league-championship-series Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Will the Texas Rangers please <i>PLEASE</i> knock off the Astros?
Was it inevitable? One won the American League West, while the other led it for most of the season and was forced to go the wild-card route to make it to this stage. The Texas Rangers and Houston Astros share a state and are bitter rivals and will face each other in the postseason for the first time...

Tuesday night should’ve been only celebratory for this Texas Rangers fan. It wasn’t
Last night should’ve been pure, unadulterated joy. I haven’t been shy when it comes to the Texas Rangers and writing about my favorite baseball team. It swept the 101-win Orioles and advanced to the American League Championship Series for the first time in a dozen years. I was a sophomore in college...

The Tampa Bay Rays-Texas Rangers series winner will advance to the World Series
Here’s your de facto American League Championship Series. Sorry to those in Baltimore, your luck will run out despite being undervalued the entire season. Postseason baseball is a different juggernaut. The Toronto Blue Jays and Minnesota Twins just don’t have the firepower to keep up. And Houston co...

2023 MLB HR leaders
This article is based on data from Sportradar. Text was compiled by an AI engine that was then reviewed and edited by the editorial staff....

MLB's final 10 days in the American League will be pure chaos
Entering the penultimate weekend of baseball’s regular season, so much is in flux. The calming part is the National League. Every division race is wrapped up and the Wild Card will become a matter of which pair of teams are the odd ones out between the Arizona Diamondbacks, Chicago Cubs, Miami Marli...

Adam Wainwright will be harder to replace in the clubhouse than on the mound
Adam Wainwright represents a lot for St. Louis Cardinals fans. He’s the final player standing from the club’s latest but not-so-recent recent World Series victory, a pitcher who was a mainstay of a consistently good to great staff for almost two decades, and a cornerstone in the clubhouse both on an...

Behold, the magic of the Blue Jays' face-plant!
It’s been a wonky season for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was supposed to be the one where they leaped from just a playoff team to AL East titan. Didn’t work out. Part of it is that Alek Manoah started throwing wiffle balls. Another part is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s power went to the zoo for most of...

The Astros are just going to win again, aren't they?
There’s been a lot to get excited about in the American League, and a lot of new....

Texas Rangers don’t need Jacob deGrom to be one of MLB's best teams
The weirdest part of the news of Jacob deGrom’s impending season-ending Tommy John surgery, which in all likelihood could keep him out of the Texas Rangers’ rotation until the beginning of the 2025 season, is that the first-place team in the American League West doesn’t need him. Is deGrom a massive...

Boston Celtics got a lucky bounce — along with Game 7 and all the momentum
After falling behind 3-0 in the Eastern Conference Finals, Boston Celtics’ guards Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart told the media, “Don’t let us get one.” Not only did the Celtics get one, but they got a second and a third in a row to tie the series and become only the fourth team in NBA history to adv...

Aaron Boone wants to yell at real people, not robots
Aaron Boone has a knack for early showers. You can blame it on a short temper or having the pinky-up attitude of being the Yankees’ manager. Whatever the case, no one has spent less time helming his team from the dugout in Major League Baseball than Boone this season, or since the start of the 2018 ...

MLB scheduling change making it easier for American League East to assert its dominance
Six months or so after the NFC East was the best division in football, the American League East has overtaken MLB. No team is below .500 as of Friday morning/early afternoon, and the fives clubs are a combined 105-56 against opponents outside the division. The Tampa Bay Rays (37-15) and Baltimore Or...

Chicago Cubs skipper David Ross is clueless
Modern baseball thinking has it that the manager in the dugout is just an extension of the front office. He pressed the buttons he was told to, and if he can help manage personalities and keep a bunch of millionaires from knifing each other over seven hot months, so much the better. So maybe David R...

The Mets prove you don’t have to have holes if you don’t want to
The Mets don’t have to be unique. There are plenty of teams that wouldn’t have to use the departure of a player like Jacob deGrom as an excuse to declare it’s all over for them, that they’d have to find a new way, and to take a step back. You can get away with that if you’re the Astros and your mino...

World Series X-Factors: Who needs to step up for Houston Astros, Philadelphia Phillies to win the title?
The World Series kicks off tomorrow night between two teams with wildly different expectations heading into the postseason. On one hand, the Astros were the top seed in the American League. Houston reached the World Series in three of the last five seasons and reached the ALCS in all five. Everyone ...

Houston, we have a champagne problem
Champagne isn’t the only thing the Houston Astros are keeping on ice. ...

If you were to watch the NLCS instead of just complaining about it, you might like it
There’s no denying that the ALCS is a bigger draw than the NLCS this year. The Yankees always garner eyeballs, New York and Houston have a recent, contentious history, and there is no fence straddling when it comes to the Astros’ cheating scandal. Either they should have a postseason ban like a coll...

So it’s root, root, root for the Yankees
It has happened only once in recorded history....

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. ...

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...