excerpts Page 8 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
If Albert DeSalvo Wasn't The Boston Strangler, Who Was? Bill James Investigates
During the years 1962-64, 13 women in the Boston area were molested and then strangled by an assailant who came to be known as the Boston Strangler. In 1965, Albert DeSalvo, a convicted sex offender and patient at a local mental institute, began telling people he committed the murders. With the help...
Kelly Leak: The Coolest Kid Who Ever Lived
The following is excerpted from Josh Wilker's book about The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, written for Soft Skull Press's Deep Focus series....
Floyd Patterson Was A Coward And Other Excerpts From One Of The Best Collections Of Boxing Writing In A Long Time
In the foreword to "At the Fights," a newish boxing anthology that spans over a century of pugilistic history, the novelist Colum McCann observes, quite appropriately, that, "Boxers get told to imagine punching a spot behind your opponent's head, to reach in so far that they can extend the destructi...
My Lunches With Costas: A Series Of Frank Encounters With The Journalist And Shill (UPDATE)
The following is adapted from Lipsyte's new memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, now available on Amazon....
New Bits From ESPN Book: "A Lot Of Drugs," "Quite A Bit Of Screwing"
Entertainment Weekly has some new snippets from Miller and Shales' forthcoming ESPN book, Those Guys Have All The Fun. Publisher Little, Brown lifted its embargo on writing about the book earlier today....
ESPN Book Excerpt: Keith Olbermann, The Asshole Genius
GQ called dibs on the first exclusive excerpt of the gigantic Miller-Shales ESPN oral history, Those Guys Have All The Fun, but we've been given an excerpt of their excerpt just because nobody wants us running any more unapproved excerpts. We'll play along. So read this, then pop over to GQ for the...
The Restless Mind Of C.J. Wilson, The Rangers' Straight-Edge, Tolkien-Reading Enemy Of MLB Douchebags
The following is excerpted from Curtis's cover story in the May issue of Texas Monthly about the Rangers — "an AA meeting in spikes," he writes....
The Sultan Of Twat: Babe Ruth's Swinging First Few Years With The Yankees
The following is excerpted from Weintraub's The House That Ruth Built, about Babe Ruth, the Yankees, and the 1923 baseball season....
Roberto Clemente's 3,000th Hit, In Glorious Graphic-Novel Form
The following is excerpted from Santiago's 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, a gorgeous graphic-novel biography of the martyred baseball great. Clemente got his 3,000th hit on Sept. 30, 1972, three months before he died in a plane crash. You can watch video of No. 3,000 here; Santiago's rendering b...
The Devil In Tampa: Remembering The Penny-Pinching, Snack-Policing, Nut-Cutting Days Of Vince Naimoli
In his new book, author Jonah Keri covers the rise of the Tampa Bay Rays under the stewardship of two Goldman Sachs alums and a private equity banker, who in 2008 managed to do to the rest of the American League what some of their former colleagues were doing to the U.S. economy. Before their arriva...
Deadspin Presents An Interpretive Rendering Of Cal Ripken Jr.'s Young Adult Book
We received an email from Cal Ripken Jr.'s publicity team at Random House, which will release his three-CD audiobook, HOTHEAD, next Tuesday. HOTHEAD (the caps are apparently intentional) is about a Babe Ruth League shortstop named Connor Sullivan and is "loosely based on challenges Ripken himself ...
How NASCAR Conquered America Through The Air
Greg Lindsay is the co-author of the forthcoming Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, which argues that air travel has a lot more to do with your daily life than you might think. In this outtake from the book, he describes how NASCAR teams took to the skies as the sport expanded nationally over th...
Why There Are More .300 Hitters Than .299 Hitters, And Why It Matters
Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, authors of the Freakonomically inclined Scorecasting, explore the peculiar power of round-number milestones and how they affect a ballplayer at the plate....
The Invention Of Air: The Myths Of Young Michael Jordan, Deconstructed
There was a time when Michael Jordan was a very different kind of superstar, writes Bethlehem Shoals in this excerpt from FreeDarko's wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History. That MJ was edgy and menacing, and he helped make embarrassing music that no one r...
A Yankee Stadium Memory: "Their Look Didn't Say, 'Shut Up.' It Said They Wanted To Kill Me."
The following is taken from Bronx Banter Presents: Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories, edited by Alex Belth and featuring recollections of the old ballpark—sorry, stadium—from the likes of Pete Hamill, Charles P. Pierce, and Joe Posnanski. Bob Costas has something in there, too, I guess. Here, the grea...
Jeff Garcia Pisses In Hand Towels, And The Art Of Breaking Thumbs In The Loose-Ball Pile
Today, mongrels, we're excerpting from Anthony Gargano's tremendous NFL Unplugged, which offers a ruthlessly entertaining portrait of the NFL. It has all the lawlessness, the poop, the broken fingers, the organized insanity that the league would prefer you not know about....
A Meeting With The Godfather: How Youth Basketball's Sausage Gets Made
In the world of grassroots basketball, the sneaker companies are kings, the coaches their vassals, and the players their serfs. However, these links are symbiotic: the companies need the coaches and players for marketing purposes and the coaches and players need the sneaker companies to get exposur...
Here's What The Fuck We Did With Judah Friedlander
Judah Friedlander didn't want to write an essay—or do any of your suggestions—so he dropped by the office and fucked around on the roof. Here's what happened. ...
What The Fuck Are We Supposed To Do With Judah Friedlander?
Greetings, faceless demographic. So the folks at HarperCollins are trying to promote Judah Friedlander's book "How To Beat Up Anybody" and I'm having trouble trying to figure out how to promote it. It doesn't help that the publicist lady referred to the site as "Deadpin" several times....
The Day Jeremiah Pharms's Wife Attacked His New Girlfriend In The Stands
You might remember the brilliant, scary reporting about the 2000 Washington Huskies by the Seattle Times' Ken Armstrong and and Nick Perry in 2008. Now, all the stuff that couldn't make a family newspaper has been released in the book, "Scoreboard, Baby."...