John Smoltz is, at this point in his second career as a color commentator, not really that good at the job. He understands the game well, but he’s also drowsy and grouchy in all the ways that old ballplayers tend to be: checked out and skeptical and reflexively salty about today’s players, grumpily grudgeful about…
With his go-ahead two-run homer in Game 7, Cody Bellinger was a deserving NLCS MVP, but Yasiel Puig ribbed him for a perceived snub.
Red Sox pitcher Chris Sale was forced him to miss his Game 5 start of the ALCS after he was hospitalized with an unspecified stomach illness. On Saturday, he used his deadpan personality to convince reporters that his health condition was something from a spring-break trip gone wrong:
A super PAC called Black Americans for the President’s Agenda paid for a staggeringly racist radio ad in support of Mr. Peanut-looking-ass Arkansas congressman French Hill that dropped yesterday. The ad was targeted towards black voters (the PAC ran a similar ad in Missouri) and it features two caricatures agreeing to…
No one was more unprepared for the brief and preposterous baseball card boom of the 1990s than the companies that manufactured and sold those cards. This is not to say that I, as a tweenage idiot, was capable of assimilating and comprehending the fact that the baseball cards I’d stockpiled out of rote guppy-brained…
The ALCS was largely beef-free, outside of the front offices. Certainly no player-on-player enmity, like we’re seeing in the senior circuit. The closest thing was Houston’s Alex Bregman posting before Game 3 an Instagram story showing that night’s starter Nathan Eovaldi surrendering back-to-back-to-back dingers to the…
The World Series starts Tuesday night, and it’ll start at Fenway Park for the simple reason that the Red Sox are the best. They were the best team in the regular season—108 wins, fewer than it probably could have been had they not been allowed to take their foot off the gas after essentially clinching the division in…
Unfair or deserved, David Price has a reputation for pitching like butt in the playoffs. Before tonight, he was winless in 11 postseason starts since 2011. In Game 2 against the Astros, he had to settle for the “team win” when he was pulled after 4.2 innings and didn’t factor into the decision for Boston’s 7-5…
The Red Sox took a 3-1 lead in the ALCS by winning Game 4 by two runs. The Astros had a two-run homer wiped out by a truly confounding ruling of fan interference. That’s the math for a call that could be remembered for a very, very long time.
It’s certainly less-than-ideal for a team to be up less than four runs in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and an All-Star at the plate. It’s even worse when that All-Star is batting over .400 in the postseason. But that’s exactly where Craig Kimbrel was in facing Alex Bregman late Wednesday night with…
Left-handed pitcher Wade Miley appeared to be the Brewers’ starter for Game 5 of the NLCS today. And technically, he was. But after Miley gave up a lead-off walk in the first, Brewers manager Craig Counsell immediately went out to the mound and gave Miley the hook, replacing him with the right-handed long reliever…
In the second-pettiest looming controversy of this postseason, Houston had been accused by both the Indians and Red Sox of having a man working for the Astros standing in the camera well, using a cell phone camera to capture images of their dugouts. MLB has come out swiftly and strongly on the matter: It doesn’t care.
Spicy times in the wee hours! A lengthy and bizarre Game 4 ended in the 13th with, of course, a Manny Machado slide. That’s not the close call the Brewers are thinking about, though.
The Dodgers scored a run in the first inning of tonight’s NLCS Game 4, and then the Brewers matched them with a run in the fifth, sending starter Rich Hill to go terrorize some Halloween treats in the dugout. And then, in a bizarre occurrence only rarely seen at a baseball game, a temporary black hole swallowed up…
Manny Machado is back in the postseason spotlight for the wrong reasons. In the bottom of the 10th, the Dodger hit a grounder to shortstop for what should have been a routine out at first. Machado decided to break the routine by kicking Brewers infielder JesĂşs Aguilar in the ankle after he was called out.
Major League Baseball is internally handling an incident from Game 1 of the American League Championship Series involving suspicious activity by a Houston Astros employee at Fenway Park, according to Alex Speier of The Boston Globe. According to the league’s investigation, the Astros employee engaged in shady behavior…
Dodgers starter Rich Hill pitched well in Game 4 of the NLCS tonight, but he couldn’t quite hold on to L.A.’s slim 1-0 lead, which came early off a Brian Dozier RBI single. In the fifth inning, his final frame of the game, Hill gave up a base hit to Orlando Arcia (of course), and then surrendered a pinch-hit double…
Astros starter Dallas Keuchel got bailed out of a jam in spectacular fashion by his tiny left fielder, Tony Kemp, in the third inning of this afternoon’s ALCS Game 3. With the Red Sox already winning 2-1, and with runners on first and second with two down, Steve Pearce blasted a deep ball all the way back into left.
Baseball writer Peter Gammons is a favorite around these parts, mostly because on Twitter he’s notorious for gems like this:
Astros third baseman Alex Bregman hasn’t recorded a hit in the ALCS, although he almost spoiled Red Sox closer Craig Kimbrel’s Game 2 save and does have six walks, which gives him a perverted .000/.700/.000 slashline for the series. Maybe the video Bregman posted Monday on Instagram served two purposes: to annoy the…
