of Page 422 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Fans Of The TV Show Castle Angry At Sports
In the bottom of the eighth inning of the first game of the ALDS series between the Baltimore Orioles and Detroit Tigers, the Orioles offense went gangbusters and sent 14 players to the plate as well as prompting three pitching changes. This took a long time, so the Los Angeles Angels-Kansas City Ro...

Chart: Royals-A's Was Awesome; Giants-Pirates Was Shit
Everyone knows the AL wild-card game between Oakland and Kansas City was much more exciting than San Francisco's blowout win over Pittsburgh in the NL game. Fangraphs' Jeff Sullivan has provided all of us with a stark visual representation of that fact by charting the win-expectancy fluctuations fro...

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Greg Maddux
A record producer friend once told me that Check Your Head, the Beastie Boys' 3rd album, was perfectly realized. That's stuck with me over the years, the idea of being able to achieve something that lives up to your ambition. In a 1978 Playboy Interview, Bob Dylan said: "The closest I ever got to t...

The Russians Have Stolen Our Original IPA Formula, But It's Still Tasty
India pale ale is far and away America's favorite style of craft beer (at least during the handful of months when there isn't pumpkin juice all over the goddamn place), which is why it made sense for Pabst Brewing to announce late this summer that they were resurrecting Ballantine IPA....

The Royals Will Never Stop Running
The Royals had seven different players steal a base on Tuesday night. That's a playoff record, and an incredible figure considering that most teams would have become gun-shy after a disastrous failed double-steal in the first and a four run deficit after six innings. The Royals are not most teams....


Madison Bumgarner Pitches Gem As Giants Advance In Playoffs
En route to winning the 2010 World Series, San Francisco Giants play-by-play announcer Duane Kuiper coined a slogan to describe the team's penchant for winning tight games: "Giants Baseball...Torture." In 2012 they went down 0–2 in the NLDS and 1–3 in the NLCS before beating Detroit to win their s...

Brandon Crawford's Grand Slam Silences Pittsburgh Crowd
Supporting their team to the fullest, Pittsburgh Pirates fans have been very loud the entire NL Wild Card play-in game. So loud that they almost managed to cause a second inning drop in the outfield when Giants Joe Panik and Hunter Pence collided while catching a pop fly. That's what makes this cl...


Baseball Will Test Out Six New Rules To Speed Up The Game
If every baseball game were as exciting as last night's, no one would mind if they lasted forever. But most definitely aren't and even the most loyal fan ought to agree that there's a lot of downtime that could be eliminated. To that end, MLB's pace-of-game committee has come up with six experimenta...

Schlitz Is America's Best Cheap Beer
My first Drunkspin post was last summer's "36 Cheap American Beers, Ranked." It will almost certainly be the most widely read thing I ever publish. Kurt Loder and Steve Inskeep tweeted about it, and it got me booked onto one really cool AM-radio show in Minnesota and one really obnoxious beer podc...

Alex Rodriguez Is Not Comfortable In His Own Skin: A Gallery
Alex Rodriguez was present—though not honored, of course—at a fundraiser for the Buoniconti Fund to Cure Paralysis a couple of nights ago. He somehow made standing around and taking pictures with fellow athletes look incredibly awkward....

The Pirates Were One Of The Unluckiest (And Best) Teams In Baseball
Pittsburgh hosts its second straight National League play-in game tonight. The Pirates will host the Giants, with both teams finishing the regular season at at 88-74—which doesn't mean they were necessarily equal this year. While the one-game format renders a lot of season-long trends obsolete, the ...

Royals Fans Got Loud Enough To Help Their Team Win
If you are a Royals fan who attended last night's crazy-ass wild card game in Kansas City, you should go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. Because according to A's outfielder Sam Fuld, you played a direct role in the Royals winning that game....


Royals Defeat A's, Ned Yost In Epic Play-In Game
Sacrifice bunts are rarely the correct call in baseball, so of course Ned Yost's Kansas City Royals laid down four of them in Tuesday night's wild card play-in game against the Oakland A's. Despite Jon Lester displaying uncharacteristic shakiness and the Royals' offense performing uncharacterist...

MLB.com Runs "Royals Lose" Game Story
Live on MLB.com in the minutes immediately following the Royals' incredible extra-inning win was a version of the game story written in the ninth inning. In this version, which you can read below, the A's hung on to win and advance. ...

Chart: How Sabermetric MLB Forecasts Stacked Up Against Vegas
From Skidmore College statistics professor Michael Lopez comes the handy chart you see above, plotting the 2014 win totals of all 30 MLB teams against preseason predictions from Vegas and what Lopez calls his "Statsheads Prediction."...

TBS Baseball Crew Recreates "Boom Goes The Dynamite" Highlight Reel
To help ring in the playoffs, TBS had the crew from its studio baseball show do a new version of the famous "Boom Goes The Dynamite" highlight disaster. It's a pretty well-struck parody....

Jon Lester Vs. James Shields Is An Argument For The Second Wild Card
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the presence of MLB's second wild card teams, but tonight's matchup is not one of them. That's because we will get to watch two great pitchers—James Shields of the Kansas City Royals and Jon Lester of the Oakland A's—start the precise game that they were acquir...