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The Tampa Bay Rays can sure beat the tar out of awful teams
You can only play who is on the schedule. That’s an axiom as old as baseball, and it’s mostly true. The Tampa Bay Rays got to start their season with nine games against MLB’s kids with mittens pinned to their jackets year-round, and they’ve done all they can do. Which is to beat the ever-loving piss...

How every MLB team will tank their seasons and break their fans' hearts in 2023
You can all give up the Rogers Hornsby quotes, already. We made it Opening Day, when hope springs eternal for millions of MLB fans across the country, a least for a few days/weeks. We’d all love to believe that our team has as much of a chance of winning the World Series as any other but, realistica...

The biggest World Cup upsets of all time
As Saudi Arabia shocked the globe by defeating Lionel Messi and World Cup favorites Argentina on Tuesday, it provided the most recent example of a tremendous upset victory at the quadrennial showcase. Argentina was No. 3 in the FIFA rankings and Saudi Arabia was the second-lowest ranked team to play...

The warm glow of MLB Hot Stove’s warming glow — AL East
The GM Meetings are in the books, the Winter Meetings aren’t in the distant future, and the rumors are beginning to fly. You can be sure your favorite team is talking to agents for players! Does that mean anything? Nope, sure doesn’t! But you’ll take anything at this point, and they know that. So we...

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...

Might be time for pro athletes to beef up that security — or flaunt less online
In a little less than three months, it will be the 15th anniversary of Sean Taylor’s death from a home invasion in South Florida. A physical specimen by any metric, the University of Miami and Washington NFL franchise star died from a gunshot wound at age 24. ...

Jamie Kerstetter comes in second in World Series Of Poker event
Jamie Kerstetter came so close to achieving her dream: To be the “worst player” with a WSOP bracelet. We kid of course, as she would....

That’s the difference between the goalies
Hockey — as weird, random, and boorish as it can get — is a pretty simple game at times. The storylines coming out of Game 3 were that the Tampa Bay Lightning authored some market correction to get back into the Stanley Cup Final after a 6-2 win to get the series to 2-1. And with no team having won ...

The NHL finally gets its era-shifting Final with Lightning vs. Avs
Hockey being what it is, mostly weird and random, rarely throws up the two best teams in the NHL’s showpiece, the Stanley Cup Final. Sometimes we get close, and most seasons it’s actually hard to decipher who are clearly the best teams. With shootouts and overtime goofiness affecting the standings, ...

This is probably as close as Connor McDavid will get
There’s not much more that Connor McDavid can do. For that matter, Leon Draisaitl should be attached to that lament permanently now, after he also averaged two points per game in the playoffs with maybe two functioning limbs. They’re the only players to average two points per game in the playoffs ov...

Miguel Andújar's fall from grace
In 2018, young Yankees were taking over AL Rookie of the Year ballots. New York’s third baseman Miguel Andújar and shortstop Gleyber Torres finished second and third respectively in rookie of the year voting, losing out to Angels’ two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani....

Nazem Kadri is in the Oilers’ shirts instead of his own head
On a night where suffocating defense was being celebrated across the sports spectrum thanks to the Celtics David Copperfield’ing the Warriors in the 4th quarter, the night’s other playoff action saw Nazem Kadri prove what a force he can be when he’s not letting his brain drip out of his ear....

Welcome back, baseball
I spend a lot of time here pointing out everything that’s wrong with baseball. Maybe even most of my time. And for good reason. Baseball is broken, and the latest CBA doesn’t do nearly enough to address the problems. And those who are in a position to do anything about it aren’t interested in doing ...

Deadspin’s 2022 MLB predictions: The good, the bad, the frustrating
You don’t need sportswriters to tell you that the Dodgers are going to be better than the Diamondbacks this year. You already know that. At the same time, it feels wrong to go into the baseball season without looking ahead at it, without trying to gaze into a crystal ball to make some kind of picks....

The Rays are at it again
The Tampa Bay Rays once again ducked having to pay a player some serious money when they shipped Austin Meadows off to Detroit for Isaac Peredes. Meadows is still some three years from free agency, but the Rays are probably fearing that second arbitration year like Baba Yaga. I mean, Meadows might m...

What’s the future for Cuonzo Martin?
Throughout the years of covering Cuonzo Martin with my boots on the ground in Columbia, Missouri, musing to every whim of Mizzou athletics as the hometown daily newspaper’s sole beat reporter, I’ve learned a few things about the 50-year-old East St. Louis, Illinois native along the way. ...

Difficult Super Bowl Trivia: Part 2
Records are made to be broken, the old saying goes, but that’s not always true. Some records, in fact, cannot be broken. There’s no way, for example, to score a touchdown in the NFL longer than 99 yards. ...

Bengals’ win not just a whistling dick, see
It’s a bit shy of 50 years since the Raiders got knocked out of the playoffs by The Immaculate Reception, a play that wasn’t just dramatic, but controversial....

IDIOT OF THE YEAR: 40 of the dullest tools from 2021's shed
Happy holidays, you filthy animals, and welcome to Deadspin’s annual IDIOT OF THE YEAR extravaganza. Within these hallowed slides are 50 of the year’s least bearable dorks, whose transgressions range from “just kinda silly,” to “dangerously stupid,” to “Trevor Bauer.”...

IDIOT OF THE YEAR 2021: Countdown begins with Stephen A. Smith, Adam Silver, Johnny Damon, and more luminaries
Happy holidays, you filthy animals, and welcome to Deadspin’s annual IDIOT OF THE YEAR extravaganza. Within these hallowed slides are 50 of the year’s least bearable dorks, whose transgressions range from “just kinda silly,” to “dangerously stupid,” to “Trevor Bauer.”...