year-in-review Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Ugh. Colin Cowherd Is (Statistically) The Best Pundit Of 2012.
Republished with permission from PunditTracker.com....

The 15 Best Peter Gammons Tweets Of 2012
Longtime baseball analyst Peter Gammons also shares his insight and knowledge via his Twitter account. Even when the season is over, Gammons will offer up his aperçus about baseball and life in general. Here are his best tweets from 2012....

The 10 Best Sports Infographics Of 2012
For those who don't really enjoy scrolling through Baseball Reference spreadsheets, there are some great artists and analysts out there constantly developing new ways to elegantly present the data of sports. Below are the 10 best sports infographics/data visualizations from 2012, in approximate orde...

What Were Your Favorite Sports Stories From This Year?
The year in sportswriting is almost over, which means that it is time to start making all kinds of "best of" lists. All the cool kids are doing it. We'd like to make a list too, and we'd like your help compiling it. Were there any pieces of sportswriting that you came across this year that you foun...

The Year In JaVale McGee, Our Favorite Basketball Player
No NBA player is closer to Deadspin's heart than JaVale McGee. That's because JaVale McGee only makes spectacular plays—the plays that no one else in the NBA could or would make, because they're cowards. To commemorate the man with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, here's the best of McG...

The Year In Gronk
Rob Gronkowski is what would happen if Dr. Frankenstein created a monster, but instead of blood, the doctor filled his veins with Keystone Light. Here are some of the best Gronk stories from this past year....

This Guy Died This Year: The Man Who Hated Us
2011 was a bad year for assholes. It was the year we were finally rid of this demented and twisted man who hated everything at the very core of what it means to be an American, a human. This man who spit hateful words toward those unlike himself, whether it be based on race, religion or sexual ori...

This Guy Died This Year: Nate Dogg, The King Of G-Funk
Nathaniel "Nate Dogg" Hale always sounded smooth. His voice gave him a niche within G-funk's very stylized confines for the most quintessential G-funk crooner of them all—not that there were many, because who else did we really need?—and he held that title for as long as it even existed....

This Guy Died This Year: Peter Falk
Depending on your age, Peter Falk is that guy from Columbo, that guy from Princess Bride, or that guy from that show your dad used to watch (which was Columbo). But all three of these suppose Falk to be an actor. In reality, acting was the career he landed in after failing as an academic and rese...

This Guy Died This Year: Clarence Clemons, Big Sideman
When Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, died this year at 69 after a stroke, a lot of the remembrances, including Hickey's in this very webspace, cued up his solo in "Jungleland." "Jungleland" is a great song, one of Bruce's best, filled with lyrical drama and e...

The Highlights (And Assorted Lowlights) Of 2011, In Under Three Minutes
A collection of highlights and occasional lowlights from 2011, a year of triple plays, juggling catches, buzzer beaters, record-setting performances, Abby Wambach, "We will see you tomorrow night," fathers dropping daughters to catch foul balls, and old men punching each other silly. Enjoy...

This Guy Died This Year: George Shearing, Music's Original Hipster Taste
Jack Kerouac was into George Shearing before it was cool to be into George Shearing (or into Jack Kerouac, for that matter). Kerouac wrote a great deal about the near-orgasmic experience of listening to jazz, and one of his more notable passages on the subject appears in On the Road. It's drawn fr...

2011: The Year We Became The United States Of Trolling
Well, that about wraps up yet another shitty year of the new millennium. I don't know about you, but I personally can't wait to see what future shitty years have in store: rising water prices, a sharp growth in armed RoHoWa militias, a new Pitbull album ... everything shitty is on the table, people....

The Faces Of 2011: A Gallery Of Derp Portraiture
Roger Goodell Is Going To Be A Big Baby About This Lockout Until The Very End...

<em>SportsCenter</em>'s Lowlight Countdown Is Always Fun
ESPN aired its annual countdown of the year's worst plays, including a few you've probably forgotten about. It's a rare list where No. 1 actually deserves the honor....

The Year In Animals Running Onto The Field, Adorably: A Video
Humans weren't the only creatures invading our sporting events this year. There was the squirrel that interrupted an NLDS game, the fluffy owl who is sadly no longer with us, and a strangely high quantity of dogs running around soccer pitches. Here are some of our favorite animal trespassers from ...

The Year In Fans Running Onto The Field: A Video
Is there anything more life-affirming than watching a fan—likely drunk, possibly naked, probably a moron—jump a barrier and dash onto a field in the middle of a sporting event? The responsible authoritarians who run the TV networks won't show you these occasional bursts of the anarchic spirit, but...

This Guy Died This Year: Shrek, The Unshearable Sheep
There is only meaning in life if there is revelation in death. Billions of generations have come and gone, and most are meaningless for the purposes of the living if we can't take some sort of lesson from their brief time on earth. It's why we scour the obituaries and mourn the famous and infamous a...

This Guy Died This Year: Bil Keane, Comics Paterfamilias
Bil Keane was known, among his fellow professional cartoonists, as a funny, funny man. His life's work, in The Family Circus, was to hide that fact from as many people as possible. Day after day, decade after decade, The Family Circus delivered the mildest gags imaginable—observational humor minus t...

The 11 Worst Grantland Long Reads Of 2011
11. Wesley Morris, "On Brady's Hair"...