The Mourning After Page 21 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Aaron Judge ties Maris with 61st blast
I thought I was annoyed when all the Yankees fans were complaining about Aaron Judge walking all the time (just wait for the ALDS, Vinnie Bag O’ Screwdrivers). Then we got back to all the crusty baseball men trying to pretend that the AL record, or the Yankees record, is anything the masses should c...

What if Christian Pulisic isn’t that good anymore?
Also, he might be kind of a prick, but we’ll circle back to that....

Our ass bleeds for Kyrie Irving
Athletes being dumb isn’t anything out of the ordinary. It’s been the crux of the matter for sports’ entire existence. With social media and athletes having a giant bullhorn whenever they feel like, without the filter that the media could provide them (imagine Mickey Mantle today), they’re going to ...

Beck, you can’t possibly need the money from this ad that badly
I know that I’m supposed to waive the white flag on the fight of any musician selling their songs and work for commercials. Most of them do it, the industry doesn’t work the way it used to, and it’s probably a necessary evil these days. This is just the way the world is, everything is for sale, no m...

It’s OK to enjoy Albert Pujols’ 700th home run
I never know how to write about the teams or players I like. I could pen 2,500 words on Albert Pujols in 20 minutes, literally breaking Mavis Beacon records along the way, and none of it would be coherent or old-time-y poetic like in the days when you had to read sports writers to see a swing. ...

We can’t get upset just because one organization gets it right
I’ll admit, when I first saw last night that Ime Udoka had been suspended by the Boston Celtics for the entire upcoming season, my eyes widened. Seemed awfully harsh for a relationship that every reporter seemed to stress was consensual. But then I have little experience in the corporate world and a...

The White Sox’s year finally dying the death it deserves
It’s not that you have to go back all that far for a season by an MLB team that was as disappointing, confounding, and overall just as big of a waste of time as the 2022 Chicago White Sox. It was just last year that the San Diego Padres acquired every player that wasn’t nailed down, and then finishe...

60 is such a round number
It was a number we didn’t even think about when we were kids. Only if you were born in a specific time, where you were an impressionable youth between 1998-2003, would 60 seem reasonable, or even reachable, or something to be expected to happen semi-regularly. It was never even talked about....

Are we done being salty about the Astros yet?
Last night, the Astros clinched their fifth AL West title out of the last six. And that one they missed was the 2020 season, which basically doesn’t count. So for all intents and purposes, this is their fifth straight division title. Currently, that’s the longest streak in the majors, as the Dodgers...

It was a good day for karma
Sports fandom is a series of choices. You have to tell yourself a lot of things that might be a fudging of the truth, or outright lies to get through to the next game, the next season, whatever it might be (remember I’m a Bears fan). So yeah, there are shithead fans everywhere, and something that go...

Someone might want to check to see if Boone is still standing
Appalachian State earned its first appearance on ESPN’s College Gameday after upsetting then No. 6 Texas A&M in College Station a week ago. Usually, when Kirk Herbstreit, Lee Corso, and the crew roll into town, the game rarely lives up to the pregame festivities....

Yordan Alvarez would like you to know that play time is over
There are less than 20 games left for each MLB team, and a lot of fan bases have already switched to football mode. When you mix that with these home runs races — Aaron Judge mashing balls toward the Yankees franchise record, and Albert Pujols trying to reach career home run No. 700 — it’s easy to f...

Amazon came to football and no one died
It’s not much of a leap now that a sports broadcast is completely on streaming. The NFL was the last to jump the River Styx (though I guess no one really jumps The Styx), though plenty of people have been watching Monday Night through the ESPN app and the like. But Amazon bought the Thursday Night p...

Who the hell let Ray Hudson in the house?
CBS has mostly been a gift to soccer fans. Unlike Turner when it bought the Champions League rights, forgot about it until the day before the tournament started, and then dusted off some closet and called whatever former USMNT members were within an hour’s flight of the studio, CBS has taken its cov...

You get eight months to come up with better than that
There is more that goes into being a head coach of an NFL team than I can possibly imagine. But then, no one’s paying me several million (feel free to though!) to learn all the things it takes and be good at them. Not only do you have to manage the side of the ball that you have been as a coordinato...

HBO isn’t the only home for a Song of Ice and Fire
You can only hope you’re witnessing history at the moment. You obviously can’t know until the perspective of time kicks in. You tell yourself that this moment or that moment feels different than other ones you think you saw. But does it? Are you just telling yourself that? You can tell yourself anyt...

There’s losing to Kentucky and Marshall, and then there’s losing to App State and Georgia Southern
The unassuming weeks are always the most dangerous for college football, but especially so early in the season when the rankings are more guesses than earned distinctions. Still though, when you schedule an FCS school and pay them to come play non-conference patsy during homecoming or whatever else,...

Oh great, they’re letting humanoids play tennis now
The US Open could’ve fizzled out after Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal lost. Casual fans are conditioned to look for those four names when following a Grand Slam. While we weren’t watching for Williams’ pursuit of her 24th Slam, we were still watching for Serena. The men’s bracket was more of the s...

It’s also the start of NFL propaganda season
You always have to hope that the Sunday night game, or really any primetime NFL game, is a good one. Because when it’s bad, there’s just far too much dead time for Cris Collinsworth’s brain to drip out of his ear. I don’t mind Collinsworth as much as other people. He can be a little too “Everything ...
