fr Page 68 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Let’s hope rest doesn’t matter much
Right at the top, I’ll admit this is all a forlorn hope. Whatever happens in the first season of baseball’s expanded playoffs isn’t going to cause too much of a ripple in how the sport looks and how teams are managed. I get that. But we can at least start here. ...
The Maple Leafs are going to try again with Matt Murray and that’s great for the rest of us
The NHL season kicks off for real tomorrow night (the two appetizer games in Prague don’t count, especially because they involved the Sharks), or as it’s known for most of the hockey covering world, “Six months of how does this affect the Leafs?” Yep, the sport’s biggest soap opera, the question of ...
Victor Wembanyama is the NBA’s basketball comeuppance
Victor Wembanyama is the evolution of basketball personified. But evolution requires a catalyst. Sure Wembanyama’s genes play a significant part, but decades earlier he could have been Frédéric Weis. Weis was the first French center whose name was seared into the memories of American basketball fans...
The Mets didn’t do anything wrong
Perhaps that’s what will kill their fans most. Then again, Mets fans have never needed much prodding to tell the world how miserable it is to be a Mets fan. They’ll certainly have the ammo now....
For its next trick, the Mariners will juggle orcas while unicycling over a volcano
It takes a lot for the sporting public to notice a Saturday highlight other than a football one in early October. It has to be especially good on a weekend when Alabama staves off an upset, but my god what the Seattle Mariners are doing is beyond good. ...
There’s a reason Mike Leach’s quarterbacks have never cost him his job
The next time a pundit says “Missing on such-and-such QB cost coach X his job” will be my next visit to the psych ward. You know why Spencer Rattler didn’t cost Lincoln Riley his job, and Paul Chryst couldn’t survive Graham Mertz? One looks at a chalkboard as a place to draw plays, and the other see...
The Yankees should be stripped of the Evil Empire moniker if they let Aaron Judge walk
No one could’ve predicted that Aaron Judge’s contract season would feature 62 home runs and enough memories for Yankees fans to blubber on about for seven lifetimes. I’d be interested to see what the non-New York fan reaction would have been if Judge’s historic season came in a different uniform. ...
Picking our MLB National League award winners
Yesterday, we gave you our picks for the American League awards. Today, we move to the Senior Circuit. While the National League didn’t have anyone hit 60 home runs or pitch and hit, it did have a multitude of strong, MVP-caliber performances. Aside from Sandy Alcantara most likely securing the Cy Y...
Bobby Wagner joined an elite group on Monday: The ‘athletes who have pounced on fans for invading the field’ club
Several memorable plays were made during the San Francisco 49ers’ 24-9 victory against the Los Angeles Rams on Monday. There was Deebo Samuel’s back shoulder catch that he turned into a 50-plus yard touchdown, as well as Jeff Wilson Jr.’s touchdown run that first gave the 49ers the lead....
The ruthless efficiency of Sandy Alcantara
As the baseball season draws to a close today, one of the rites of this time is to look at numbers that pop off the screen. For most of the last month, that’s been Aaron Judge. Whether it’s the number of homers he hits — or more often, it’s simply the gap from him to the second-place homer total, wh...
College football Marty McFly Rankings Week 5: Is UCLA back? Is Chip Kelly back? Do they even qualify for being back?
I think we’re going to need to redefine what is a lost program. For example, if Virginia Tech returns to the form that Frank Beamer consistently had them at, would they be back? I ask because schools that were trying to get back this year are disappearing like Spider-Man in Infinity War. (I can’t re...
Picking our MLB American League award winners
The 2022 MLB season is coming to a close today and here at Deadspin, we decided that despite the fact that we will likely never, ever, get to actually vote on awards — let alone get credentials — we’d still offer up our take. It’s not like the infallible BBWAA has ever been wrong with its picks befo...
Micah Parsons declares Dallas Cowboys’ ‘Doomsday Defense’ is back
The Dallas Cowboys are playing the best defensive football we’ve seen from them in quite some time. Last year the defense was good at creating turnovers, but this season they’re barely giving up anything to opposing offenses. Comparisons to past Cowboys defenses are beginning to emerge, and one pers...
Set your DVR when Deebo Samuel and Talanoa Hufanga are playing
In the fall of 1994, Michael Jordan was still away from the NBA and the World Series was canceled. For a young Chicago Bulls and White Sox fan, there wasn’t much to look forward to in sports, especially with Horace Grant having just signed with the Orlando Magic in free agency....
Week 4 NFL Powerless Rankings: Texans sit atop trash heap
It’s time to check in on the teams that can’t get out of their own way. The first few weeks of the 2022 NFL season have been somewhat unpredictable, but there are always a few teams we expect to disappoint their fan base. Now let’s get into the powerless ranking for Week 4....
Rob Manfred strikes again!
MLB entered its last series of the season on Monday, and there wasn’t a game on the schedule worth watching. Wild-card seeding doesn’t really get the blood going, y’know....
The Rams should take down the banged up 49ers on Monday Night Football, but only if they shore up a key weakness
Opening night was a grand affair for the Los Angeles Rams. In their shiny facility in Inglewood, Calf., they were able to relive the night that they became the second consecutive team to win a Super Bowl in their home stadium. They got the rings, unveiled the banner, and three hours later they were ...
Baseball cares not for your plans, especially when you’re the New York Mets
History will record it as another case of Mets-ian fortune. A Mets team that still might win 100 games blowing the NL East on the last weekend of the season. A Mets team that at one point was 10.5 games ahead of the Braves. A Mets team that really only had to win one game of three in White Flight Co...
Antonio Inoki leaves behind a legacy that rivals any in combat sports
There’s not an athlete in combat-sports history with a bigger influence than Antonio Inoki. How many other professional wrestlers have a common opponent in Superman? Inoki is one degree of separation from Clark Kent because of his 1976 fight against Muhammad Ali, then the WBC and WBA heavyweight cha...
NFL Week 4: Are backup QBs better than we give them credit for?
America loves an underdog story, but the betting public hates backup quarterbacks. Despite the Cowboys going 2-0 with Cooper Rush filling in for Dak Prescott, Dallas is seeing only 16.7 percent of bets placed on them to take down their division rivals, the Washington Commanders on Sunday....