mlb Page 39 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

It’s never been easy to win a World Series
The past 24 hours or so have been filled with shrieking referendums on the MLB playoffs and its structure. Not that this structure is really all that different from what came before. But the hope, expressed by yours truly as well, was that making the lower-seeded teams play one or two more games bef...

The rest of the bill is coming due for the Rams’ Super Bowl
In professional sports, it’s understood that if a team has a legitimate chance to win a championship, the front office needs to operate as if they’re in the final frame of play, and down by one score....

With offense winning titles in other sports, playoff baseball is still about pitching
The Dodgers, Braves, and Yankees combined to win 311 regular season games over the course of the regular season, but the playoffs have been a beautiful disaster so far. Mid-’90s alternative rock references notwithstanding, all three clubs received first-round byes, and only New York isn’t on the bri...

Clint Eastwood has an explanation for Yordan Alvarez’s hot streak
Once Clint Eastwood turned into his character from “Gran Torino” I haven’t paid as much attention to the Hollywood legend’s movies. So forgive me, I just saw “Trouble with the Curve,” and aside from more evidence that Justin Timberlake isn’t an actor, I walked away pleasantly surprised. It was a pre...

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....

How should he be remembered?
On July 26 of this year, the Jackie Robinson Museum had its soft opening. The SoHo ribbon-cutting occurred 14 years after plans for the cathedral to honor the man who broke baseball’s color barrier and ended racial segregation of Black players relegated to the Negro Leagues were first announced. The...

TBS sets new standard for cringiest promo of all time during Game 1 of the ALDS
One of the less glamorous parts of being a professional play-by-play commentator is being handed a cringy script and being told to act enthusiastic about a show you don’t watch or a product you don’t use just so you can appeal to your boss and finally get back to calling the game. It’s such a forced...

Is MTV Cribs-era fashion making a comeback?
The split jersey look usually serves a purpose. It’s for parents with kids playing against each other in a nationally televised sporting event, or for a young woman who has to support both her brother and her new boyfriend who would go on to become her husband and an NFL bust....

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 Padres’ arms are coming for the Dodgers
Ignore the San Diego Padres all you want....

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. ...

‘It could always be worse’ isn’t much solace to Mets’ fans at the moment
Every lower seed but Tampa won on the opening day of the 2022 MLB playoffs. The Guardians, Phillies, Mariners, and Padres all hold 1-0 advantages and could send their opponents fishing today with another W. ...

MLB Wild Card Series predictions: Rays-Guardians, Mariners-Blue Jays, Phillies-Cardinals, Padres-Mets
The MLB playoffs begin today, and with that, eight teams will battle for the chance to compete against the Dodgers, Braves, Astros, and Yankees. Yikes! What an awful prize that is, am I right?...

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...

Baseball always gives you a moment
I have lamented how the last series of the MLB season didn’t contain much drama, which it’s supposed to. Sure, the Phillies clinched a playoff spot on Monday, and there was some seeding to sort out, but overall the last three games of the season passed by in a vacuum, kind of befitting the weekday n...

The 10 most proficient cheaters in the history of sports
There are many forms of cheaters in sports, and often the dumbest of them get the press because they’re as close to dumb criminals as one gets — and everybody loves a dumb criminal. The 2000 Spanish Paralympic basketball team that won gold despite only two of the 12 players actually having a mental ...

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...

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...
