baseball Page 147 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Big League Bullying: The Conspiracy To Humiliate MLB Umpire Steve Fields
Baseball consensus holds that umpires only get noticed when they make a bad call. Steve Fields’ career as a major league ump was bookended by two calls that put him in the spotlight. But he went to his grave insisting both were right....

Infielder Matt Davidson Struck Out Giancarlo Stanton, Still Hasn't Allowed A Run This Year
Lance Lynn was excellent in his first Yankees start, throwing seven and a third scoreless innings and leading New York to a 7-0 win over the White Sox to break a five-game losing streak. But I don’t care. Lynn allowed two hits, and that’s just not good enough. Not when we’ve got Chicago’s Matt David...

Yankees Play-By-Play Guy Michael Kay Is In Hot Water With Clint Frazier
In an animated discussion on his radio show Monday, about the four-game weekend series sweep that all but knocked the Yankees out of contention in the AL East, Yankees television play-by-play man Michael Kay was at the very least clumsy with his choice of words while bitching about which Yankees wer...

Report: Former All-Star Pitcher Esteban Loaiza Expected To Plead Guilty In Felony Drug Case
Former MLB All-Star pitcher Esteban Loaiza is expected to change his plea from not guilty to guilty in a felony cocaine distribution case, per a report from ABC7 Chicago:...

Bird's Dong Ripped Out Of The Sky
The Yankees are looking to get healthy against the woeful White Sox Monday night, following a decisive four-game sweep at the hands of the Red Sox that all but ended the race for the AL East. Mostly they’re having their way, but the highlight of the game came in the top of the fourth inning, when Ya...

Matt Harvey Is Not Bitter Toward The Mets At All, No Sir
The lowly Reds are taking on the even lowlier Mets Monday night, for the start of a three-game series. The occasion marks the return of Matt Harvey to New York, for the first time as a member of a visiting club. The Mets, perhaps feeling some regret over the way Harvey’s time as a Met ended, put tog...

The Red Sox Have Won The AL East
The race is over. After a four-game sweep of the Yankees, capped off by a comeback against Aroldis Chapman and the vaunted Yankees bullpen, the Red Sox now have a 9.5-game lead, the largest division lead in baseball. They are 79-34, and on pace for 113 wins, which would be the best record in franchi...

“Among the 14 versions the Post-Gazette collected, the Pirates use the slowest tempo by more than 20 beats per minute. Some teams, like the Oakland Athletics, have versions more than 25 percent faster than the Pirates.” What’s with Pittsburgh’s distinct, super-slow version of “Take Me Out to the Bal...

Mike Scioscia Describes Report Of His Impending Departure From The Angels As "Poppycock"
Mike Scioscia has been manager of the Angels for 19 years, long enough to have been around before they were the Los Angeles Angels, before they were even the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Their current condition—a middling, forgotten team criminally wasting two of the most exciting players in all o...

Carloz Gomez Has More Fun Than Anyone
Carlos Gomez is having a rotten season, overall. He’s batting just .220, and his OPS sits at the always alarming .666 mark. The batting average is the worst of his career; the OPS is his lowest mark since 2010. But he does lead the majors in one useful statistic: Gomez and Brandon Nimmo have each be...

Shohei Ohtani Still Has That Fearsome Tater-Mashing Power
Angels phenom Shohei Ohtani missed most of June following the bullcrap UCL injury that ended the pitching part of his season after just nine starts. Ohtani was batting .289 with a .907 OPS when the Angels shut him down, and in 71 plate appearances since his return on July 3 his batting average and s...

A's Rookie Produces Walk-Off Win With First Career Hit In First Career Game
This is the kind of thing that happens for a team having one of those magical runs: the two huge clutch plays that delivered a 1-0 A’s win in extras Friday night were made by a rookie, making his first career appearance in the majors, and his first career knock was a walk-off game-winner. Break up t...

Rick Ankiel, Who Could And Then Couldn't, Might<em></em>
We should begin with the important stuff. There is a league that plays at Louisville Slugger Stadium, in Louisville, over the course of a brief eight-team tournament held at the height of summer. It’s called the Bluegrass World Series, and seven of the teams in its field have rosters made up of coll...

Maikel Franco Punctuates Walk-Off Dinger With Incredible Bat Flip
Every bat flip demonstrates a certain amount of contempt for the bat. Something like who needs this piece of shit or get this fucking thing out of my face, odd and rude attitudes to have towards a tool that just helped you do one of the coolest things in baseball, which is sock a mighty dinger....

That Might've Been Sonny Gray's Last Bad Start For A While
Sonny Gray, last year’s big trade deadline acquisition, has had a poor 2018, with an ERA of 5.56 and a role in the rotation that’s gone unthreatened only because the Yankees haven’t had any other real options. That last part changed this week when New York went out and got Lance Lynn, who hasn’t bee...

The Best Sports Of The Night Is These Dogs Licking Peanut Butter
This has been an especially draining news day, and the most prominent sporting event tonight is *shudders* the MLS All-Star Game, so the time has come to look at some dogs. Please, appreciate the innocence and enthusiasm of these good boys named Bentley and Charlie, who both like peanut butter very ...

Only The Shit-Ass Mets And Shit-Ass José Reyes Could Make Baseball History Like This
To the surprise of nobody, the Mets followed up yesterday’s 25-4 loss to the Nationals by losing yet again. They couldn’t capitalize on the late momentum they generated last night or the Nationals’ fluid roster, and they wound up losing 5-3. It was not for lack of effort on José Reyes’s part, howeve...

Whatever Caleb Joseph Was Doing On This Home-Plate Play, It Didn't Work<em></em>
With two outs in the top of the fifth in today’s game between the last-place Orioles and the Yankees, Baltimore catcher Caleb Joseph tried to score from first base on a double, but he was out by a mile. As Yankees catcher Austin Romine squared up in front of the plate to make the tag, Joseph went to...

The Nationals Are Cracking Down On Their "Iffy Clubhouse Culture"
Nationals reliever Brandon Kintzler was one of the team’s few trade deadline casualties on Tuesday, traded to the Cubs for a Single-A prospect, a relative pittance given the all-star set-up man’s production this season. The Nats were in a weird, hybrid, buyer/seller mode, one that necessitated consi...

Shawn Kelley's Glove-Throwing Meltdown Will Cost Him His Spot On The Nationals
Last night, Nationals reliever Shawn Kelley gave up a completely meaningless ninth-inning home run to Austin Jackson, which turned the Nationals 23-run win into a 21-run win. Maybe he was mad about dulling Washington’s historic margin, or maybe he was just angry that he was in the game at all, but K...