ball Page 517 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Grand Junction Humpback Chubs Game Postponed, Which Means The Grand Junction Humpback Chubs Will Play A Double-Header Today
The Grand Junction Humpback Chubs, a minor-league baseball team associated with the Colorado Rockies, had their game against the Ogden Raptors canceled last night due to an “outfield surface issue.” This was bad news for local Chubs fans who had purchased tickets to the game. Not only were they deni...

It Is Time Now To Demand That MLB Invite Shohei Ohtani To The Home Run Derby
Shohei Ohtani smoked another big home run Thursday, a sizzling shot to straightaway center against the puny Oakland Athletics. It was his 10th dinger of the season, and his seventh in the month of June, a period during which he’s also hit for the cycle and driven his slugging percentage up from .345...

The Lakers Are Really Going For it
The Lakers have cleared the decks. They’ve stripped away every player from the roster who they do not view as central to their next championship push. It turns out the list of remaining players is hilariously small and remarkably expensive, and before filling out the margins the Lakers very much ho...

The Mets Bullpen Completes A Remarkable Phillies Sweep Of The Mets
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Mets lost in deeply dispiriting fashion Thursday, to finish off a gruesome series and drop eight games below .500. Things are getting pretty grim over there....

An Interview With The Man Who Enraged A Minor League Baseball Team By Suggesting They Call Themselves The Humpback Chubs
Today, for reasons that were at first very hard to parse, the Grand Junction Rockies, a minor-league team affiliated with the Colorado Rockies, sent out the following aggressive, since-deleted tweets:...

What A Foul Ball Can Do
Laura Cusick and her husband Richard loved baseball. They loved it so much for so long that it became a part of their marriage. When they had kids, they taught them to love the game, too: to root for the home team (the Braves), and learn the players names, and to stretch in the seventh inning. They ...

Dominant Dodgers Reliever Russell Martin Threw His First Career Strikeout
Some MLB managers might believe that, when the team is down 8-2 and the bullpen is drained, it’s time to give up and send out a position player to pitch. Not Dave Roberts, though. When he and his Dodgers found themselves in that exact situation at the tail end of their series against the Diamondback...

The Madman Theory Of The Montreal/Tampa Bay Rays
Any self-respecting student of insane Machiavellian gambits should be familiar with the Madman Theory, Richard Nixon’s self-invented strategy for winning the war in Vietnam. The theory, as recounted by Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman after he got out of jail for his role in Watergate, went like t...

Jason Vargas Implies That We Do Not Know The Full Story Behind The Mets' Latest Metsing
Mets pitcher Jason Vargas had one of his best starts of the season last night, holding the Phillies to just three hits and two earned runs through 6.1 innings while striking out 10. The Mets still lost the game, of course, but Vargas’s strong start apparently left him feeling a bit sassy. In the loc...

Moron President Gives Defense Department Four Months To Craft Service Academy Athletics Policy He Himself Axed
Having previously bragged about his intention to look into such a thing, our sleazy doofus of a president has taken the first formal step toward instituting a policy that would allow service academy athletes to defer their military service obligations in order to pursue careers in professional spor...

Hey, Remember Giancarlo Stanton? Well, He's Gone Again
Just when the Yankees were starting to enjoy the return of slugger Giancarlo Stanton, just when he’d started to look like the middle-of-the-lineup force of old, just when the sight of him looming over the plate like a comic book monster started to lose its weird nostalgic charm, the universe has ste...

Miguel Cabrera's Decline Is Going To Be A Long And Sad Affair
I didn’t watch the Tigers lose 5-3 to the Rangers on Tuesday night—I was paying attention, instead, to the local baseball team that was actually trying to win. But a tweet from the Tigers’ broadcasters caught my eye in the middle of the Michigan-Vanderbilt game. I assumed, at first glance, that Migu...

Joey Votto Treats Heckler With The Appropriate Level Of Respect
By now, hecklers should know better than to mess with Reds first baseman Joey Votto. There are enough documented instances of him clowning opposing fans (and Cincinnati’s own) that the best strategy is to just let him be. One Angels fan at Tuesday night’s game chose not to do that, and although it’s...

The 2-Year-Old Who Was Hit By A Foul Ball At An Astros Game Suffered A Skull Fracture
On May 29, a two-year-old girl was struck by a foul ball during a game between the Cubs and Astros in Houston. In the first update about the child’s condition since then, an attorney representing her family revealed today that she suffered a fractured skull when she was struck by the ball....

Get Excited For Free Agency, A Delightful Graveyard Of Best-Laid Plans
According to Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer, who got his number from someone else, there is around $474 million in available cap space to be flung about the NBA this summer, more than the last two seasons combined, and his conclusion from the resultant analysis is that the most important thing a team ...

Jack Del Rio Was At The Buffet When The Jaguars Decided To Draft Blaine Gabbert
Usually we only get to hear the juicy stories behind NFL Draft machinations when someone wants to brag, about finding a hidden gem or putting one over on another team, but in all cases, it involves a successful pick. Well, this is not that, but it’s also sort of that, in the sense that Jack Del Rio ...

Reds Allow Runner To Score From Second Base On Sac Fly Like Big Sleepy Idiots
It was an extremely unimpressive night for the Cincinnati Reds, who suffered a 5–1 loss against the Angels in Anaheim. They gave up their first run of the night on a leadoff inside-the-park dinger to Tommy La Stella, and they gave up the final run of the night when Wilfredo Tovar scored from second ...

Tommy La Stella's Blessed Season Continues With Leadoff Inside-The-Park Dinger
It is now late June, which means if you can’t at least feign excitement about a leadoff inside-the-park home run in an interleague baseball game, you are staring down a summer of relatively slim pickings, VAR-marred World Cup soccer notwithstanding. Please, before you reduce yourself to hunting for ...

The Cubs Fell Ass Backwards Into A Very Dumb Double Play
I don’t know why Javy Baez (or whoever’s giving him signals) would have so much faith that a pitcher making only his third plate appearance in the major leagues would be able to hold up his end of the suicide squeeze, but the overconfidence of Baez and the pure stupidity of Willson Contreras over on...

Report: Oh God Yes, The Toxic Rockets Are Pursuing Jimmy Butler
If there’s one thing a top-heavy Western Conference contender built on the ball-dominant shot-creation of two ornery superstars locked in an “unsalvageable” personality conflict needs, it is an infusion of noted mature adult in the room and agreeable teammate Jimmy Butler. Thankfully, that is exactl...