baseball Page 48 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Hunter Greene is who Major League Baseball would promote more if it cared about diversity

Playing baseball is hard. Living up to the hype is a bit harder. But so far, Hunter Greene seems up to the task. It’s too bad the league he plays in isn’t....

Leury Garcia hitting 3rd? Tony La Russa... explain yourself

Losers of three in a row, the Chicago White Sox currently sit at 6-6, tied for second place in the AL Central with the Kansas City Royals. Lo and behold, The ChiSox’s adversaries yesterday were the Cleveland Guardians. Cleveland took both games of Wednesday’s doubleheader, so you’d assume that manag...

Alex Ovechkin is the best, no matter what he might stand for

On Wednesday night, Alex Ovechkin recorded his 50th goal of the season. It is his eighth 50-goal season, which ties the record for most in NHL history, along with Mike Bossy and Wayne Gretzky. But Ovechkin’s accomplishment is far more impressive than those two’s, and eight 50-goal seasons in any era...

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field has never been to Wrigley Field

Dr. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field has never been to Wrigley Field....

Who would’ve thunk? People in Oakland aren’t attending A’s games

We’re less than two weeks into the MLB season and just like everyone predicted, the Oakland Athletics are tied for first place in their division...wait, what? Yeah, it’s early, but the A’s were supposed to be the cellar dwellers of the AL West. They spent a whopping $0 in free agency and traded away...

The baseball is deflated again

I’m cribbing heavily from Joe Sheehan’s newsletter again, but in his latest missive he points out that things keep getting better and better for pitchers. Thanks to technology and greater study, they discover new pitches or tweaks to existing ones as they keep throwing harder and harder. At the same...

The Japanese pitching sensation that refuses to let hitters reach base

One of the biggest stories in Major League Baseball right now is the dominance of 27-year-old Japanese rookie Seiya Suzuki. In 10 games Suzuki is slashing .429/.564/.929 with four home runs and 11 runs batted in. With Suzuki’s early success and Ohtani’s 2021 MVP campaign fresh in everybody’s minds, ...

Tom Seaver deserved his own day

Thanks for allowing us to exhale, Jake

Jake Arrieta announced his retirement yesterday, though the league had basically announced it for him about two years ago. Still, I’ll never forget his run that really started in 2014 and carried through the 2016 World Series....

Ranking the NBA’s first round matchups by how likely we are to see an upset

The NBA’s playoffs are easily the most predictable of the major American sports leagues. Without the variability of baseball or the single playoff game format like football, it’s pretty rare that there are any true upsets in the first round of the NBA playoffs. In most years you look at the bracket ...

MLB, please don’t reinstate Trevor Bauer anytime soon [Updated]

Trevor Bauer is going to be reinstated by Major League Baseball at some point. We might as well accept it from the outset. We don’t know when the reinstatement will come. Earlier this week, MLB extended Bauer’s administrative leave through April 22....

Joe Maddon out-galaxy brains himself, manages to win anyway

There are a couple of key questions in baseball over the past several years that regularly intersect: “Why can’t the Angels win anything when they have Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, two unique talents among the greatest the game has ever seen?” and “How did Joe Maddon ever win a World Series with th...

Jackie Robinson died unhappy with baseball

There was no Jackie Robinson Day in 1972. On the 25th anniversary of him breaking the MLB color barrier on April 15, 1947 the league hadn’t retired his number. In fact until June 1972, the Dodgers had never retired a number. They would do so for him, Sandy Koufax, and Roy Campanella. The league didn...

Farewell to my first and last

The generations of sports fans who grew up learning and loving a sport and team through the radio are disappearing these days. Another one came to a close on Thursday night in Chicago, though this one was a little different. We were a group out of place and time, which we came to identify ourselves ...

Gabe Kapler backing over the unwritten rules all the way to the bank

The buddy cops driving the MLB’s unwritten rules squad car last night were Bob Melvin and Eric Hosmer of the SDPD. The Padres’ manager and first baseman respectively took issue with a bunt single by Giants’ utility man Mauricio Dubón in the sixth inning with San Francisco up nine runs....

Sorry not sorry, Clayton Kershaw deserved a chance to finish that game

Look, I understand the arguments and the rationale. Clayton Kershaw is coming off an injury-plagued season and he didn’t even have a proper spring training to prepare for this season. He’s 34 and hasn’t had a 200-inning season since 2015. ...

Sports is about magical moments and Dave Roberts robbed us of one

Dave Roberts must have had a ski mask on yesterday in Minneapolis....

Narrative Ball: Tom Murphy

Welcome to Narrative Ball, a series dedicated to pointing out some lesser known players and changing the narrative surrounding them in an effort to put them in the same class as some of the best players in baseball. This is not just an attempt to shine a light on someone worthy of more praise than t...

Women tries, fails to glue herself to NBA floor

The animal rights protestors never fail to keep us entertained (remember when they wanted to rename the bullpen in baseball?), and Glue Lady is no different. Late in the second quarter of the play-in game between the Timberwolves and the Clippers last night, the cameras cut away from a Minnesota fre...

Actually, dude, we can go anywhere

MLB owners and front offices probably forgot the concept of shame long ago. I doubt most of them could spell it much less define it at this point. You still see owners in other sports wince when one of theirs goes off script and lets in a glimpse of how things really work behind the curtain (see: Sn...