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Women's World Cup 2023: The USWNT isn't a championship squad
Portugal’s headed home looking happy. The flight back to Lisbon should be filled with post-elimination joy and realizations of long-term progress knowing how they held the former undisputed world champions in check. And that’s all you need to know about how the United States women’s national team pe...

Rangers, Astros, and Angels, oh my!
At 40-20, the Texas Rangers looked to be a lock for the postseason. The Dallas-area MLB team always appears to have a loaded farm system, and those moves looking toward the future paid off at the same time the big-money signings stayed healthy. In addition to all that, pitching whisperer Bruce Bochy...

World Cup Day 12: Speed kills, and so does a lack of it
We had our clash of teams that have looked most dominant so far, and we can pare that list down to “one team that’s looked dominant so far.” And in something of a surprise, Canada got their leaden asses booted back to the Great White North. Let’s get in. ...

The Rangers better know what they’re getting with Max Scherzer; and ESPN cleared out their staff for this putz?
The Rangers haven’t spent all this time operating like tomorrow is coming, so there’s no reason to stop now. Two winters ago it was Corey Seager and Marcus Semien, which went well. Last winter it was Jacob deGrom, which…well, not so much. You keep letting it ride, sometimes you lose. But that doesn’...

World Cup Diary Day 11: Give them an inch…
We’ve gotten to the business end of the Group Stage, with Group A finishing up their schedule and sending a host home before the knockouts for the first time. But that was overshadowed by possibly the biggest upset of the tournament so far that blows up the draw a bit. Let’s run it through....

Crawford-Spence was an all-timer — just not in the way fans expected
The only ruling necessary after Terence Crawford’s TKO of Errol Spence Jr. was whether Saturday’s fight at the T Mobile Center in Las Vegas met the hype. It was one-sided throughout, as Crawford (40-0, 31 KOs) put Spence (28-1, 22 KOS) on the canvas in the second round for the first time in Spence’s...

OK, now imagine if the Mets had signed Carlos Correa
It feels like just yesterday that the New York Mets had orchestrated a coup, signing Carlos Correa, and putting the other 29 clubs on notice that there’s a new titan of spending in the Northeastern Corridor. Then Correa failed his physical, the deal went belly up, the season started, and the Mets re...

Where did the American heavyweight boxing champions go?
Errol Spence and Terence Crawford’s highly-anticipated welterweight Fight of the Year doubles as a ring showdown for the pound-for-pound crown that boxing aficionados have been counting down to for years....

NBA needs to up the ante with its international game slate
What happens when a seventh seed and a 13th seed meet on a basketball court in a country that doesn’t have an NBA franchise? Who knows, but we’re going to find out....

St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster Chip Caray is a big dumb wanker
The St. Louis Cardinals may suck ass, but they’re also petulant pissbabies too, clinging to their binky of outdated and archaic baseball theory that they can’t even apply correctly:...

World Cup Day 8: The Aussies step in it
This tournament started with how every organizer wishes it would, with both hosts getting wins to up the energy and buzz around the whole thing. World Cups and big tournaments are just better when the hosts are relevant and getting the home fans excited. But now both Australia and New Zealand are up...

The USWNT gets out of medium security jail
The pregame chatter mostly centered around Netherlands manager Andries Jonker’s quotes in the Matchday -1 press conference. It certainly had USWNT followers getting a little tight in the seat. In full:...

Tracy McGrady seems perplexed by James Harden trade request
Over the past 20 years, the marker that separates great from all-time great in the NBA has become more about how many rings an elite player wins than almost anything else. You see it in other sports like football, but the ring conversation is always most prominent with fans, media, and even players ...

World Cup Day 7: It’s easy when you’re big in Japan…and Spain we suppose
After Group A decided to keep everyone alive with some truly weird (and awful) soccer on Monday night, it was time to send some teams to the land of wind and ghosts on Tuesday, as Costa Rica, Zambia, and Ireland will make it home before the postcards. Let’s make it happen, captain!...

No one does the absurd quite like the Red Sox
The challenge of baseball, and the beauty of it, is the length and density of it. It’s pretty much every day for six months, and every team and every player has to do whatever is necessary to even remember what day it is at this time of year and beyond. Over 162 games in 180 days or so, anybody can ...

Patrice Bergeron was your favorite player’s favorite player
When Felix Hernandez won the Cy Young in 2010 while his record was only 13-12, it was seen as something of a first strike for the new way of analyzing baseball. There was no question that Hernandez was the best pitcher in the AL that year, he had a 7-WAR season for fuck’s sake, but the fact that for...

Is Saquon Barkley stuck in a time loop, or just us?
On the surface, Saquon Barkley’s new contract with the New York Giants feels a lot like the franchise tag. It’s a one-year deal worth roughly the amount of same money — $10.1 million fully guaranteed vs. $10.091 million via the franchise tag — but with about a million in incentives. The main distinc...

Last year Deshaun Watson apologized, this year he's playing the victim
Deshaun Watson is great at reading defenses — he’s completed 67 percent of his passes and thrown for over 100 touchdowns and 15,000-plus yards in his career. But, what Deshaun Watson is not great at, is reading the room. He has a history of it....
