e Page 7385 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

ESPN Sunday Baseball Earns Most Viewers Of The Season, Fails To Outdraw Lifetime's <i>Army Wives</i>. Sports TV Ratings, In Context.
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen and Sports Business Journal's John Ourand. Viewership numbers represent approximate number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all households using a telev...

WWE Reenacted Chael Sonnen's Failed Spinning Backfist
On Saturday at UFC 14, Chael Sonnen attempted a spinning backfist that was ducked by Anderson Silva. Sonnen tripped, took a knee to the grill, and the fat lady started singing. Two days later on WWE Raw, CM Punk paid a bit of tribute to one of the more theatrical MMA endings in recent memory: he mis...

Outside Man: Why Is Spike Lee So Underrated?
Spike Lee celebrated his 55th birthday in March. I still can't believe it. When he turned 40 in 1997, I remember being astonished that a man so youthful and vital could possibly be that old. (I was 22 and clearly very naive.) In my mind, the filmmaker of Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X would always...

What Did Sportswriters Think About Kansas City Barbecue? We Investigate.
The MLB All-Star Game is one of the few times during the season when baseball writers across the country congregate in a single city. When that happens, their conversations inevitably turn from their hatred of their jobs to the one thing that keeps them going through their existence: food. This year...

Filmmaker Jon Paley Is Here To Discuss His Documentary About How MLB Takes Advantage Of Dominican Prospects
The video above is a clip from Ballplayer: Pelotero, Jon Paley's film about the shady practices of MLB scouts in their pursuit of young talent in the Dominican Republic. The film, which is being produced by Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, is being released Friday. It follows Dominican prospects M...

The U.S. Olympic Uniforms Are Socialist Propaganda, According To Pro-American Internet Commenters
Welcome to another installment of the Fox Nation commenter essays. Please prepare yourself for lots of caps lock....

Minor League Football Organization Bans Two Players For Life After On-Field Brawl
The Northern Elite Football League (not to be confused with minor league football competitor New England Football League) banned two players for life after a nasty brawl broke out in Eau Claire, Wisconsin between the Lake Superior Rage and Eau Claire Crush....

Bristolmetrics: <i>ESPN</i> Navigates The Dark, Sportless Days Of Summer
When last we met, SportsCenter finally covered the Jerry Sandusky case, we found out if the Rose Bowl will stay on ESPN (it will), and Outside The Lines aired one of the year's most fantastic features. What would this week bring? ...

An Actor Explains Just How Bizarre Bob Kraft's Casting Video Was
We asked you last night for information about the bizarre audition tape Bob Kraft made with his girlfriend, Ricki Noel Lander. This morning, a reader (no, not Jon Hamm) wrote in to give us some sense about how audition tapes work in Hollywood:...

Baseball Player Who Said He'd Never Live In Racist South Carolina Assigned To South Carolina Team
Outfielder Robert Refsnyder, who was born in South Korea, took some heckling from South Carolina fans at the College World Series last month when his Arizona Wildcats beat the Gamecocks. Refsnyder ran to Twitter and declared he "will never live in South Carolina because they can't accept Asians play...

Read The Full Saga Of The Piggyback Bandit
Back in 2009, we wrote about the strange antics of Sherwin Shayegan, otherwise known as the Piggyback Bandit. Intrigued by Sherwin's story, the fine folks at Grantland sent Bryan Curtis on the bandit's trail in the hopes that some sense could be made of the man's obsession with piggyback rides....

Angler's Worst Nightmare Comes True As "Big-Ass Shark" Steals The Fish Right Off Her Hook
I was thinking this morning that we really don't cover fishing enough here at Deadspin, and sure enough CBS blogger Will Brinson tweeted out a link to this video that's pretty much perfect....

Phillies Announcer Melts Down: "Somebody Figure Out How To Fucking Get Scott Hairston Out!"
Scott Hairston owns the Phillies. Just plain steals their lunch and eats it in front of them, then poops in the bag and gives it back. He's a journeyman against everyone else, an All-Star against Philly....

ESPN Entertainment Writer Has A Bad Wikipedia Habit
We've introduced you to ESPN's Lynn Hoppes a time or two. He's now an entertainment writer (and Cupcake Wars correspondent) for ESPN.com, but he used to edit the website's Page 2—where he wrote about pizza, covered the Jonas Brothers, and hired Sarah Phillips—before it rebranded itself as Playbook. ...

Ben Sheets Will Return To The Majors This Sunday
Heading into this season, it looked like the Atlanta Braves were in possession of a stacked starting rotation. A trio of dynamic young arms—Tommy Hanson, Brandon Beachy, and Mike Minor—were set to team up with proven veterans Tim Hudson and Jair Jurrjens. What's more, the Braves had prospects like ...

Jeremy Lin's Mad At The Knicks, But It's A Healthy Kind Of Mad
The honeymoon may not be over, but Jeremy Lin's New York marriage has definitely begun. Though he hasn't yet put pen to contract, he's already got one tabloid trying to stir up shit between him and the Knicks. That's about an official a welcome as the New York media has to offer....

Our Race Horses Are Broken, America
Our horses are sick. Our thoroughbreds are thoroughly inbred. They are locomotives sitting atop toothpicks. They are fragile and friable, designed to run but not to recover from running. And each time they break down or wear out, we chalk it up to an individual horse's shortcomings, rather than the ...

Kansas City's Smoky Air Turned Bryce Harper Into A Zombie
The National League spanked the AL in last night's All-Star Game, which may actually be news to you given ratings almost certainly went down yet again for the Midsummer Classic....

Here's Patriots Owner Bob Kraft Helping His Girlfriend With Some Kind Of Weird Audition
Well, this isn’t something we ever thought we’d see. Here’s 32-year-old occasional actress Ricki Noel Lander, better known around Boston as the close “pal” of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and she appears to auditioning for the role of “Mary Elena” in something that requires her to be in a bikini....

MLB's Plan To Drain Every Last Ounce Of Fun From The Home Run Derby Takes Shape
Kansas City Royals fans were pissed off that Robinson Cano didn't pick Billy Butler for the Home Run Derby, so they booed him. Mercilessly. And each time he failed to hit a home run, compared to the zero times he successfully did, they cheered him. (Burke went ahead and isolated the crowd audio, s...