ball Page 1311 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Are Thursday NFL Games Actually As Terrible As They Seem?
It's conventional wisdom that the Thursday night NFL games, whether because of the short break or the quality of the teams involved, are crap. The conventional wisdom's not always right. Over at Sports on Earth, Aaron Gordon dove into 13 years' worth of games to puzzle out the truth....

Jim Leyland Was A Weeping, Dancing, Adorable Mess Last Night
Well, OK, everything about this is great....

John Lardner Evaluates Ted Williams
From a John Lardner column for Newsweek, “The World’s Richest Problem Child”:...

Todd Helton Homered In His Final Game At Coors Field
In the 1,140 previous home games the 17-year veteran played for the Rockies, his only Major League club, Todd Helton batted .345 and hit 226 home runs. This shouldn't come as a shock. And yet — the first baseman just turned 40, he'd hit just 14 homers this season and the Rockies don't exactly comma...

Pitcher Do Get Lonely (Even Scrubs)
I used to play stickball with my pals out in Brooklyn in the late '90s. One summer morning I was pitching and getting bombed. When I tried to be cute, I didn't come anywhere near the box on the wall. When I tried my best David Wells and just put the ball over the plate, they murdered me....

Jeremy Hill Is A Beast. Does His Past Matter? 125 FBS Teams, Ranked.
Each week during college football season we put the conventional polls to shame by ranking every FBS team from 1-125, by whatever standard we see fit. Last week's rankings were not consulted....

High School Player Penalized For Spectacular Touchdown Run
That's L.J. Scott of Marion (Ohio) Harding High rumbling for a 50-yard touchdown run last Friday night against Bowsher (Ohio). You'll notice that an official threw a penalty flag. The penalty was against Scott. His run was too good for high school football....

Shirley Povich on Football
Slide on over to the Washington Post and check out this selection of football columns by Shirley Povich. ...

Jason Giambi: Baseball's Favorite Old-Ass Slugger
Jason Giambi did it again last night. At 42 years old, he stepped up to the plate as a pinch hitter with a man on in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game one-run game—a game that his team desperately needed to win in order to keep its playoff hopes alive—channeled his violent and nervous ene...

Dwyane Wade And Kevin Durant Are Now Feuding, Or Something
In a recent interview, Kevin Durant said that he thought his former teammate James Harden was a better basketball player than Dwyane Wade. That's a pretty uncontroversial thing to say, but it was enough to goad Wade into responding on social media. And Wade's response was enough to get a passive-agg...

Frat Bro's Amazing Pregame Speech Gets The <em>Any Given Sunday</em> Treatment
Yesterday, we brought you a video clip of one of the frattiest bros we've ever seen firing up his brothers with a passionate and profane speech before a flag football game. Today, we bring you the work of reader Kevin, who is a hero. Kevin decided to take the music from the end of Al Pacino's famou...

Korean Baseball Player Wastes Awesome Bat Flip On Foul Ball
Choi Jun-seok really thought he hit a no-doubt home run on this swing. Nope! Choi had to shamefully trudge back and pick up the bat he so eloquently tossed aside. Nothing sadder than a wasted bat flip....

Craig James Is A Christian Martyr, According To Craig James
After a disastrous senate run, Craig James landed himself a gig at Fox Sports Southwest—for all of one show before being dumped. Officially, the higher-ups at Fox were caught by surprise by the regional network’s hire of the all-around toxic James, and he was tossed out before any deal was official....

Why <em>SI</em>'s Oklahoma State Series Sucked: The Inside Story
On Wednesday, Aug. 28, Sports Illustrated senior writer George Dohrmann placed a phone call to Oklahoma State's public relations office. He said that the magazine was about to publish a series of stories about what he characterized as "disturbing allegations" involving the OSU football program. An i...

See Ya, Mick: The Best Photo Ever Taken Of A Great Athlete in Decline
All the recent hoopla around Mariano Rivera's retirement brings to mind other, crappier ways that famous athletes have elected to leave the game(s) they love....

Frat Bro Gives Pregame Speech For The Ages Before Flag Football Game
Have you ever been just so, so amped about something? Well, you've never been as amped about anything as this Drexel frat bro is about flag football. Because flag football isn't just about hanging out with your buddies, it's about fucking legacies. ...

Roger Angell On Mariano Rivera
Angell's take on Mariano Rivera Appreciation Day:...

NCAA Eases Up On Some Penn State Sanctions, Acts Like A Dick About It
The NCAA announced today that it will gradually start restoring some of the football scholarships it took away from Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Beginning next season, the Nittany Lions will get an additional five scholarships back per year, allowing the program to return to...

The Greatest Rumor Of All Time
I was on a plane yesterday and had to drop anchor in the bathroom, so I sat down and did my business and then, without thinking, I did a courtesy flush while still sitting on the toilet. NEVER DO THIS ON AN AIRPLANE. I thought my dick was gonna get sucked out of the tailwing. Kind of exhilarating...

Mark Richt Wants To Sex You?
Someone's been reading a lot of Whitman lately. ...