chicago Page 137 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Fukudome Flattered That Cubs Fans Want Him to House The Sandwich Of Investing Sockdrawer
Kosuke Fukudome sure has been a nice investment for the Chicago Cubs, hasn't it? And the cultural movement has swept up the north side of Chicago. The transition from Japan to America has been almost seamless (.317 average, .442 on-base percentage) for him, but the fans haven't quite gotten it down ...

Marty Brennaman Is Unlikely To Receive A Statue Outside Wrigley Field
Marty Brennaman has been the voice of the Cincinnati Reds since 1974, taking over for, of all people, Al Michaels. He's a legacy broadcaster, like the Bucks and the Carays; his son Thom is a FOX broadcaster, works with him in Cincinnati and was once a Cubs broadcaster. Oh, yes, the Cubs: It appears ...

Surprisingly, Alcohol May Have Been Involved
If it wasn't for those screens in the outfield at Wrigley, fat drunken Cubs fans would be flopping onto the warning track like tuna on the deck of a Japanese fishing boat. "We caught another one, Lou!" I loved it when they used the gaffe hook to haul him back in....

Shades Of A Very Expensive 2003
And there it is. The dreaded comparison: "Detroit is 0-5 for the first time since the Tigers dropped their first nine games in 2003 en route to an AL-record 119 losses." For the record, the 2008 Tigers are in no way similar to the 2003 variety, with the exception of players named Brandon Inge, Jerem...

Benny The Bull: Free At Last!
Displaying the kind of investigative moxie that could have kept us out of this whole Iraq mess, the Chicago Sun-Times dug into Thursday's Benny the Bull T-shirt assault story and discovered that Benny had been wrongly accused! On Thursday it was reported that Benny — the costumed mascot for the Bull...

Benny The Bull Will Put A Cap In Your Ass
When talking about illegal mascot shenanigans, no one, of course, beats the drunken exploits of the Stanford Tree. But running a close second is Benny the Bull, the only NBA mascot with a criminal record for battery on a police officer. On Tuesday he was at it again, shooting the Celtics' Kevin Garn...

Moises Alou's Timing Leaves Much To Be Desired
As has been well documented, if Moises Alou, back in 2003, just slowly jogs away from the left-field wall, no one ever knows who Steve Bartman is, and people can go back to blaming Alex Gonzalez or Mark Prior or whomever they want to blame. (You know, people who actually played.) A few years ago, Al...

Those Proofreading Cubbies
Up until this morning, this was what the new Ernie Banks statue looked like in front of Wrigley Field. Yes, they missed an apostrophe....

Cubs Still Somehow Manage To Fukudome Themselves
It all looked good for the Cubs, thanks to the mighty bat of Kosuke Fukudome, who went 3-for-3 with the game-tying home run off the hairy useless mess that now inhabits former lights-out closer Eric Gagne. But the Cubs still lost to the Milwaukee Brewers 4-3 in 10 innings. Bobby Howry gave up a sacr...

Your AL Central "Preview"
All right, well, the season has supposedly started, though rain on Opening Day has to be some sort of cruel trick from God. So let's wrap up the last division....

Your NL Central "Preview"
OK, now before you start hollering, no, we did not pick the Cardinals to win the division. And yes, that's the first time that's happened since we started this here site....

Baseball Season Preview: Chicago Cubs
For the third consecutive season, we are proud to introduce the Deadspin Baseball Season Previews. Yes, baseball is awfully close now; heck, they're playing real games in Japan tomorrow....

It's So Cute When Newspapers Fight Over The Cubs
The Chicago Sun-Times announced earlier today that Katie Hamilton, a 22-year-old college student, won its "Zell No" video contest. The newspaper says her entry "chastises [Tribune CEO Sam] Zell for pondering the sale of Wrigley Field's naming rights." What the paper didn't seem to realize was that H...

Athletes Have Fun In Different, Violent Ways
It's hardly news to report that professional athletes have a different definition of "fun" than you or we do. And we don't just mean the groupies at every stop on the road ... though that's certainly a factor too. We mean that they get to do things for amusement that the rest of humanity might find ...

Felix Pie's Minor Surgery, No Big Deal, Nothing To See Here
The sad saga of Felix Pie took a new twist yesterday, and we're sorry we just used that punnish metaphor and actually have doubled over in our chair and are fighting off dry heaves....

Ministry Is Now Writing NHL Fan Songs
Anyone who had that collegiate/postcollegiate fervor of metal-sledged revolution will remember the anarchic thrust of the band Ministry. Every time we listened to that band, we were convinced the world was collapsing all around us and only our youthful vigor could save it. Then the song would end an...

Are You Ready For "Torco Field" On The North Side?
We haven't weighed in yet on the notion that the Cubs might change the name of Wrigley Field, but let us say that it would make us, and just about everybody we know, incredibly sad. There'd be no more sad sign of our times than having drunk postcollegiates stumbling around Bank of America Field. Ev...

Hasn't Benny The Bull Suffered Enough?
If you can't see the video for some reason, what we have here is Benny the Bull on The Jerry Springer Show, being told by his girlfriend that there's "someone else." That someone is a larger, plastic Benny the Bull, and of course violence ensues. But there are so many ways that it could have been fu...

Welcome To Levitra Field, Home Of The Cubs
So, much grumbling today over the latest blasphemy in Chicago: Owner Sam Zell says he "wouldn't hesitate" to sell the naming rights to Wrigley Field. Of course our friend Mariotti is all in a sweaty panic over this, which kind of makes me think it might be a good idea. But then I'm not a Cubs fan. H...

Baseball Season Preview: Chicago White Sox
For the third consecutive season, we are proud to introduce the Deadspin Baseball Season Previews. Yes, baseball is awfully close now; it's spring training, after all....