family officially purchased a 95 percent ownership stake in the Chicago Cubs from the Tribune Company, bringing an end to a long, arduous, and complex sale process. Now, thanks to a cache of emails and documents obtained by Deadspin, more details from that process c...

I Guess We're Doing "Baby Shark" This Season

You cannot say we weren’t warned. On Monday, in the Rangers’ final exhibition of the spring, Elvis Andrus debuted a new walk-up song. A familiar song, you might say. One that your child has probably played on Youtube so many times that you wished you could throw it (the computer; your child) through...

Vile Cardinals Thwarted By Lorenzo Cain's Game-Ending Dong-Robbery

Opening Day, baby! Many good teams—the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Phillies, the Astros, the A’s—looked impressive; certain lousy teams—looking straight at you, Orioles—looked inept in a way that is possible to find charming in the very first game of the year. But wherever your team fell in all of thi...

Dodgers Set New Opening Day Record By Bashing Eight Dingers

The Dodgers kicked off the 2019 season in style, destroying the Diamondbacks at home for an easy 12-5 win. The final 11 of those runs came courtesy of eight dingers, the most any team has ever hit on opening day. That ties a Dodgers franchise record for homers in any game and comfortably surpasses t...

Hell Is Trying To Get Into A Ballpark On Opening Day

Opening Day is here again, and you know what that means: hot dogs, dingers, the smell of the freshly mowed grass, and also the experience of standing in a line for 45 minutes because overdramatic security measures and some pointless new technology means that fans are slowly being let into the ballpa...

Does Luke Voit Know How To Eat? An Investigation

Yankees first baseman Luke Voit is big and beefy and slugs dingers—including one in the first inning on Opening Day—so one could probably assume that he consumes calories, at least on occasion, in order to give his body energy....

MLB Advanced Media Made Billions For Baseball, Chewed Up Its Employees, And Spit Them Out

On the second Tuesday of February, at 3:00 in the afternoon, around 40 employees of MLB Advanced Media—one arm of MLB’s media empire, which also includes MLB.com, MLB Network and MLB Productions—nervously filed into a conference room at MLBAM’s office in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market. They had been liv...

Which Online Edgelord Mishaps Will Derail Trevor Bauer's Season?

It’s Opening Day, folks, and you know what that means: It’s time to speculate and make predictions about the upcoming major league baseball season. Which teams will win the divisions, wild cards, pennants, and World Series? Who’s gonna sock a ton of dingers? Which bizarre Internet Libertarian ailmen...

Dear God

Baseball Will Outlive These Complaints Too

When His Exalted Malignancy Magary I churned out his latest Funbag under the headline “Would You Rather Be Born Old Or Die Young?” I thought of baseball, and how it has become this new battleground for the end of one generation at the neglectful hands of the next. That’s the New Narrative, ladles an...

The Best Way To See America Is To Visit Every Last Minor League Ballpark

Not long after the 2017 World Series ended in a dogpile of happy Houston Astros, Bart Wilhelm began planning his first big trip of the 2018 season. For more than half a decade, Wilhelm has been “chasing” Minor League ballparks, with the goal of attending a game in all 159 of them. Wilhelm began the ...

<i>Sports Illustrated</i> Publishes Anonymous Scout's Tantrum Over Odubel Herrera [Update]

Sports Illustrated published its season previews for every MLB team today, and the entry for the Philadelphia Phillies features a trip back to a time when an anonymous scout dog-whistling a non-white player was a regular genre in sportswriting....

How Much Longer Will Baseball Stadiums Be For Baseball Fans?

MLB’s attendance, you might have heard, was down last year, around four percent by season’s end. The league’s front office, represented by anthropomorphized wet blanket Rob Manfred, has operated under the assumption that pace of play is the issue, arguing that “putting the best entertainment product...