After 15 seasons as a big leaguer, Jayson Werth is out of baseball this year, which has given the 39-year-old an opportunity to pick up a couple of age-appropriate hobbies: reliving past glories in pick-up games, and hating on the newly powerful generation directly behind his. In Werth’s case, his quaint and…
Man, Trebek really looked at her, took a breath, then dropped the hammer.
A lot of the fun in going to see a world attention-grabbing movie on opening night is getting swept up in the pomp. If you’re a Star Wars nerd, like Brooklyn Nets center Brook Lopez is, you want to be able to feed off the collective energy of the other nerds in attendance when you go to a midnight showing of Star…
It’s the early 2000s, and I’m working at a bar across the street from the convention center where Comic-Con is held. At the time, Comic-Con was big, but the locals hadn’t embraced it and its multitude of people who can recite every episode title of The X-Files in sequential order, the way they have now. The locals…
Over the weekend, the first four episodes of Game of Thrones leaked onto torrent sites. In one day, they were downloaded more than a million times. And yet on an Internet that mainlines recaps, teasers, spoilers, and breakdowns, no one seems to want to talk about them, at least beyond the odd mealymouthed appeal to…
"Pro Sports Teams" was a category on Teen Jeopardy this evening and none of the contestants wanted anything to do with it. The rest of the board slowly vanishes while the Sports column remains menacingly unselected.
Geoff Foster of the Wall Street Journal has done the lord's work. He went back and watched every touchdown celebration that occurred in the NFL this year for the purpose of creating a comprehensive audit of how NFL players decided to get down after scoring.
How unlikely was Tom Brady's game-winning pass to Kenbrell Thompkins? Unlikely enough to make this Win Probability chart for the Saints look like it got stabbed in the heart with a spear.
On September 17, 1977, Carleton College and St. Olaf College played the Liter Bowl, the first NCAA-sanctioned game to use metric measurements, and probably the dorkiest piece of football ever put together.
David Price had a rough outing yesterday, giving up seven runs in seven innings and losing Game 2 to the Red Sox. He didn't take the media criticism well.
Television is the worst. Look at what's happened to the MLB Network's house numbers guy, Brian Kenny, who's spent the season preaching to the choir by beating horses to death right in front of them. It's fucking awful.
Thirty-three years and more than 50,000 episodes on, SportsCenter is less a television show or a convenient way to catch up on the day in sports than a great mechanical contraption gone awry, its parts moving independently not just of one another but of any obvious directing intelligence.
Two years ago, our friends at the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective applied their usual rigorous statistical scrutiny to a series of basketball movies. We pick up the idea again with this analysis of Hercules, by Anthony Zonfrelli and Dmitri Ilushin.
You're all right, Rex Ryan:
From Thomas Boswell's column in today's Washington Post:
The Seattle Mariners optioned once-promising second baseman Dustin Ackley to Triple A yesterday because Ackley has been having a miserable season at the plate. But what's to blame for Ackley's .205 average and .266 on-base percentage? Mariners coach Eric Wedge has a theory, and it has to do with all those damn nerds!
Goddammit, guy.
Here's Noble Ackerson, a so-called "Glass Explorer," trying out his Google Glass in a gym session yesterday. The view sure looks a lot like a dude wearing a mounted camera like a GoPro while he shoots hoops (there has to be an option to record the "robot view" eventually, right?), but if this makes for a more…
This picture is art. I can't stop looking at it. It almost made me happy for Harvard, in some demented, twisted way—that is, until I looked up the Harvard athletics band, to find more about those wondrous facial expressions, and found this informational paragraph:
Last weekend, I went to the sixth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Attendance has gone up every year, and it gets harder and harder to get a feel for who actually goes to this thing: Why were they there? Were they still all sabermetrics geeks? High-powered businessmen? To find out, I did some analysis of…
