ball Page 694 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The Astros Can Pitch Now And Look Invincible
It took Justin Verlander just 2 hours and 36 minutes to dispatch the Angels on Wednesday night, striking out seven in a five-hit shutout. We’ve come to expect this sort of thing since Verlander was traded to Houston last August, but it was especially impressive given the team that was on the receivi...

The Desperate Rockets Beat The Warriors, And It Was Actually Fun To Watch
The Rockets can pass! That’s the most stunning takeaway from their 127-105 win against the Warriors tonight, which evened the Western Conference Finals at one game apiece and introduced a prettier, more kinetic version of the Rockets than the team that won 65 games in the regular season. Game 2 saw ...

Albert Almora Jr. Discovers Invisible Stair In Center Field Wall
If baseball players didn’t wear cleats, Tyler Flowers would have earned himself a dinger in his first at-bat tonight. But because outfielders have those spikes on their feet, the Braves catcher’s long fly ball to center field was hauled in by the Cubs’ Albert Almora Jr., who dug his cleats into the ...

Report: Very Fortunate Mike Budenholzer Gets To Coach Giannis Now<em></em>
Mike Budenholzer, the head coach who parted ways with the Atlanta Hawks last month after a 24-58 season, has agreed to become the new coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, according to Woj. What a lucky bastard....

It Sure Seems Like Nobody Running Any Sports Team Knows How To Run A Basic Background Check
The Luke Heimlich redemption tour carried on this week, cresting with the full Sports Illustrated feature treatment. There are thousands of words, a serious-faced cover photo, an alliterative headline, randomly capitalized words (“the era of Too Much Information” comes up twice), and all the fancy o...

Maybe, Just Maybe, The Knicks Might Have A Functional Defense
The Knicks did not luck out, which is basically an evergreen sentence. Their lottery pick did not leap into the top three, which had only a six percent chance of occurring last night. It instead landed at nine, as expected. I feel a little good about this. ...

Please Just Call Up Vladimir Guerrero Jr., He's Too Good For The Minor Leagues
Truly I say to you today: Double-A ball offers no challenge to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. besides that of a blank canvas upon which he can paint wild highlights. The 19-year-old slugger has spent his time with the New Hampshire Fisher Cats smacking big dingers and generally looking like he belongs at a h...

Let's Remember Some Guys, Random Baseball Card Treasure Trove Volume II
In this week’s thrilling installment of Let’s Remember Some Guys, Lauren and I return to the treasure trove/antique printer box of unsolicited baseball cards mailed to our office by an unnamed benefactor in search of ... I should probably have figured out the conclusion to this sentence before I sta...

Joey Votto "Terribly Ashamed" Of Saying Semi-Rude Things About Canada
Reds first baseman Joey Votto is a fantastic baseball player, a charmingly prickly dude, and a Canadian. Those last two things converged recently to produce one of his more memorable quotes, in which he explained that he really doesn’t give a shit about Canada....

Coach: 25-Year-Old Who Posed As High Schooler To Play Basketball Was “Average Player”
High school was a fun time for many people. But would you actually want to go back and relive it? Maybe, if you could star on a school’s basketball team!...

It Appears The Kings, Who Always Screw Up, Can't Possibly Screw This Up
For what feels like the first time in recent franchise history, the Sacramento Kings got lucky. The Kings briefly held the reins in the NBA’s greatest-ever tank-off last season, but they were soundly out-tanked over the stretch run, and wound up finishing with the lottery’s seventh-best odds after e...

The MLB Narcs Have Come For Willson Contreras And His Venezuela Sleeve
Cubs catcher Willson Contreras began wearing a Venezuelan-flag sleeve to honor his home country last summer, and it has become an essential component of his uniform. But as part of MLB’s recent efforts to crack down on uniform regulations, Contreras has been told by the league that he can no longer ...

How Are The Cavs Like This?
The Cleveland Cavaliers, lifted by a huge first half from LeBron James, began the second half of Game 2 against the Celtics with a seven-point lead. This was a vast improvement over the circumstances they found themselves in during Game 1, when the Celtics had put the result out of reach by the end ...

Josh Reddick Fries Mike Trout At Third, Then Cooks Ian Kinsler At The Plate
Astros right fielder Josh Reddick had to have assumed he taught the Angels a lesson about running on his arm in the sixth inning tonight. When Mike Trout tried to move from first to third on a Shohei Ohtani single, he quickly became, in the accurate words of the announcer, “a dead duck.”...

Uh Oh, The Cavs Might Actually Be In Trouble<em></em>
An all-timer of a first quarter from LeBron James, in which he scored 21 of his team’s 27 points, and a 42-point triple-double for the entire game all went to waste in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, as the Boston Celtics took down the Cleveland LeBrons, 107-94....

Stephen Piscotty Homers In First At-Bat Since Returning From Bereavement List
Oakland A’s outfielder Stephen Piscotty—who missed his team’s previous four games after his mother, Gretchen, died from ALS—smashed a dinger over the Green Monster tonight in his very first at-bat since returning to the team. The reaction to the homer was subdued, in part because it was hit on the r...

Here's How The NBA Draft Lottery Went Down
The team with the worst record in the NBA this season, the Phoenix Suns, won the draft lottery tonight, and with it the choice of either Arizona’s Deandre Ayton or Real Madrid’s Luka Dončić. Whoever of those two the Suns don’t pick will likely go to the Sacramento Kings, who defied the odds and took...

Report: Trump-Signed Alabama Football Caused White House Drama, And Now Nobody Knows Where It Is
In a performance that had many praising its avant-garde catchphrase stylings, President Trump welcomed the national champion Alabama Crimson Tide football team to the White House last month and proceeded to speak for approximately three hours about, I assume, how he’s actually glad he didn’t win the...

Red Sox Pitcher Carson Smith Suffers Potentially Major Injury After Throwing His Glove In Frustration
Carson Smith tossed one inning in relief for the Red Sox in yesterday’s loss to the Oakland A’s, giving up a home run to Khris Davis. After he left the game, he was apparently mad at himself, and he tossed his glove in frustration. That’s a normal and fine reaction, but Smith injured himself doing s...

Robinson Canó Suspended 80 Games After Testing Positive For Banned Drug
Mariners second baseman Robinson Canó has been suspended for 80 games after failing a drug test. Domincan journalist Héctor Gómez first reported that Canó would be suspended, with Ken Rosenthal confirming shortly afterward. According to MLB, Canó tested positive for Furosemide, a diuretic that is ba...