aba Page 66 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Local Columnist Woefully Out Of His Element
One possible explanation for the existence of this Albany (Georgia) Herald column, in which Carlton Fletcher fields all the questions a “female person” might have watching her first baseball game, could be that it was accidentally sucked through a wormhole decades ago and finally reappeared on Sept....

"He Would Have Mounds Of Towels": A U.S. Open Ball Person Dishes On The Nicest Players And Oddest Habits
Tennis watched on TV has nothing on tennis watched from the stands. Tennis watched from the stands, in turn, has nothing on tennis watched while standing right on the court. That’s one perk of being a ball person, one of the many workers crucial to the smooth function of a tennis tournament. They en...

Alabama Wants Students To Exchange Their Privacy For College Football Playoff Tickets
The fervor that students who attend SEC schools have for their respective football programs is so well known that it’s become cliché for religious comparisons to be made. But for University of Alabama coach Nick Saban, that level of fandom has just not been cutting it lately, and he’s gone so far as...

Jameis Winston Still Doesn't Quite Have This Pep-Talk Thing Nailed Down
No matter what becomes of the rest of Jameis Winston’s career, I think it is safe to say that the first thing he will be remembered for is the multiple accusations of sexual assault that have been made against him. But the second thing—well, that’s the crab legs. But the third thing he will be remem...

Interminable Mike Pereira Rules Monologue Interrupted Several Times By Ghastly Football
The NFL’s got to clean this crap up. The Thursday night game between the Panthers and Buccaneers was already a hellish, dismal slog, featuring punchless, amateurish offense run by a pair of deeply disinterested quarterbacks. Then the fourth quarter rolled around, and what might’ve otherwise been at ...

The Secret Fun Of Wild Card Bumper Cars Without An Audience
Having been surprised and inspired by Comrade Burneko’s scolding paean to the virtues of minor league baseball (namely, that it’s fun and people you don’t hang out with seem to like it so it deserves its continued existence based solely on that fact), I decided to avert my eyes from the smoldering r...

How Much Of Jalen Hurts Is Just Oklahoma?
Here’s a chicken-or-egg question to puzzle over for the next several weeks, until Oklahoma faces a ranked opponent: Was Sooners quarterback Jalen Hurts completely underutilized at Alabama, or is head coach Lincoln Riley an unequivocal offensive genius? In Hurts’s debut game for Oklahoma on Saturday,...

Family Of Rays Prospect Blake Bivens Killed In Triple Homicide
ESPN reported this morning that the wife, child, and mother-in-law of Blake Bivens, who pitches for the Tampa Bay Rays’ Double-A affiliate, were murdered in Keeling, Va. on Tuesday. An 18-year-old named Thomas Bernard, who is the brother of Bivens’s wife, was arrested and charged with the murders af...

I Hereby Declare The Lions The Most Miserable NFL Franchise
Which franchise is the NFL’s poop standard (obviously, the inverse of the gold standard)? Part of what’s fascinating about football’s ongoing analytics revolution is the unknown—that there are possibilities we haven’t even considered for what we may someday be able to do with the application of high...

Patty Mills Casually Tosses Team USA On The Barbie, Snaps Their 78-Game Winning Streak
Prior to Team USA’s game against Australia on Friday, Kemba Walker told an Australian reporter that there was a lot of room for growth within the team, and that their previous performance was perhaps not as great as some players thought it was. The quote was the kind of thing a veteran player says t...

Team USA Routed In Bleak Scrimmage Against D-League Crew
Team USA still needs to winnow its pool of 15 finalists down to 12 before the FIBA World Cup begins on September 1. No one else is getting added to this team, but perhaps they should burn down the roster and start all over....

Local Billboard Calls Tuscaloosa "Abortion Capital Of Alabama," Claims 19,000 Future Fans Have Been Aborted
An anti-abortion billboard was spotted in Tuscaloosa, Ala. on Friday that called the hometown of the University of Alabama the “abortion capital” of the state, and claimed that 19,000 future fans of the Crimson Tide have been aborted. A picture of the billboard was posted on Twitter, but the post th...

Miami Marlins Sorry For Blaming Tampa Bay Rays For Killing Steve Irwin
A spokesman for the Miami Marlins apologized today for a bit of spicy Twitter banter in which the Marlins’ account blamed the Tampa Bay Rays for Steve Irwin’s death, Miami radio host Andy Slater reported....

The Team USA Rejections Are Getting Grim
The FIBA World Cup has only drawn closer since Monday, and Team USA’s prospects have only gotten drearier. The players’ excuses are starting to increasingly resemble ones that might be used to beg out of a coworker’s birthday party....

Why Your Team Sucks 2019: Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Some people are fans of the Tampa Bay Bucs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Tampa Bay Bucs. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here....

Rays Put Pitcher At First Base, Nearly Destroy The Tender Fabrics That Hold Together The Game Of Baseball
A crucial AL East game between the Rays and the Red Sox ground to a screeching halt in the eighth inning on Wednesday afternoon after the Rays pulled some lineup shenanigans with their relief pitchers. Lefty Adam Kolarek got the first out in the inning, at which point the Rays brought in right-hande...

Team USA Is Bleeding Out
The FIBA World Cup begins in China on the last day of August. After a training camp in early August, Team USA will set its 12-man roster by August 12. Who will still be standing at that point?...

Coach Who Once Ditched Job During Season Frets About College Football Player Transfers
Alabama football coach Nick Saban thinks “the spirit” of college football’s transfer portal “in and of itself is a positive thing for players.” But let’s not get carried away: Lest anyone think he’s completely on board with the idea of players having the sort of agency that, say, coaches do, Saban t...

Benches Clear In Rays-Yankees Over Grown Men Arguing About Not Talking To Each Other
The benches cleared briefly in the middle of the sixth inning of Tuesday night’s Rays-Yankees tilt in New York. No one was plunked or brushed back; there were no dirty slides; no catchers were trucked at the plate. Yankees pitcher C.C. Sabathia struck out Rays outfielder Avisail Garcia on a, hmm, cr...

In Miracle, Orioles Somehow Manage To Avoid Falling Victim To Perfect Game
The Orioles are in the midst of a historically bad season with many lowlights that will likely be used in hospitals all over the country to help patients induce vomiting. But to those cursed with supporting this team, I bring good news. Baltimore showed on Sunday that the depths of their awfulness d...