Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

New Nationals manager Dave Martinez moved Bryce Harper to the leadoff spot on May 1, with the Nationals sitting at a disappointing 13-16 on the season and mired in an offensive slump that saw the team produce more than four runs in a game just once over its previous nine games.

If you can’t be bothered to schlep to the gym during the winter, you can still keep in shape at home with this cleverly designed PowerBlock dumbbell set. Each dumbbell adjusts from 3 to 24 pounds in 3-pound increments with just the flick of a selector pin, so it’s basically like a complete weight rack that could…Read more...

Meet Peoria sportscaster Jim Mattson, whose segment on WEEK tonight was perspirative and gonadic. His broadcast partners were... surprised?Read more...

Read more...

Baseball is difficult and contingent and deeply cruel under the best of circumstances, and playing baseball for the New York Mets is not the best of circumstances. It is a big-league job and pays commensurately, and when things are going well it comes with a gaudy suite of perks and sweeteners, but there are ways in…Read more...

Last fall, Peter King and Sports Illustrated editor-in-chief Chris Stone insisted that The MMQB, the football vertical the magazine created for King five years ago, was built to survive even if King were to ever leave. Now, with King headed to NBC, we get to see how that might work.Read more...

Staff writer and heinous Duke fan Emma Baccellieri has been minding the night shift around here for about two years now. We’re sad to report that this is her last day at Deadspin, and that she will be leaving us to go work at Sports Illustrated, a once-prestigious publication that now functions as a retirement home…Read more...

There is no worse fate that can befall a Tweeter than the dreaded ratio—when a tweet receives more responses than likes. Though elite pundits scoff at the wisdom of the crowd, the ratio is accepted by Twitter pros as an indicator of a tweet’s quality. If the number of people who felt the need to weigh in on your tweet…Read more...

Former ESPN employee Britt McHenry got spicy on the internet last night while talking about her work history. McHenry said the Worldwide Leader demoted her because she was white.Read more...

If you write about music online even once, something cool and unexpected happens: a handful of artists just like the one you originally covered will send you their music in the hope that you’ll write about that, too. Sometimes that doesn’t work and they’ll pursue other methods, like following you on Twitter, liking a…Read more...

Many—most?—Orioles games feel vaguely pointless right now. The end result is usually clear before the game is underway, and while there’s plenty of different ways for the team to reach that result, those differ only in substance rather than sentiment. It’s all going to be pretty depressing. This was especially true in…Read more...

Toronto Blue Jays prospect Vlad Guerrero Jr. smacked a massive tater Thursday night that sailed clear out of the stadium in Double-A Binghamton. We’ve seen Vladito hit some major dongs already in his still very young career, but the audio on this particular big fly gives it a little something extra.Read more...

The dubious politics of WWE’s Greatest Royal Rumble card in Saudi Arabia have taken center stage in the sport over the last week, but there were still some bright spots on the card itself. One of those was 2018's second WWE guest appearance from Rey Mysterio, this one coming in the titular 50-man Royal Rumble match;…Read more...

Sports genius Donald Trump has done the inevitable, again. This time, the big lad has put his close personal friend Bill Belichick on an official Presidential council. Shockingly, Belichick will not be in charge of any nuclear weaponry or an actual department of significance, which honestly would have made as much…Read more...

Dominique Moceanu was nervous as she sat in the green room before being interviewed on HBO’s Real Sports in 2008. It was not nearly the biggest stage she’d faced, but the challenge in front of her was a new one. The 1996 Olympic gold medalist and 1995 national champion was about to talk about her experiences as an…Read more...

In every playoff series, LeBron James is going to have a handful of games where he’s utterly unstoppable and goes for some ridiculous stat line like 45-12-14 just because he can and because his team needs him to be everywhere all the time. The Cavs found out how far LeBron alone can take them in the first round, when…Read more...

Welcome back to Dead Letters, the feature in which we reprint our favorite reader mail. We should take this moment to remind you that all emails to Deadspin and its editors and writers are on the record unless otherwise specified. Now for your letters.Read more...

On Wednesday, Carolina Panthers defensive backs coach Curtis Fuller suddenly and surprisingly resigned from his position. No reasons for the resignation were given at the time, and head coach Ron Rivera only said, “it’s a complicated situation,” when directly asked about Fuller’s departure. Today, the team has…Read more...

Among the crowd that watched Persepolis top Sepidrood Rasht, 3-0, in Tehran last week was a group of six female fans who disguised themselves as men in order to get into Azadi Stadium.Read more...

It took Yangervis Solarte about eight hours at the ballpark on Thursday to notch eight hits during the Blue Jays’ doubleheader against the Cleveland Indians. That’s a lot of hits, and the performance is even more impressive when you consider that, before he got in too much of a rhythm, Solarte violently flailed his…Read more...

Well, that settles that.Read more...

In the most basic sense, there’s the 22-point comeback. There’s also the complete disassembling of Ben Simmons and Terry Rozier’s fearlessness and Al Horford’s craft and a whole host of other things that explain how a Boston Celtics team missing both its two best players and a full-strength Jaylen Brown have taken a…Read more...

Celebrate May the 4th with Star Wars deals, water-resistant Bluetooth speakers, discounted Herschel Supply Co duffel bags, and more of the best deals in the galaxy.

Our beloved colleague Dave McKenna tells good stories. He’s done a lot of cool shit, met many weird people in weird ways, and had his run-ins with the law. And after selfishly squirreling all his stories away in Slack and our brains for years, we’ve realized we have a societal obligation to share.Read more...

io9 Chris Pratt May Have Let Slip Some Avengers 4 News With a Guardians Vol. 3 Update | Kotaku I Hate How Much I Want A PlayStation 4 Pro | Jalopnik Why Did Batman Lie About The Transmission In The Tumbler? | Lifehacker Why You Should Consider Seat Size When Booking a Flight |Read more...

In the highest leverage game of their playoffs so far—don’t you hate the term “must-win” in non-elimination games?—Predators goalie Pekka Rinne turned in his best performance of the postseason yet, anchoring Nashville as they beat Winnipeg 2-1 on the road in Game 4 to tie their second-round series at two games apiece.Read more...

The Celtics were probably going to win Game 2 no matter what happened in the last 30 seconds. They’d already come back from a 22-point deficit and were ahead by three with half a minute to play. But the Sixers did something to lessen their already-small chances of winning late last night: They didn’t foul.Read more...

Here’s a stat—a quirk?—that has very little to do with anything else in this blog but is too amazing not to lead with: In this series, Sidney Crosby has been on the ice for all 10 of Pittsburgh’s goals.

The iconic Herschel Supply Co. Novel duffel bag packs an impressive 4+ star rating from almost 800 customer reviews. And with its has a waterproof zipper, shoe pocket, and removable strap pad, it would be perfect for a quick weekend trip.

With a little more than five minutes remaining in the first half tonight, Robert Covington drained a three, stretching the 76ers’ lead over the Celtics to 21 points. Philadelphia was in control here, with no signs of loosening their grip. And then they sent all of that to hell. Over the next quarter and a half, they…Read more...

Oh dear. The Herefords and the Darbys are brawling again. Do ask the butler to close the shutters, will you?Read more...

The No. 1 seed Raptors, again, built a first-half lead tonight only to squander it, losing 128-110 to fall behind 2-0 in their second-round series against the Cavaliers. And while it may be tempting to file this one away as yet another classically Raptorsian playoff performance, there’s only so much—which is to say:…Read more...

Missouri’s Cade Bormet tumbled into an unpadded brick wall during the Tigers’ home game against Georgia tonight while trying to field a foul ball, causing the freshman outfielder to be removed from the field on a stretcher by emergency personnel.Read more...

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Stick around.Read more...

Drake spent time during the Raptors’ spectacular Game 1 choke getting into it with Kendrick Perkins, a man much larger than him, and at one point even called him a “fucking pussy” while the two were surrounded by approximately 500 security guards. It was one of those fake NBA fights where both guys talk over each…Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.

At the 2012 Olympics in London, Kayla Harrison became the first American to win a gold medal in judo. Four years later, she defended her title at the Rio Games. That’s the last time she competed in judo. Since then, Harrison has been training for a shift to MMA and working on a book about child sexual abuse, based on…Read more...

Originally published as “How to be Jamie Lee Curtis” in the July 15, 1985 issue of US magazine, this profile appears her with the author’s permission.

TMZ has obtained photos and additional details from the night when Johnny Manziel was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault after his ex-girlfriend Colleen Crowley says he hit her several times in Jan. 2016. Manziel’s case was dismissed in Nov. 2016 after he agreed to attend counseling and stay away from…Read more...

After 29 years at Sports Illustrated, Peter King is leaving to join NBC.Read more...

In a universe that is similar to but not quite the same as this one, a new and very strange Deadcast would appear in this space. Drew would probably be more or less the same as usual, but as I had just gotten off an overnight flight on Wednesday morning, it’s a virtual certainty that I would have been a psychedelic…Read more...

On an auspicious day for names, the Western Hockey League held its draft for 14- and 15-year-old players. As in past years, the draft board is a revealing look at what parents west of Ontario and west of the Mississippi are naming their kids.

Since suffering a season-ending ACL tear, Kristaps Porzingis has done everything a Knicks fan could have hoped for. The 22-year-old is busying himself with two or three therapy sessions a day, strengthening his core and upper body, and sharpening his mind. “Reading bores me, I don’t like reading,” he said in a recent…Read more...

Bill Cosby held a big party at Temple in December 2004.Read more...

Last night, the Phoenix Suns announced that lead Jazz assistant Igor Kokoškov will take over as the team’s head coach next season. Kokoškov inherits a team full of young whippersnappers who logged the NBA’s worst record last season, and he has the tricky job of turning unrefined talent into NBA production. Kokoškov,…Read more...

Find a kid with a tablet or computer these days, and chances are they’re watching or playing Fortnite. The online video game in which players build stairs and walls and then shoot each other has spread like a virus, and it’s derailed at least one boys lacrosse team, to the point where the coach sent out a desperate…Read more...

Ichiro, the true hit king, has played his final major-league game—probably.

Former Michigan defensive tackle Maurice Hurst, initially projected as a first- or second-round talent in this year’s NFL draft, ended up falling to the final day last week, when the Raiders picked him up in the fifth round. Hurst’s drop came after he was diagnosed with a previously undisclosed heart condition at the…Read more...

Asbel Kiprop, the best miler of the last decade, a three-time 1,500-meter world champion, and an Olympic gold medalist, reportedly tested positive for the blood-boosting drug EPO. Matt Lawton of the Daily Mail broke the story yesterday; several other outlets independently confirmed the report; and Kiprop released a…Read more...

The early part of the MLB season has seen strikeout and home run rates continue to rise, and the game is trending towards one that is positively overstuffed with Ks and dingers. A decent theory of why this is happening isn’t too hard to tease out: Batters are consciously taking big swings, which are more likely to…Read more...