baseball Page 342 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Minor Leaguer Suspended For Refusing Drug Test Says Testers Went To The Wrong Address: "I'm 28 Years Old. I Don't Live With My Mom!"
Yesterday, MLB announced that minor leaguer Justin Dowdy is suspended for 50 games for refusing to take a drug test. Dowdy, a former White Sox pick who spent most of last season with the Giants' AAA Fresno Grizzlies, signed last month with the independent Grand Prairie (Texas) AirHogs and so will ha...

Here's How You Get A 50-Game Suspension Without Failing A Drug Test
Refuse to take one! Deceptively simple. Via Hardball Talk:...

Exclusive: Former Reliever Mike Stanton Weighs In On Current Outfielder Mike Stanton Now Going By Giancarlo Stanton
The news came across the wires this morning that thumping Marlins outfielder Mike Stanton, who finished 5th in the NL with 34 home runs last year, will now go by Giancarlo Stanton, his birth name. (His full name is Giancarlo Cruz Michael Stanton, and he says he prefers Giancarlo.)...

Mark McGwire Thinks He Has The Numbers For The Hall Of Fame, But "Obviously Something Happened"
Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: McGwire says it's all out of his hands now....

How The Doping Case Against Ryan Braun Fell Apart: One Theory
The conventional wisdom on Ryan Braun's overturned doping suspension is that it was a triumph of cautious proceduralism over substantive justice—a victory for protocol and a rare (and for my money not entirely unwelcome) defeat for the drug cops. Baseball's testing program caught a juicer, the think...

A D-Backs Employee Embarrassed Himself On MLB Network's Game Show Last Night
Poor Josh DeFamio, graphics supervisor of the Arizona Diamondbacks. He was on MLB Network's Baseball IQ—a show in which teams' employees compete to win money for charity—last night, ready to advance to the finals to face off against Mets statistician Ben Baumer. All he has to do is name 10 of the ...

Topps Sued For Firing Employee, Then Putting Him On A Trading Card
In the fall, Topps released a handful of very odd cards. Dubbed "American History Relics," they were five-card runs of John Henry, Pecos Bill, and Leif Ericson. Despite their rarity, the cards were a flop — one sold for $84 on eBay — perhaps because they were so strange. Card collectors like collect...

Help Us Identify These Hundred-Year-Old Sports Photos
A reader named Sam sent along some wonderful old photos, taken more than a century ago, of what appear to be local sports teams. Sam says the photos were in the possession of his late grandmother, but they have no provenance beyond that....

The Making Of “Homer At The Bat,” The Episode That Conquered Prime Time 20 Years Ago Tonight
On Feb. 20, 1992, more American homes tuned into The Simpsons than they did The Cosby Show or the Winter Olympics from Albertville, France. A foul-mouthed cartoon on a fourth-place network bested the Huxtables and the world's best amateur athletes. Fox over NBC and CBS—its first-ever victory in prim...

Fox 5 New York: "Gary Carter Will Be Remembered As One Of The Elite Pitchers In Baseball History"
WNYW's Adrienne Supino did her best to report on the passing of Gary Carter tonight, but struggled a bit when it came to knowing which position the Hall of Fame catcher played in the majors. It wasn't the first Fox blunder today when it came to Carter's death....

The Baltimore Orioles Have Pissed Off Korea
This fresh-faced young man is Kim Seong-Min, who as recently as last month was a regular high school student in South Korea. But he's a lefty pitcher, which automatically makes him one of the most desirable people on Earth, and the Orioles swooped in to cause an international incident and get their ...

Somebody Took The Time To Compile Baseball's 10 Worst Swings From The 2011 Season
The only criterion were swings at pitches outside the strike zone. [SB Nation]...

Marshall Baseball Player Sues Frat After Being Startled By Anus-Mounted Firework
Louie Helmburg is a sophomore, and the backup catcher for the Marshall Thundering Herd. He hit .226 last year, with three RBI and four runs scored, and missed part of the season when he fell off a deck at the ATO house after one of the brothers fired a bottle rocket out of his ass....

Baseball Executives Continue To Show They Have No Idea How Baseball Works
Hidden in this interesting piece about identity fraud from Tyler Kepner in the The New York Times is the perhaps not so stunning realization that many of the people charged with evaluating, acquiring and displaying baseball talent don't know a thing about baseball. Sandy Alderson, the current gener...

Don Mattingly Beans a Bear And Other Trick Shots
This is one of those trick shot videos that are all the rage these days. It seems that Mattingly, son Preston (and future Yankees MVP) and some other local Evansville, Indiana super stars have their own now called Trickwinkle? I don't know. A bear is involved....

Ladies And Gentlemen, The Cubs Of Tomorrow
The Idaho Cubs, presented without comment, but with "Party Rock Anthem." [via Big League Stew]...

The Sad State Of The Modern Baseball Blooper
At Hang Up and Listen Comes Alive! here in New York last week, regular panelist Mike Pesca devoted his Afterball to a very important issue: the continued deterioration of This Week in Baseball, the Fox program that airs on Saturday afternoons during the MLB season. Once upon a time it was Bowie Ku...

Murray Chass's Hall Of Fame Vote Is Based Partly On His Dinner Plans
Blogging anti-blogger Murray Chass has written one of his patented half-lucid anti-blog blog posts about the Hall of Fame. Near the end of the post, he dodders over to the subject of his own voting habits. This one's a treat:...

Here's Barry Larkin In The Most 1991 Photo Ever
Check out baseball's newest Hall of Famer, in what looks like the early 1990s, sporting that dope look, complete with one of the shoulder straps undone on his overalls. No, that's not a Cubs sweatshirt, as noted here, but rather something from the 1990 MLB All-Star Game, which was played at Wrigley...

Does Anybody Know A Nine-Year-Old Power-Hitting Catcher In Raleigh?
I'm not sure why I'm so taken by this Craigslist posting, sent in by a pair of readers, seeking a very specific sort of ballplayer for a Wake County (N.C.) 9U travel team. Maybe it's because all the nine-year-olds we remember from little league swung as hard as they could on every pitch, and because...