National League Page 8 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Is Albert Pujols ... good again?
It’s been a minute … maybe even millions of them....
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-...
Brandon Crawford deserves more love than he’s been getting
When the 2021 MLB All-Star Game polls opened on June 3, I filled out five ballots. I’ve voted at least once every day since. And every time, I voted for pretty much the same team with a few minor adjustments. ...
The Cleveland Avengers, really?
When a team changes its name, there’s so much potential for creativity. Obviously, there are some aspects that need to be avoided. You don’t want to pick a name that will marginalize or stereotype any groups. You also want to choose something that represents the city, state, or area you’re playing f...
The Chicago Cubs are the real-life team from 'Major League'
Now you have to imagine Tom Ricketts in her dress. Have a nice day....
Position player pitching alert gone awry: Wilmer Difo ignominiously and historically lit up
Wilmer Difo has played second base, shortstop, third base, and all three outfield positions during his career with the Nationals and Pirates, and now he can add pitching to his resume....
Albert Pujols is the latest Hall of Famer you’ll forget played for the Dodgers
The possibility of Albert Pujols returning to St. Louis to finish his career where he started it, this time as a bench bat for a Cardinals team that has title aspirations and Paul Goldschmidt at first base, was too good to be true....
The Reek in Review: L.A. Dodgers edition
You smell that?...
Albert Pujols’ career wasn’t supposed to end like this
Albert Pujols’ lifetime numbers are utterly staggering. He has 667 home runs, that’s more than Willie Mays. 3,253 hits, more than all but 14 players, more than hitting machines like Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn and George Brett. More than some guy named Napoleon Lajoie, who played 120 fucking years ago and...
What are the Giants doing here?
The baseball world was all gaga over the seven-game rumble the Padres and Dodgers put together in the season’s opening weeks. The part of the story that got lost and ignored is that they’re currently 2nd and 3rd place teams. It seems while they were eyeballing each other, the San Francisco Giants we...
Dustin May’s injury highlights a bigger problem in Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball gets a lot of flack for its unwritten rules, inaction against cheaters, television blackouts, and inability to market top players. Yet, what MLB gets the most hate for is its unwillingness to change....
Please, please, send John Smoltz to a farm upstate
It was a slow, lazy Saturday afternoon. It would have to be for me to turn on the Mets when Jacob deGrom isn’t pitching (though Marcus Stroman can be a very entertaining watch, too). I grew up at a time here in Chicago when we hated the Mets as much as the Cardinals, and those instincts still flicke...
Moving back the mound, and other rules changes we can get behind
With MLB taking over Minor League Baseball, and apparently hitting small towns worse than the death of American manufacturing, one small benefit is MLB’s newfound ability to experiment with new rules in the lower leagues it now controls. It gives the big leagues a lab, as it were, to test the effect...
Once again the Atlanta Baseball Team proves itself a shrieking fraud on caring about Black people
You mean to say that a baseball franchise with a racially insensitive name, which does all it can to harm any argument that their name isn’t just insensitive, but outright racist, by encouraging its fans to do racist chants; which moved out of team’s location name’s urban core and into another count...
NL East Preview: Are the Mets good enough to topple the Braves?
You could make a definitive argument that the National League East is the strongest 1-through-5 division in Major League Baseball, so long as no one fucks this up....
Tennessee State Republicans want to treat student-athletes like employees, just not pay them like employees
For decades, the powers that rake in that sweet college sports cash have been claiming the unpaid labor force is made up of students who just happen to be athletes. Never mind that professional sports leagues use colleges to develop talent, and that those schools rely on the millions that come in fr...
Stop trying to make Nerds vs. Fun happen in the NBA, too
Let’s get this out of the way immediately: if your reaction to seeing Anthony Edwards’ dunk last week was to complain that it was “all over Twitter” but also note that he was 0-for-7 on three-pointers, you’re either an idiot, a serious killjoy, trolling for attention, or some combination of the thre...
What In The Hell Is Happening In The NL?
I am surprised that Comrade Roth hasn’t mentioned this a couple of hundred times because as a Mets fan he is by definition skin-rash-level annoying, but there’s this: The Mets are now in the National League wild card mosh pit....
Here Are Your MLB All-Star Game Starters
The MLB announced starters for the All-Star game while you were watching the first half of the Women’s World Cup Final. These are the starting lineups as determined by the fan vote: ...
Woeful LA Dodgers Need More Of Wild-Pitch Walk-Off Hero Schumaker
Once again Friday night the Dodgers proved they can still fog a mirror. They got a game-tying homer in the sixth from the suddenly incomparable Yasiel Puig (who became just the second player since 1900 to bang out four home runs in his first five major league games) and then the winning run, on a wi...