as Page 1052 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Baseball Child Cannot Be Stopped From Dragging Out His Moment Of Glory
Here we have a lesson from a baseball child on truly committing to the bit. Our slugger, presumably headed in to score a run after some cool-ass baseball heroics, was not having it with instructions to “run as fast as you can” or “move” or “not dunk on the poor blue-uniformed team.” He enjoyed himse...

Pirates Pitcher Nick Kingham Had A Hell Of A Debut
Eight years after being drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates, Nick Kingham delivered one of the best major-league debuts of all time. He took a perfect game into the seventh inning against the Cardinals, before Paul DeJong knocked a single down the third-base line with two outs. Kingham retired 20 stra...

Sometimes LeBron Just Decides To Fuck You Up
This is in no way the most impressive highlight of LeBron James’s series-clinching performance in Game 7, which he started a perfect 7-of-7 from the field and finished with 45 points on 25 shots, but it’s the most representative of what it’s like to face LeBron James in a do-or-die scenario:...

This Is What We All Came To See
Because these are two relatively young franchises, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the Jets’ and Predators’ rosters the same way, as playoff ingénues. But Nashville has been here before, seven postseasons in nine years, and has carried over most of the same faces from last year’s Fina...

The Dodgers Are Struggling And Dave Roberts Made An Example Of Cody Bellinger
Already seven games back of the division-leading Diamondbacks with a 12-15 record, the Dodgers are off to a rough start this season. And although it’s still pretty early, some cracks are beginning to show. With the team down four in an eventual 4-2 loss to the Giants on Sunday, manager Dave Roberts ...

Isn't This A Goal? It Sure Looks Like A Goal
Soon after the Capitals killed a Penguins power play, at about the 11-minute mark of the third period of today’s Game 2, with the Capitals holding a 3-1 lead, the Penguins scored what sure looked an awful lot like a goal:...

Unconventional Blue Jays Double Play Follows Just The Luckiest Catch
In the top of the first inning of today’s Rangers-Blue Jays game, with Delino DeShields Jr. on second base, Rangers second-baseman Isiah Kiner-Falefa slapped a flare to shallow right field, where Blue Jays outfielder Randal Grichuk came charging in to make a heroic play. And make a play he sure did,...

Defiant, Moldering Melo, On Moving To The Bench: "That's Out Of The Question"
NBA exit interviews can be a hoot. Players are mostly fresh off a loss, and are feeling wistful or pissed off or utterly spent, and some use the occasion for a kind of honesty that might generally be inadvisable for public people. For example, John Wall used his to trash his team’s useless centers a...

The Warriors Revved Up And Beat The Pelicans At Their Own Game
There was a short period during the first quarter of Saturday’s Game 1 between the Pelicans and the Warriors when it looked like the Warriors were a little flustered by New Orleans’s frenetic pace. That five-game first-round series with the Spurs was downright sluggish, by Warriors standards: at 95....

Pablo Sandoval Pitched A Perfect Inning, And It Was Just Fucking Perfect
Saturday’s slate of Major League games featured a number of hideous blowouts. The White Sox crushed the Royals by eight runs in Kansas City. The Rays scored 12 runs on 18 hits against the Red Sox. The Dodgers scored 15 runs and beat the Giants by nine. The Mariners beat the Indians by eight. The Ast...

All Hail Franchy Cordero, San Diego's Dong-Smashing Superhero
Excellently named Padres outfielder Franchy Cordero can sure launch a goddamn tater. He plays in San Diego, which is as obscure a professional baseball outpost as you can find without going to the minors, but we should all be paying attention to young Franchy. According to Statcast, Cordero has alre...

Pour One Out For Joe Prunty, Who Turned A Bunch Of Shit Into A Pile Of Shit
Here’s a pretty remarkable stat: the Bucks used 16 different lineups Saturday night, in their Game 7 loss to the Boston Celtics; the five most used lineups of the bunch played about 35 minutes, and finished plus-11; the other 11 lineups played a total of just over 13 minutes, and were outscored by a...

Oklahoma Softball Scores Unconventional Run
The third-ranked Oklahoma softball team beat the Texas Longhorns by a score of 7-1 today. The win featured a grand slam, but the highlight of the game is this here example of extremely creative base-running, by senior catcher Lea Wodach, who scored the go-ahead run in extremely unconventional fashio...

Grim And Gritty Ricky Rubio Will Be Grimly And Grittily Cheering From The Bench In Game 1 Of Jazz-Rockets
Ricky Rubio, who looks like the very happiest bearded child in that damn photo up there, will reportedly not be available for Game 1 of Jazz-Rockets, to be played Sunday afternoon in Houston. The hamstring injury that sidelined him for most of the final game of Utah’s series-clinching win over OKC w...

The Raptors Finally, Mercifully Spared Us Any More Of The Washington Wizards
The Wizards, who won 43 games during the regular season—that’s three fewer than the Denver Nuggets, who failed to make the playoffs in the much tougher Western Conference—and were the Eastern Conference’s 8th seed, were eliminated on their home floor by the Toronto Raptors Friday night. ...

Shohei Ohtani's Dinger-Smoking Heroics Cut Short By Injured Ankle
Shohei Ohtani smoked another home run Friday night, his fourth of the season. This one came off a sizzling 97-mph fastball from Yankees pitcher Luis Severino that appeared to be well off the plate inside:...

PGA Tour Event Made Much Cooler By Crew Of Fun-Loving Gators
The Zurich Classic’s being played this weekend down in Louisiana, and the tournament features a few hundred golfers (okay) and approximately 20 alligators (great!). This little buddy was kind of interrupted by a Talor Gooch shot, and they tried to scare him off by throwing a rake towards him. He ate...

A Cool Thing Jayson Tatum Does A Lot
One of the best ways for a basketball scorer to shake free from a committed defense is to catch the ball while on the move, instead of from a stationary position, so that his individual defender and the broader opposing defense don’t have time to get between him and a good look at the basket. ...

Ned Yost, Like The Rest Of Us, Was Shocked To Learn His Team Hasn't Lost 20 Games Yet
Ned Yost, brick-breaker and bee-tamer, can’t take things one game at a time because he isn’t sure how many games his team has played. Coasting on organizational goodwill from the Royals’ 2015 World Series win, he’s pretty firmly in autopilot, to the point where finding out they’re 5-17 instead of th...

Jets-Predators Is A Cruel And Fantastic Second-Round Series
First off, I have to admit that I actually like the current NHL playoff format, and its focus on intra-division competition in the opening two rounds. I think the general geographic closeness of the early-round games is a plus for the competitors, but more importantly, the repeated match-ups year af...