fastball - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The off-putting history of Spencer Strider, and the incredible weirdness of the NHL AwardsI won’t pretend what follows makes any sense. It is simply a matter of taste, and my tastes have warped and mutated often into a territory I can no longer explain. If you’re an Atlanta baseball fan, Spencer Strider is a titan walking among men. Cobb County probably has dubbed it “Strider Day,” a gam...

MLB’s shift ban hasn’t solved baseball's real problem, but it also probably can’tA little more than two months into the MLB season, the first with a shift-ban that keeps two infielders on each side of second base, and the league will probably declare victory. There are more hits, and left-handed batters are seeing more grounders and line-drives are resulting in base hits, which ...

It’s never too early to laugh at the last-place CardinalsFrustratingly, it doesn’t happen all that often, so when it does you kind of have to eschew the normal protocols of being guarded due to sample-size, and randomness in baseball. When the St. Louis Cardinals are in last place, you simply shoot that fucker right into the vein and kiss the sky. In our ...

They say a good fastball is still the best pitch

It still amazes me how quickly a baseball playoff series, especially one of the seven-game variety, can pivot. ...

For the Houston Astros, it can be as simple as one pitch

I am guilty, as well as many others, of thinking of the Astros as the same Godzilla offense as they were in 2017, whatever means they used to get there. I hear Astros and think whatever batter they’re sending to the plate sends thousands of Tokyo residents scurrying for cover. And the Astros offense...

Sticky substances are back in fashion for the postseason, it seems

In a little over a year since MLB enabled umpires to routinely check pitchers for illegal foreign substances, there have been a few ejections, pitchers making scenes by stripping to their undergarments, and above all else, there’s been a drastic drop in some pitchers’ spin rates....

60 is such a round number

It was a number we didn’t even think about when we were kids. Only if you were born in a specific time, where you were an impressionable youth between 1998-2003, would 60 seem reasonable, or even reachable, or something to be expected to happen semi-regularly. It was never even talked about....

The most uncomfortable at-bat ever

I join many others in giving MLB hitters a hard time. The need to lift and drive has added an untenable amount of strikeouts to the game, and it can be frustrating watching guys simply pound contact right into a gaggle of fielders shifted over. But we also try to defend them as best we can, given th...