ball Page 1903 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

One Of Our Favorite Days Of The Year
Forgive us if the site devolves into prattle the rest of this week: Our copy of Baseball Prospectus 2006 just arrived in our mailbox — we have a big mailbox — and if past years are any indicator, we're not gonna get much work done this week....

Hide Your Eyes, Children
Your eyes are not deceiving you, unless you think that's a picture of a sane human being unworthy of ridicule, in which case, yes, your eyes are deceiving you....

Four Tiny Tidbits On: The Giants
We're just more than a month from Opening Day, so it's time to start previewing the season. Inspired by an old feature on The Black Table, we're going team-by-team and distributing Four Things You Don't Know about them. We're not sure how this is gonna work, but if you have suggested oddities on y...

Mark Prior Knows Not Of Your "Blogs"
In the past, we've received emails saying we should check out Mark Prior's MySpace page. We've grown increasingly skeptical of alleged athlete MySpace profiles, if just because, well, about 85 percent of the time they're fake....

Roger Clemens Grounds His Son
We kind of like that final scene in The Natural, where Roy Hobbs is playing catch with his son in a wheat field. But when the subject is Roger Clemens playing baseball with his son, a couple of other films come to mind. • The Great Santini. Dad: Robert Duvall. Son: Michael O'Keefe. Quote: "You go...

Yeah, Damon Back At Fenway Should Be Fun
A reader, calling himself (ominously) "the Hector Villanueva Posse," writes in from Boston to give us this photo of Johnny Damon memorabilia being drastically cut down in price in Boston....

J.J. Jumper: Give Him Something To Break!
The most terrifying mascot in organized sports has to be J.J. Jumper, the official mascot of the NCAA. (Because nothing gets the crowd more fired up than a mascot for a faceless, totalitarian organization. "Prop 48! Prop 48!")...

Four Tiny Tidbits On: The Devil Rays
We'll, we're just more than a month from Opening Day, so it's time to start previewing the season. Inspired by an old feature on The Black Table, we're going team-by-team and distributing Four Things You Don't Know about them. We're not sure how this is gonna work, but if you have suggested odditi...

Setting The Vince Young Record Straight
All the buzz yesterday at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis — because when something's buzzing in Indianapolis, it can be heard everywhere — involved a supposed score of "6" by Texas quarterback Vince Young on his Wonderlic test. (To wit, realizing that the pen they give is to be written with, and n...

Today In College Hoops...
UConn just put their thing down against Villanova this afternoon, winning by a score of 89-75 and avenging their earlier loss to the Wildcats. This is probably as much talent as is possible to put on one college basketball floor at one time this year. UConn's talent, however, is much taller....

Today In College Hoops...
• Syracuse 53, #23 Georgetown 68. Syracuse, very much a Bubble Bitch, comes up with 53 points in what was a very important game for them. They probably still need a big W or two....

John Rocker Would Like To Knock You Up
Maybe we're just too skeptical today, but this might be too good to be believed: It seems John Rocker has himself a Match.com profile. (His handle is "bullpenjohn," rather than, say, "crackerman1974.")...

Brian Giles Remembers The Little People
Since we're not nearly the pop culture oddity barometer we wish we were, we were not aware of MiniKISS, the band consisting of "little people" who dress up like (and play the songs of) KISS. We're not sure what we can say here, except that we like the idea of the Gene Simmons equivalent having a ...

The J.J. Redick It's OK To Like
This story is a little bit old, and pretty much everyone else has written about it, but we don't care, because we were gone all week and do not want to go down in history as having ignored it....

A-Rod Chucks Dominicans Under the Bus
Well, not really. But regardless of how it plays out, that's what most people will think. Everybody seems to just HATE this guy. Yesterday, Alex Rodriguez spoke openly about his decision to play for America in the upcoming World Baseball Classic, mostly because, well, he was born here. He didn't ...

Strap on the Old, um, Feedbag and Check Out 'Footballers Wives'
If you haven't already been watching the british import Footballers Wives, then it might be time to finally pop for premium cable. Of course the "football" here means "soccer", for you nonmetropolitan types. Thanks to our man Tim Goodman, the TV writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, we discovere...

ESPN-Sponsored Texas Tech Recruiting Materials
As you may know if you've watched ESPN at any point over the last few weeks, tonight debuts "Knight School," a six-episode reality show detailing the quest of sixteen young men to be chosen as a walk-on to the Texas Tech basketball team....

Arena Football. Outdoor Life Network. Irony.
The Arena Football League has found a new home on cable TV. The Outdoor Life Network, which I don't get, has signed a deal to pick up some Arena football games this season when NBC has other things going on, like hockey or the Winter Olympics. The deal was announced on Friday, and there's a game o...

Heisman Trophy Export Business Is Thriving
In my continuing quest to find even a small amount of football to inject into my life in the NFL offseason, I bring you this reader tip: Former Heisman Trophy winner Eric Crouch has found a home with the Toronto Argonauts. He joins all-time great (actually, I don't know how great they were in Toro...

Today In College Basketball...
• #1 UConn 81, #11 West Virginia 75. UConn just put the finishing touches on a tough road win at West Virginia in the only game of the day between two ranked teams. UConn's big men were just a bit much for Kevin Pittsnogle to handle, but I think he still leads the nation in the amount of ink injec...