ja Page 246 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Man, do the Cubs need to shut up
I’ve documented how on the field, the Chicago Cubs are quickly becoming one of the stories in Major League Baseball. This is a team that had been partially stripped for parts by its owner (even though he’s tried to duck that in recent days like the coward he is), who also left the roster high and dr...

SEE IT: Phoenix fan pummels man in Nuggets jersey, declares 'Suns in four'
The Denver Nuggets can’t go out like this. ...

Denmark’s team doctor says Christian Eriksen was ‘gone’ before resuscitation
Thankfully, Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen is alive after suffering what’s now been confirmed as cardiac arrest....

Hey, another country is forcing an international sporting event down its citizens’ throats
Only 29 percent of the people in Brazil want the country to host Copa America, with 64 percent opposed, but that’s what’s happening anyway, even with 2,000 deaths a day from COVID-19 in Brazil, even with 65,000 new daily cases of coronavirus, even after a dozen members of Venezuela’s contingent test...

Choose your fighter: deGrom or Ohtani?
New York Mets’ starter Jacob deGrom is kinda having a pretty alright season. More than 60 games in, his 0.56 ERA is half that of Bob Gibson’s from 1968 (1.12 — the lowest single-season ERA in the modern era). He’s also striking out 14.48 batters per nine innings pitched, which would also be the all-...

Stop the Bubble slander
The Denver Nuggets are down 3-0, meaning no team who reached the NBA’s Final Four in The Bubble has won a game past Round 1, and one of them didn’t even do that. But these four teams — the Nuggets, Los Angeles Lakers, Miami Heat, and Boston Celtics — shouldn’t be diminished for accomplishing what th...

Wheat, chaff, separation, etc., in NBA’s second round
It’s beginning to look a lot like a short second round of the NBA playoffs after the Suns rolled out to a 3-0 lead on the Nuggets with a 116-102 win in Denver on Friday night, behind 28 points from Devin Booker and a 27-point, eight-assist night from Chris Paul....

Jacob deGrom is deBest, but can he stay healthy?
Jacob deGrom is incredible, that’s nothing new. Friday night, the best pitcher on the planet had his third game this season with double-digit strikeouts and no walks, lowering his ERA to 0.56 with six innings of one-hit ball against the Padres....

Cool take: Four hours is too much baseball
Ryan Butcher started the 10th inning for the Diamondbacks in their game against the Angels on Friday night, with Jared Walsh serving as the courtesy runner at second base. But it was another of baseball’s unnecessary and irritating new rules that really wound up causing trouble for Arizona....

There will never be another game like MJ's ‘Flu Game,’ and that’s a good thing
Twenty-four years ago today, Michael Jordan played in Game 5 of the NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz while being — as the band Disturbed would say — down with the sickness after getting food poisoning from a pizza delivered to his hotel room the night before by five randos. ...

Vandy’s Kumar Rocker has no more use for college hitters
It’s so unfair, man. ...

Kawhi’s gonna have to do it again
This 0-2 hole, in some ways, isn’t as dispiriting as the previous round’s seemed to be for the Los Angeles Clippers. ...

Nazem Kadri cost the Avs everything
Hockey is a truly vicious sport, in that the team that wins the Presidents’ Trophy — i.e. the team that is best over the largest sample size — rarely “justifies” that achievement in the playoffs. You have to go all the way back to the Hawks in 2013, another shortened season, to find a team that was ...

Hear me out: If Chris Paul is a winner, why hasn’t he won anything?
Remember Cars? Yesterday was the movie’s 15-year anniversary. In the 2006 film, after a full season of third-place finishes, a racer — Chick Hicks — is asked to compete with the top two racers for a chance to win the championship. That’s a plot hole that has bugged me for the last fifteen years. Why...

A 12-team playoff won’t change the fact that the same schools win every year
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like a 12-team college football playoff format could be on the horizon. ...

Mom makes MLB catch of the year
Is there anything a mom can’t do? It’s an overused phrase, I know. But it’s pretty true. I’d like to imagine that someone, somewhere, actually has a list of all things the super-moms can do out there. Now, it’s time to add, “mom bare hands foul ball with baby in hand” to the file....

Pete Alonso has no problems with sticky stuff, but big problems with MLB
Break out your tin foil hats, because we’re diving into the Major League Baseball conspiracy well. All the talk around baseball’s proverbial water cooler lately has been about pitchers using sticky substances to increase their grip on the baseball. However, according to 2019 NL Rookie of the Year, P...

LeBron reminds us of other greats who wore multiple numbers on the same team
After a tumultuous 2018-19 season with the Los Angeles Lakers, LeBron James tweeted this out, passive-aggressively declaring his intentions to change his number to six....

Rookie umpire throws bat, hits José Abreu squarely in knee
I know umpires like to clear bats out of the way when they anticipate a play at the plate, but one would think that they would do so with a little bit of caution....

Aaron Rodgers doesn’t owe the fans a damn thing
The Green Bay Packers’ front office continues to squirm. As Aaron Rodgers doesn’t show up for mandatory OTA’s the Packers are getting dangerously close to having to live off the merits of their own decision-making in the form of Jordan Love starting Week 1....