baseball Page 442 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Buy Beltran's Helmet (But Not THAT Helmet)
Today's Super Ultra Valuable find on MLB Auctions: An actual NLCS game-worn helmet from Mets center fielder Carlos Beltran....

Hating The Yankees With The Strokes
This offseason has been a somewhat difficult one for Mets fans, who are still trying to deal with the glue that held Carlos Beltran's bat to his shoulder and the creeping sense that they really are going to sign Moises Alou. And it's not just your smart fans hand-wringing either. One of the quieter ...

Ryan Howard Gives Philly Something Small To Be Happy About
Hey, Philly fans, good news: No need to cause bodily harm to yourself or others. You finally have a beacon of light in Philadelphia. One might even say it's always sunny....

David Wright And His Headband
In the tradition of Brady Quinn, here's Mets young stars David Wright and Jose Reyes, in the new issue of GQ, playing another round of "Does This Athlete Know How Gay His Glamor Shots Are?"...

Heavy Is The Head That Wears The Fitted National League Cap
This story isn't totally new, but it's the first we've seen of it. And we have to warn you in advance that all sides here are quite possibly insane. Charles Littleton, 22, was tackled, tasered and hauled off to the hoosegow last week for refusing to remove his Los Angeles Dodgers cap during a Sagina...

Look, The Cubs Actually Spent Some Cash. A LOT Of It
Say what you will about the Chicago Cubs, but they aren't letting a little thing like an impending sale stand in the way of paying a ridiculous amount for a big name. In a move that should put those A-Rod rumors to the crematorium, the Cubs signed Alfonso Soriano to an eight-year, $136 million dea...

Dodgers Release Crack Smuggling Minor Leaguer
Kengshill Scheider Pujols is a minor league pitcher with the Vero Beach Dodgers, and the man stuffed 118 bags of crack cocaine into his underwear. The unfortunate thing about it is that he didn't even wait for "Stuff Bags of Crack-Cocaine in Your Underwear" night at Vero Beach, and almost certainly ...

Ghostin' All The Way To Fremont
Ghostriding. For those of you too white — unlike us; we're totally down, totally, totally, absolutely — to be familiar with the practice, ghostriding "involves the driver and/or passengers of any given vehicle exiting while it is still rolling and dancing beside it or on the hood or roof." We've nev...

You Know What? We Prefer Orton And His Jack
Because we haven't had any fun Athlete Doing What Most Of Us Do All The Time But It's Still Amusing To See Because It's Funny When The Public Relations Bubble Is Burst And They Look Like Normal Human Beings pictures for a while, we present you this shot of San Diego Padres pitcher Jake Peavy, down...

The Madness Of Matsuzaka
As Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan has been warning us, and Yahoo's Jeff Passan echoes, the baseball contracts you're going to see this winter will blow your mind; teams are ready to spend like crazy. But, still: Our jaws are still dropped that the Boston Red Sox are paying $51.1 million just for t...

This Time, We Refuse To Believe It's "Used"
So this is entertaining: Official MLB Auctions have discovered a sense of humor....

Welcome To Boston, Matsuzaka (Maybe)
Tonight, about 8 p.m. Eastern, Japanese non-gyroball thrower Daisuke Matsuzaka could announce which team has won the bid to win the rights to bid for his services. The whole situation has been tinged with rumors of malfeasance in the bidding process, but the clubhouse leaders at this point: The Bo...

Nothing Says Old-Fashioned Like "Citifield"
This, friends, is the new stadium for the New York Mets, still out in Flushing and expected to open in 2009. It is designed, like most stadiums are these days, as a throwback to the old-timey fields of the '50s, with smidgens of Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds mixed in with, you know, big skybox...

How To Deal With Angry, Suing Fans
Remember that A's-Rangers game from a couple of years ago, when Rangers reliever Frank Francisco threw a chair into the stands and broke some lady's nose? Well, that lawsuit in still going on, and it appears the Rangers are sparing no expense in their quest to discredit the lady's husband, whose hec...

Welcome Back, Dwight Gooden
After seven months in jail — in a jail in Florida, no less — fallen phenom Dwight Gooden is scheduled to be released today. A time has not been announced yet. Gooden's jail time was intriguing because he could have chosen three years probation but decided not to, because another drug offense during ...

An Excuse To Break Out Our Ditka Wine!
If an alien race ever decided to attack us, we know of one sure-fire way to hold off the destruction. Just send this ad into space. It's sure to render potential invaders hopelessly befuddled, so that they veer off toward a stable planet, like Saturn. Heck, we live here, and we're frightened by this...

Life Lessons With Darryl Strawberry
About a month-and-a-half ago, we told you about an auction that could bring Darryl Strawberry to your classroom to teach your kids a few lessons. We liked the idea and wished we had some spare change hanging around ourselves. We could use a lecture or two from Darryl....

The Bay Area Athletics Of Fremont?
For years, people have been figuring out how to either attract fans in Oakland — remember, they closed off the upper deck this year, and few complained — or how to get the heck out of there. Well, it seems like they might have finally figured out how to bolt the Coliseum: Head to Fremont!...

Lonnie Smith Wanted To Shoot John Schuerholz
We had heard that Lonnie Smith, the former Cardinals and Braves outfielder whose frenetic baserunning was almost as breathtaking as watching him try to play defense (Bill James once pointed out that Smith "really does fall down almost every game), had battled some drug problems back in the late '80s...

Funny How All The Corn Is Brown And Dying
If it's October or November, in part of the country that isn't infested with commie pinko postgraduate hippie folk — that is to say, the middle part — the season means one thing: Corn mazes!...