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Joey Votto's New Contract Is Like A Mortgage-Backed Security
Reds first baseman Joey Votto officially signed a big contract extension today. A big, honking deal: 10 years, $225 million, on top of the two years and $26 million the Reds already promised him for 2012 and 2013. There's an option year for 2024....

Shitting While Skydiving: A Physics Experiment
I apologize for not posting yesterday's Funbag on time. Due to various circumstances, you only get a half Funbag today, and I may have to work a limited schedule this month. But fear not: Everything will be back to normal soon. If by normal, you mean talking about hypothetical superpowers and poopin...

Better Know An Umpire: Jerry Meals
Welcome to Better Know An Umpire, an effort to educate ourselves on the human elements who have ultimate decision-making power over some 2,500 Major League Baseball games a year. ...

Why Did We Ever Like These Movies? <i>American Reunion</i>, Reviewed.
When you think of the big franchises of the last 10-15 years, you've got your Lord of the Rings and The Matrix and Harry Potter. But in its own special category has to be American Pie. For a four-year run starting in the late '90s, Jim and Stifler and the rest of their Michigan crew were Hollywood's...

Better Know An Umpire: Bob Davidson
Welcome to Better Know An Umpire, an effort to educate ourselves on the human elements who have ultimate decision-making power over some 2,500 Major League Baseball games a year. ...

What The Astrodome Looks Like After Sitting Untouched And Rotting For A Decade
The Eighth Wonder of the World hasn't been used since the rodeo moved next door to Reliant Stadium in 2003. There are fanciful plans for the Astrodome, still preserved in time and set up for a football game of a team that doesn't exist—luxury hotel, movie studio, etc. But for now it's still just a s...

Better Know An Umpire: Tim Tschida
Welcome to Better Know An Umpire, an effort to educate ourselves on the human elements who have ultimate decision-making power over some 2,500 Major League Baseball games a year....

Better Know An Umpire: Phil Cuzzi
Welcome to Better Know An Umpire, an effort to educate ourselves on the human elements who have ultimate decision-making power over some 2,500 Major League Baseball games a year....

<em>Titanic</em>: The Original <em>Twilight</em>
On April 10, 1998, my sister came to visit me in Los Angeles. That was her 18th birthday, and while she was ostensibly heading to Los Angeles to visit her older brother, the real reason she made the trip was to assert her newfound independence: She was gonna get a tattoo....

Better Know An Umpire: Dale Scott
Welcome to Better Know An Umpire, an effort to educate ourselves on the human elements who have ultimate decision-making power over some 2,500 Major League Baseball games a year....

Here's What Kentucky's Championship Celebration Sounded Like Over The Lexington Police Scanner
If you weren't tuned in to the Lexington Police Department's radio scanner last night, you missed out on a wild world of sports celebrations that ranged from the violent to the perverse. (The #LexingtonPoliceScanner Twitter hashtag alone was trending worldwide, at one point.) We recorded the whole ...

30 Paragraphs About 30 MLB Teams From The Baseball Prospectus Crew
The following is excerpted from the team chapters and player profiles of the perpetually splendid Baseball Prospectus. You can buy the book now. Projected records via BP's playoff odds report. ...

Commence The Kentucky Fans Shouting Profanities On Live Television
Here's a shot from a few minutes ago on WKYT in Lexington of an ill-advised live shot from the middle of a gathering of Kentucky fans at the corner of Woodland and Euclid, near the UK campus. The horrified reactions of the "hosts" broadcasting from what appears to be an RV in New Orleans makes th...

How A Career Ends: Jeff Sheppard, Kentucky's Great Dunking Guard, Quit Because Of 9/11
Tell Me When It's Over is an interview series in which we ask former athletes about the moment they knew their playing days were over. Today: Jeff Sheppard, two-time national champion and one of the best dunkers in Kentucky history. ...

Bristolmetrics: Tiger Woods Rules The <em>SportsCenter</em> Leaderboard
This is a regular feature breaking down, minute-by-minute, the content that appears on ESPN's 11 p.m. edition of SportsCenter throughout the week. Graphic by Jim Cooke....

How A Career Ends: George Lynch Was Finished Off By Sore Feet
Tell Me When It's Over is an interview series in which we ask former athletes about the moment they knew their playing days were over. Today: George Lynch, all-purpose star for the University of North Carolina....

John Calipari, The First Honest Pimp
John Calipari is a smarmy greaseball with a habit of making enemies and racking up NCAA violations, and sometimes I think he's the only man who really understands college basketball. ...

What Is The Grantland Book Good For? A Deadspin Investigation
The second issue of the McSweeney's Grantland Quarterly is out now. For those of you unfamiliar with the title, the quarterly is a $25 anthology of Grantland.com stories you could read online for free. Why take a collection of internet posts and re-publish them on heavy paper stock set between two...

Fishing Writer Submits April Fools' Column Without Telling His Editor, Paper Runs It As Fact
April Fools' Day is a day when internet users need to be especially vigilant. For every creative and well-conceived joke, like Google's 8-bit maps or AdBlock's CatBlock, there are 10 dumb "pranks" that consist of nothing more than "making shit up" and calling it an April Fool's Day joke. They're not...

Here Is The Much-Ballyhooed Ubaldo Jimenez Plunking Of Troy Tulowitzki
Earlier this afternoon, tensions ran high between the Cleveland Indians and the Colorado Rockies when Ubaldo Jimenez drilled his former teammate, Troy Tulowitzki. Tulo immediately dropped his bat and made toward the mound and Jimenez decided to meet him halfway. Benches cleared and not much else h...