rap Page 22 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

This is what it's all about
It’s not usually supposed to work like this in baseball. The quirk, some would say the beauty, of the game is that the big at-bats can fall to anyone. They don’t always fall to a team’s star player, and in fact, they rarely do. Opponents spell out a strategy most of the time to make sure they don’t....

France may be without their spine at the World Cup, and they won’t be alone
Crowbarring a World Cup into the middle of the club season in winter was always a dumb idea, probably equal to the idea that the tournament ever could have been held in the summer in Qatar, which is what the country and FIFA were originally selling when they awarded it to Qatar (and it was literally...

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....

Get good players, win good prizes
It obviously seems way too simple to distill the NLCS that kicks off tonight between the Phillies and Padres as two teams that just traded for or signed a bunch of good players. It’s a damning statement on where MLB is at the moment that this seems such a radical fucking idea. It’s the easiest thing...

A small win finally for the Carolina Panthers
They’ve lost three consecutive games, all by double digits. A team that was supposed to have an outside shot at the playoffs in a weak NFC South, currently is the frontrunner for the No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 NFL Draft. The Bryce Young sweepstakes may not be the international story of the NBA’s...

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...

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 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....

Wait, what? 10 of some of the craziest quotes from Herschel Walker
The great thing about America is that any citizen of a certain age can run for office. The bad thing about America is that any citizen of a certain age can run for office....

Draymond Green is stealing all the headlines by any means necessary
Draymond Green hijacked internet headlines Wednesday evening following his fight with Jordan Poole, which spilled into Thursday with all the talk about why this fight occurred. Thursday morning, a Tweet was posted from the latest episode of LeBron James’ “The Shop,” which features Green commenting o...

The Yankees should be stripped of the Evil Empire moniker if they let Aaron Judge walk
No one could’ve predicted that Aaron Judge’s contract season would feature 62 home runs and enough memories for Yankees fans to blubber on about for seven lifetimes. I’d be interested to see what the non-New York fan reaction would have been if Judge’s historic season came in a different uniform. ...

USWNT-England exhibition set as specter of NWSL abuse scandal looms
There’s no doubt about it. Friday’s far-from-friendly, friendly between the United States women’s national soccer team and the Lionesses from England is the biggest glorified exhibition in American soccer history, regardless of gender. It’s the first women’s soccer match — non-World Cup edition — to...

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...

Oh yeah, it’s Fat Bear Week!
Look, normally in this space in the a.m., I’d have to talk about Hockey Canada’s chair pulling a “Not All Men!” act in front of the Canadian parliament. Or a couple of owners in NWSL relinquishing “day-to-day” operations of their teams, but not selling their teams and disappearing into the cave wher...

Apparently, Herschel Walker only really objects to aborting his campaign
For Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign, shit hitting the fan is the modus operandi. On Monday night, The Daily Beast published a bombshell report detailing an abortion the Georgia Senate candidate paid for in 2009. The woman, who reached out to The Daily Beast after hearing Herschel squawk about his ...

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...

All you can do is marvel at Erling Haaland
Unless you’re decked out in blue, there has been an overwhelming sense of unfairness in the English Premier League this season. We already had the richest club in the world, with the best manager, the best squad, probably the best passer in the world, and we’ll just add the best finisher there is. A...

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney don’t have any answers for hooliganism either
We already went over how Welcome To Wrexham spent the first four episodes of its first season basically extolling how charming, funny, and nice Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are. The show isn’t meant for footy diehards, which is fine — it’s really meant for anyone who is already in love with thes...