si Page 999 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Yahoo Sneaks Past ESPN.com
We know you love those Web site ranking numbers, so we've got some more for you, and they're good ones. Last week, Yahoo Sports — are we supposed to use the exclamation point? We always feel like goobers typing "Yahoo!" — beat ESPN.com in both unique users and visitors. We've heard all kinds of ar...

Blogdome: Bill Simmons Edition
• Sports blogger goes after Bill and Chuck for trashing sports bloggers. [The Mighty MJD] • In full book promotion mode, Bill shows up on blogger radio show and actually predicts the Yankees to win. [Mr. Irrelevant] • The Phillies might be pretty much done in the playoff chase, but hey, look, they'r...

O.J. Simpson At Horror Convention. No, Really.
OK. You know that Necrocomicon convention, the one that's essentially for movie horror and gore fans? The one where the guys who played Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees show up and sign their autographs, and everyone there is obsessed with zombie and sharp things thing kill people? (Think Fangoria ...

Deadspin Party Crash: Bill Simmons' NYC Book Signing
Last night, at the Riviera Cafe in New York City, Our Boy Bill Simmons launched his worldwide tour to promote the release of his first book, Now I Can Die In Peace. And we — Deadspin editor Will Leitch and "photographer" Lockhart Steele — were there, because the bar serves alcohol and had some Arizo...

Etan Thomas Gets His Dylan Thomas On
Left-wing sports blogger Dave Zirin praises Washington Wizards forward Etan Thomas for speaking out against President Bush's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Thomas has long been beloved in the black community for his activism, and in a speech, he said he agreed with Kanye West's asse...

Simmons, Klosterman Hug For 3,973 Words
Our boy Bill Simmons and Spin and Esquire columnist Chuck Klosterman are such ideological Bosom Buddies that the surprise is not that they've collaborated on Page 2 again — they tried this once before — but that they don't do it every day, every week, every month, every year. We've always kind of ...

Football Outsiders Join The Happy Family Of Fox
Some Web business news this morning: The crazy kids at Football Outsiders have signed a deal with Fox Sports to provide NFL content for their site. Editor-in-chief Aaron Schatz — who previously had been doing work for ESPN Page 2 — says Fox Sports will run original FO content Monday-Wednesday. Fox...

Bill Simmons Brings It All Back Home
Well, we know why Our Boy Bill Simmons was sans column all week; he was saving it for his new NFL column, which clocks in at a frighteningly healthy 3,200 words. It's the usual Simmons fare; we get guest appearances by The Godfather, Andrew McCarthy and MTV's "Cribs."...

Jay Mohr: Comedy's Skip Bayless
We'll admit it: We don't really understand those columns that failed movie star/failed TV star/failed game show host Jay Mohr is writing for SI.com. They're not funny, but they're not really incisive about sports either; they just kind of hang out there, like a faded balloon (or a Marge Schott bre...

We Have To Ask ...
Suggested questions for today's ESPN SportsNation chatters ... • 11 a.m. NFL with Michael Smith: Wait, my bad, I thought you were Michael David Smith, from Football Outsiders. You know, the interesting one. You must get that a lot. • Noon. NCAA FB with Joe Schad: Covering the Dolphins for the Orland...

Just A Bunch Of Nerds, Debating Nerdom
We're big fans of Fire Joe Morgan's weekly deconstructions of ESPN analyst Joe Morgan's chats on ESPN.com — even if the chats of late, in the words of Fire Joe Morgan itself, have had "entirely un-Morgan-like reason and coherence" — and, to have some fun themselves, the folks at St. Louis Cardinals ...

About Last Night ...
You entered Harrah's Reno at noon and security deposited you outside on the lawn sometime around 3 a.m. Here's what you missed ... • MLB: Yankees beat Orioles to pry first place from Boston's withered, dead hands. • MLB: Bonds homers again in frenzied race against the arrival of that congressional s...

Flashback: Rob Neyer's Dark Days Of Amazon
All this talk about Amazon reader reviews got us to remembering one of our favorite ESPN.com snafus: Rob Neyer's infamous angry Amazon review. If you've forgotten, or if you never knew, Neyer — whose uncomfortably confessional book Feeding The Green Monster proved once and for all that stat guys sho...

Combing Through Simmons Reviews
We are about a week and a half away from the release of Bill Simmons' Now I Can Die In Peace — that's an appended title; Bill can't even resist a lengthy footnote in his book's name — and most of the big periodical reviews aren't out yet. (Our Nexis isn't working right, so we can't check the publish...

Bronson Arroyo: Now Officially A Rock Star
We were going to reveal the final of our three blind items today, but those crazy ladies at On The DL have something even better for today, so we're gonna hold off. They've put together a compendium of photos online of baseball players boozing and tarting it up with various "fans" across the count...

Jose Canseco, Professional Wrestler (Of Course)
We're not even going to pretend to be surprised here: Jose Canseco is rumored to making an appearance at Wrestlemania this spring. Perhaps it is telling that the people who are most concerned about this development are not baseball fans, but wrestling fans. Seems like the WWE — remember, that's wh...

NFL Roundup: Daunte's Blues
• If you somehow were able to make an emotionless, painless robot clone of Bea Arthur, and you pounded that clone in the face with a polo mallet for 25 minutes, then slammed that head in a car door 15 times, then severed the head with an exceptionally long and sharp toenail, then put the head in a...

WNBA Finals Controversy Debated In Empty Chat Room
We're not really going to join the growing chorus of anti-WNBA voices (or even the exact Xerox of choruses of anti-WNBA voices, just a few days later); we're not huge fans of the WNBA, but we're not huge fans of the MLS either, and you don't see us piling on them. That said, we actually watched so...

Bill Simmons' New Book: By The Numbers
Well, we are proud to report that our copy of Bill Simmons' Now I Can Die In Peace arrived at Deadspin World Headquarters last week, and, as tends to be the case with Simmons' writing, it went down smooth and quick. It took pretty much two days to read, and we read slow....

We Have To Ask ...
Suggested questions for today's ESPN SportsNation chatters ... • 11 a.m. MLB with Jayson Stark: No offense, but you're the first person we've met who spells their first name like that who sucks at basketball. • 11:30. Author Buzz Bissinger: So who's a bigger prick: Stephen Glass or Billy Bob Thornto...