red Page 97 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Coming soon to a city near you: MLB expansion
It’s always been the mantra of Rob Manfred that MLB wouldn’t look towards expansion until the stadium situations for the A’s and Rays were settled. After all, anywhere they’d award an expansion team could still be used as leverage for those teams to wrangle all the tax giveaways and government hando...

The Houston Astros don’t deserve a first-round bye
With playoff baseball rapidly approaching and the standings nearly complete, this feels like a good time to point out a flaw in the new six-team format (other than increasing the number of games per round). If you’re going to hand out first-round byes, give them to the two best teams in each league....

What was Chaim Bloom supposed to do?
Just how well is a GM/executive reign supposed to go when the first task given to them is to trade the best player in baseball? That was the road set out for Chaim Bloom, who came to Fenway from Tampa, probably with hopes that he could set up a Rays-with-money set-up like Andrew Friedman in Los Ange...

Jets owner Woody Johnson would never sign Colin Kaepernick, no matter the year
Sometimes you just have to put the request in despite already knowing the outcome. That was the case when Colin Kaepernick’s agent reached out to the New York Jets after Aaron Rodgers went down with a torn Achilles on Monday Night Football against the Buffalo Bills....

We live in a world where Matt Olson has 51 homers
Perhaps it’s because the higher-ups at MLB have wanted to discount the Steroid Era for so long and so passionately, with the hopes that we might erase all the numbers from our memories. Back then 50 homers was pretty much a buy-in. Some pretty silly names got to the mark. My favorite is probably Bra...

The New York Mets get their guy, now what?
David Stearns coming back to New York to become president of baseball operations for the Mets was about one of the worst-kept secrets in baseball. The Mets asked to talk to him after he stepped down from his post in Milwaukee and were denied access after last season, but it didn’t take a cocaine-add...

Dan Campbell and the Detroit Lions won a game that mattered
Sometimes overreactions are appropriate. And in the case of Dan Campbell and the Detroit Lions, they’ve earned every hysterical and asinine hot take fans and analysts will make about them Friday morning — and maybe throughout the rest of the season. It’s time to drink the Kool-Aid. The Lions are leg...

The Los Angeles Lakers' offseason moves are 2 years too late
The Los Angeles Lakers were able to successfully pivot away from Russell Westbrook, because this roster never really needed Russ. While the intention was right in looking for a third star, the only way adding one would’ve helped is if the team didn’t have to give up a bunch to get one, or if that pl...

The US Open has been a tough watch the past few days
The US Open used to bill itself as “The World’s Toughest Tennis.” It’s New York, which has to bill anything having to do with itself as the “biggest and toughest” or the city will collapse in on itself. But the Open was on hardcourt, it was at the end of summer so it was hot, and they used to make p...

Can the Detroit Lions live up to all the hype around them this season?
The Detroit Lions enter the 2023 NFL season on a wild hype train of high hopes and expectations after finishing strong last year, winning five of their final six games. Jared Goff looked like Detroit’s quarterback of the future, and Dan Campbell proved that he’s much more than a barbaric man who wan...

If you’re not watching Coco Gauff, you’ve got Spectrum
After a week of US Open coverage, two things are apparent: You need to see Coco Gauff and Carlos Alcaraz in person to really appreciate them, and for some tennis fans, that might be the only option. A carriage dispute between Charter Communications and Disney led to the Mouse pulling all its channel...

IDIOT OF THE MONTH: Luis Rubiales, John Angelos, and the elusive White Sox park shooter
Welcome once again to the latest edition of Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE MONTH, where we rant insanely about people we don’t like! Up yours, woke moralists!...

Julie Ertz, the USWNT’s most irreplaceable player, retires
I’m a sucker for a midfielder. Especially one like Julie Ertz. It’s not that I played there or anything. It’s just something about a player who sees all the angles on both sides of the ball before being anywhere near it that gets me, I think. Xabi Alonso is my favorite Liverpool player of all time. ...

Mookie Betts, not Ronald Acuña Jr., is the NL MVP
We’d all be better off if every MVP award was simply renamed, “Player Of The Year,” as it would save us a very annoying and tiresome debate about what “valuable” means. It gets doubly so in baseball, where we still haven’t quite escaped what numbers people should pay attention to, and what is overbl...

Let’s get this Balloon World Cup in the Olympics, pronto
The World Cup is the biggest sporting event for the most popular sport on earth when it rolls around every four years. It’s when most Americans who rarely pay attention to footie get to throw on their capes, pull out their flags, and cheer on the home team. There’s a new World Cup that seems to have...

Alex Cora had himself a night
It’s starting to slip away from the Boston Red Sox. After an excellent July, the Carmines have run to nowhere in August with a 10-10 mark which has left them five games adrift of the last wildcard spot. Which isn’t a huge surprise, given that this team was built to basically win 84 games and give th...

Fantasy Football Rankings 2023 - PPR Quarterback (QB)
This slideshow is based on 2022 NFL season data from Sportradar. Rankings were compiled by an AI engine that were then reviewed and edited by the editorial staff....

Who will New York Yankees GM Brian Cashman scapegoat next?
Atlanta has been a menace to New Yorkers of late. First, they dribbled the New York Mets all over Citi Field. Off the diamond, their District Attorney pinched Rudy Guiliani and Donald Trump in a RICO case, then the Braves continued their streak by lopping off the Bronx Bombers heads in three consecu...

Fred Toucher interrupts Jets talk to call Mike Greenberg a 'no-talent pr*ck'
Mike Greenberg has been a staple of ESPN for nearly three decades. He’s famously known as one half of the Mike & Mike morning radio show, which aired on ESPN networks from 2000-17. Greeny, as he’s affectionately known by many, has never been the rah-rah, flashy, over-the-top type of personality like...

World Cup Day 22: Spain overcome Sweden to reach their first Final
This is truly the business end of the World Cup, as we decide who will get to play for the whole Chimichanga. The first semifinal is in the books, and it was a true styles-makes-fights clash (as opposed to the staring contest England-Australia quite likely will be). Spain’s technical ability vs. Swe...