carl Page 30 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Five pitchers whose Cy Young-caliber seasons are going unnoticed
Baseball has gone through an entire “repressed Catholic kid going into their freshman year of college”-type transformation over the past several years. With baseball moving ever closer to a “three true outcomes” game, several pitchers have revitalized their careers and several more have just started...

La Russa is still managing like it’s 1989
The Yankees and White Sox combined for 26 strikeouts in a nine-inning game. In 2012, that’s not so surprising. What is a bit of a stunner is that Aroldis Chapman didn’t get any of those K’s. Carlos Rodón fanned 13, Jordan Montgomery punched out 11, and Michael Kopech added two whiffs out of the Chic...

Stephen A. Smith and baseball, always an incredible combination
Just over a quarter of the way into the MLB season, it’s pretty safe to say that Shohei Ohtani has been insane. Ohtani currently leads Major League Baseball in home runs. He’s 3rd in slugging percentage, 15th in OPS, 18th in wOBA, and a partridge in a pear tree. Oh, he’s also been pretty damn good a...

Let's predict each NFL team's win-loss record!
The NFL season is still four months away, but with the draft, the schedule release, and most of free agency in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to start looking forward to a season with lots of storylines to follow, more games than ever before, and fewer preseason games than ever before (three is sti...

The story of the New Orleans Jazz and their move to Utah, where jazz didn’t exist
With the NBA playoffs fast approaching, the Utah Jazz can boast the best record in the league. But the best team name? Not so much....

Why I won’t watch the 2021 Tokyo Olympics
Count me out on the Olympics....

Astros can’t handle the truth
It’s not like the Astros could have been surprised. And if they were, that’s on them. But then again, the Astros haven’t really stopped bitching since they got caught doing whatever it was they did for two or three years. They told you it wasn’t that big of a deal, after they told you that they didn...

Baseball didn’t anticipate this odd rash of no-hitters, which there are more of than 'count' because 'rules'
John Means pitched this season’s third no-hitter on Wednesday afternoon in Seattle, except it was really the fourth, as Major League Baseball keeps finding out that whatever oddities are available to be achieved, someone eventually will achieve them....

When fans care more about cheats than abusers
The Houston Astros missed out on all the fun last year. They still might not get the full brunt of it this term. And by the time baseball stadiums are full again, which might not be until 2022, maybe it will have blown over to a degree....

Yeah, that Tony La Russa thing is going about as you’d expect
While it was fun to pretend that the forced “Odd Coupling” of a drunk old codger Tony La Russa and one of the flashiest, dynamic young teams in baseball would boil over simply due to culture clashes, that was always a touch unlikely. Certainly, atmospheres within a clubhouse have led to poisonous re...

Mac Jones is the ultimate ‘Patriots QB’
If you’re a Patriots fan like me, you know that the NFL Draft is about two words when it comes to this team: trade back. It’s how Bill Belichick has built the league’s greatest contemporary franchise. Giving up fewer picks in earlier rounds for more picks later....

We can’t run from the Penguins and Capitals
This will be the third standings system or alignment the NHL has used in the past decade. But no matter how they shake out the teams or decide how they get into the playoffs, it’s a safe bet that the Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals will be at the top. Part of that is the NHL basically we...

The IOC is trying to ‘stick to sports’ by banning kneeling at the Tokyo Olympics – it won’t work
A day after it was proven that the sports world played a part in the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin, and just hours after police in Ohio murdered 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, the International Olympic Committee decided to keep the ban on athletes protesting racial and social issues at the Tokyo Game...

MLB Film Room allows you to choose your own video compilation adventure
If you like sports and watching videos online, YouTube’s algorithm becomes a self-fulfilling goldmine of clips. Watch enough highlights, and your front page fills up with stuff like “NFL Most Yards Lost in One Play,” “MLB 1 in a Billion Moments,” and “Legendary Fake Plays.” A whole bunch of accounts...

Let’s all enjoy the Yankees being ass
I fell into the trap, too. The return to a 162-game season lent a feeling of the Yankees being inevitable in the AL East. After all, the Red Sox simply declined to compete again (though no one seems to have told their players yet), the Blue Jays fel about a year away, and the Orioles smell like a sm...

Joey Votto almost pulled off the incredibly rare unassisted triple play
Carlos Rodón came oh-so-close to a perfect game on Wednesday night, settling instead for a no-hitter after he hit Cleveland catcher Roberto Perez with a pitch in the ninth inning, two outs away from what would have been the first perfecto in the majors since Félix Hernández’s in on August 15, 2012....

MLS is back, and I’m really going to try this time
MLS returns this weekend, and unlike most of the big soccer leagues in the world, it can do so in front of some fans. We won’t hear the sheer wall of noise we would usually get in Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, and Orlando, or in more and more places these days, just yet. But it will be a relief to hea...

Jackie Robinson would be condemning police terror and white America were he alive today
Yesterday was April 15th, Jackie Robinson Day, baseball’s annual event of empty tributes to cover up the fact that 90 percent of teams refuse to hire Black or Hispanic executives or managers despite Jackie’s dying wishes. ...

Hope Trautwein pulls off whatever you call a game where every single at-bat is a strikeout, as if anyone ever imagined such a thing
Rarely does an incredible athletic feat happen in sports that we don’t have a name for, but here we are. In the world of baseball and softball, we have the “perfect game,” where a pitcher doesn’t allow a single base runner. Allow me to introduce to you a phrase that I believe should catch on — the i...
