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Jose Ramirez Utterly Baffled By Utility Man Brandon Dixon's 10th Straight Curveball
This is wonderful. Reds utility man Brandon Dixon made his first career pitching appearance Monday night, in the ninth inning of an eventual 10-3 loss to the Indians. His pitching line was great: Dixon threw 10 total pitches; no one of them was harder than 74 miles per hour; the slowest came in unde...

Max Scherzer, Still An Intense Weirdo
Lost in the thrill of rookie David Bote’s spectacular walk-off grand slam was the best pitching duel of perhaps the entire season. New Cubs acquisition Cole Hamels threw seven innings of one-hit, one-run ball, and Max Scherzer, favorite for a third straight Cy Young, did him one better with three h...

Luke Heimlich Signs With Taiwanese Baseball Team, League Kicks Him Out
On Monday, the defending champion Lamigo Monkeys of the Chinese Professional Baseball League announced that they had signed former Oregon State pitcher Luke Heimlich, who pleaded guilty to molesting his 6-year-old niece in 2012. Heimlich was probably a first-round talent, but he was not drafted by a...

Giancarlo Stanton Set A Record For The Hardest-Hit Home Run
Exit velocity has become the bugbear of baseball’s anti–“super nerds” crowd. For them, the relatively recent ability to measure how hard a ball comes off a bat is a symbol of everything wrong with modern baseball analysis: a quantification of something that doesn’t need to be quantified; a number th...

The End Of Felix Hernandez
Felix Hernandez, once and not too long ago among the AL’s most feared and fearsome fireballers, is near the end of the line. It’s been a steady decline too, not a cliff, which makes it feel less like an aberration and more the irreversible march of time. His injury-plagued 2017 was his worst statist...

Yeah, That's A Goddamn Moth In An Umpire's Ear
Gahhhhh. This is an awful thing that should never happen—with any living creature, not just a dusty flying bug—but Yankees-White Sox umpire Bruce Dreckman was remarkably calm when a small, moth-like animal (most likely a moth) flew into his ear between innings....

Courtney Smith's Protective Order Detailed How She Told The Court Zach Smith Terrorized Her<em></em><em></em>
On July 20 of this year, Courtney Smith asked the court in Delaware County, Ohio, for a domestic violence civil protection order against her ex-husband, then-Ohio State assistant football coach Zach Smith. She already had made statements concerning his abuse in her 2015 petition for a divorce; that...

Félix Hernández Can't Contain His Laughter After Ugly Adrián Beltré Strikeout
King Félix has some of the nastier stuff in baseball. Tuesday night he K’d up his old nemesis Adrián Beltré on a wicked 78-mph breaking pitch, drawing a hilarious truncated swing out of Beltré, followed by a look of pure bafflement. It was more than Hernández could handle:...

Soccer On American TV Is Going Straight To A Fiery, Paywalled Hell
Back in the golden age of soccer TV in the U.S.—think back, if you were lucky enough to be there for them, to those naive, innocent, halcyon days of 2016—America was the best place on earth to be a couch-dwelling soccer fan. In those heady times, stateside followers of the beautiful game could gorge...

Kellen Winslow Jr. Charged With Raping Unconscious Teenager
Former NFL player Kellen Winslow Jr., currently charged with multiple counts of forcible rape and kidnapping, got the feature treatment recently from USA Today and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Buried in those stories were some important updates on the criminal case filed against Winslow—he’s now cha...

Dear Texas, Get Your Shit Together, Signed, Nobody
Welcome to the Deadspin 25, a college football poll that strives to be more democratic and less useless than every other preseason poll. Leading up to the college football season kickoff, we will give you previews of the 25 teams that you, the readers, voted to be most worthy of writing about. Now, ...

Infielder Matt Davidson Struck Out Giancarlo Stanton, Still Hasn't Allowed A Run This Year
Lance Lynn was excellent in his first Yankees start, throwing seven and a third scoreless innings and leading New York to a 7-0 win over the White Sox to break a five-game losing streak. But I don’t care. Lynn allowed two hits, and that’s just not good enough. Not when we’ve got Chicago’s Matt David...

Bird's Dong Ripped Out Of The Sky
The Yankees are looking to get healthy against the woeful White Sox Monday night, following a decisive four-game sweep at the hands of the Red Sox that all but ended the race for the AL East. Mostly they’re having their way, but the highlight of the game came in the top of the fourth inning, when Ya...

The Red Sox Have Won The AL East
The race is over. After a four-game sweep of the Yankees, capped off by a comeback against Aroldis Chapman and the vaunted Yankees bullpen, the Red Sox now have a 9.5-game lead, the largest division lead in baseball. They are 79-34, and on pace for 113 wins, which would be the best record in franchi...

Let’s Remember Some Guys: Early '90s WCW With Nick Aldis
Nick Aldis is now the NWA world’s champion. Not just that, he’s a fighting champion: He defended his title 20 times recently. Sure, wrestling is scripted, but that still means Aldis has wrestled near the top of the card at 20 shows this year. Aldis is part of a wrestling family in the spotlight: His...

Art Briles Got A New Job Coaching Football In Italy
Disgraced former Baylor head coach Art Briles has a new job. After a botched stint in the CFL and a pair of aborted college consulting gigs, Briles has accepted the head coaching job with Florence’s Italian Football League team, Guelfi Firenze....

Why Your Team Sucks 2018: Houston Texans<em></em>
Some people are fans of the Houston Texans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Houston Texans. This 2018 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here....

If You Think Urban Meyer's Career Is Over, You Underestimate The Power Of Winning<em></em>
Would it be too much to say that winning feels like great sex? The rush of adrenaline, the euphoria, the permission to scream and yell and do whatever you want in the dark of night. The sense that you are invincible and, better yet, unique and special. The scientific term for feeling as if your team...

Two Ex-Ohio State Wrestlers Say Coach Asked Them To Backtrack On Jim Jordan Accusations
NBC News reported tonight that former Ohio State wrestling coach Russ Hellickson sent text messages to two former wrestlers—who both have said they believe Rep. Jim Jordan knew about the sexual abuse done to them by their team doctor—asking the men to take back their stories and start defending Jord...

SB Nation Is Paying Workers As Little As $3 Per Blog Post
What’s a fair amount for a billion-dollar company to pay a writer for reporting, writing, and publishing one post per day on the company’s website? Two posts per day? One post per week? Two posts per week? These are the questions Vox Media and SB Nation are batting back and forth as they grind their...