sam Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

This time the Cubs can't blame Billy Goat
Though I no longer belong to the Wrigleyville parish, it doesn’t mean I have any more patience for tired and overused narratives about the Cubs. I do not find “#Cubes” any more entertaining or pertinent than I did when I bled blue. Most, if not all, should have been washed away by the 2016 World Ser...

The Washington Capitals only exist for one reason now
The NHL spent a good decade trying to revolve their league around a Pittsburgh Penguins-Washington Capitals rivalry, and more to the point, a Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin one. Unable to come up with any original ideas, because it’s the NHL, it did its best to copy the Bird-Magic dynamic from the NBA ...

Someone should look into this agreement Justin Verlander has with Father Time
If you’ve watched enough Justin Verlander starts, there’s always a feeling he has one last card to play when he absolutely needs it. That mostly comes from his habit of keeping his fastball velocity just low enough to be a tease early in his starts, and then somewhere later when he really needs it h...

MLB's new playoff system has created a wonderful, hot mess of a finish
The playoffs are approaching, and perhaps an indirect benefit of expanding them is that the more flawed teams are competing for them, the funnier it can get. ...

Darwin Nunez may be figuring it out
The overriding factor in judging Darwin Nunez last year had nothing to do with him. He had the misfortune of being a big-money forward purchased at the same time as Erling Haaland. ...

The Chicago Bears are forever hopeless until new ownership arrives
I’ll never be free of this....

If you're going to crash and burn, crash and burn like the Reds
Almost every demise in a baseball season is slow (unless you’re the Pittsburgh Pirates–more on them later). When a team still has a shot at the postseason by September, every game means that team is chasing something. And that chase means that should they falter on Tuesday, by Wednesday’s first pitc...

We don’t want to know where Brock Purdy keeps that horseshoe hidden
The most annoying thing about Brock Purdy, and there’s more than a few, is the idea that the Niners planned all of this. ...

WWE gets richer while 100 employees get the boot
Time moves fast for a company trying to send its stock price up a percentage of a point. Yes, this is how big corporate America works. Cut employee expenditure to as lean as possible while maximizing revenue. WWE cashing in on a new $1.4 billion deal to move Smackdown back to USA Network is a perfec...

Woe is a Chicago Bears fan
It’s obvious a fandom is completely beaten down and without hope when all they ask for is for their team to just be bad and unnoticeable. ...

Just how far can the Orioles go?
It would be folly to pin too much on just a handful of games, no matter how good the Baltimore Orioles have looked. But then again, October doesn’t really adhere to trends or reason or logic either. When you get to this point in the season and try to look forward, you can throw darts at stardust, an...

The umpires strike back
There is no longer season than the MLB one, and it’s understandable that just about everyone is at the end of their rope and not ready to deal with any sort of guff from any sort of swine. ...

Is there any point in playing this Champions League?
Nope, not really! But my editors and management insist that these posts are longer than three words, so I guess I’ll have to explain. If Manchester City waltzed to last year’s trophy, only really sweating in the final for about an hour against a stubborn Inter, they very well may never get out of a ...

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...

Connor Bedard's most recent highlights prove he is going to be even better than everyone thinks
I’ll throw out all the caveats first, because that’s what every hockey fan outside of Chicago wants. ...

Manchester United are doing that thing again
Yes, we have been here before. It was the beginning of last season that Manchester United started like ass, got utterly thwacked by Brighton, manager Erik Ten Hag made them run a few more miles in training, and then it was fine for a while. It was mostly fine because Marcus Rashford turned into the ...

Mike Babcock sets a land speed record for being fired for being Mike Babcock
It has to be asked what did the Columbus Blue Jackets think they were going to get by hiring Mike Babcock? ...

The Cubs are doing their best to piss away their wildcard spot
On the morning of September 7th, life was pretty good for the Chicago Cubs. They had just, essentially, ended the San Francisco Giants season by sweeping them in three games at Wrigley, leaving San Francisco 5.5 games behind the Cubs and 2.5 games out of any wildcard spot. The Cubs meanwhile were on...

Behold, the magic of the Blue Jays' face-plant!
It’s been a wonky season for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was supposed to be the one where they leaped from just a playoff team to AL East titan. Didn’t work out. Part of it is that Alek Manoah started throwing wiffle balls. Another part is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s power went to the zoo for most of...

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...