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Mike Minor struck out the side in the ninth to earn his Kansas City team a 4-3 win over Cleveland tonight, sparking North Coast fans to celebrate their team like only that region’s culture of failure can. The loss brought Cleveland’s somehow controversial win streak to an end at 22 games.Read more...

Here’s a dipshit invading the field in Houston tonight, as is the Idiot’s way. He dodges a few tackles but finds his path blocked by the very low right field wall; it’s still too tall for his limited leaping ability (though it looks like that might be an usher playing defense on him).Read more...

The Champions Basketball League, an independent pro league that has repeatedly failed to start its inaugural season after taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment from regular fans, sued Ice Cube’s Big3 league for $250 million earlier this month. Today, the Big3 filed a counter defamation suit against the…Read more...

Gizmodo Chrome Will Soon Block Autoplay Videos With Sound—Here’s Why You Should Be Worried | Truck Yeah A Brilliant Ford Dealer Just Brought The F-150 Lightning Back | Kotaku Smash Players Thought They Were Friends With A Reclusive ‘God’ Developer, But Now Suspect She Duped Them | The A.V. Club Okay, maybe things…Read more...

ESPN spent this week caving to the most cynically motivated people on the fringes of sports media and their manufactured outrage at SportsCenter anchor Jemele Hill’s accurate comments about the president. Thus the network finds itself in the midst of a culture war that’s activated every reactionary attack dog out…Read more...

NASCAR looks, feels and acts a lot differently this year. The cars, drivers and the tracks are mostly the same, but NASCAR went all “sports ball” on our beloved American motorsport. Now, the sport’s about to start its first-ever “NASCAR playoffs.” Those playoffs come with a new set of rules.Read more...

It’s Friday and we are all working really hard at our jobs and doing our best, but also we’ll be hanging out down here for a while to answer your questions and probably yell about board games with you.Read more...

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, No. 9 UConn.Read more...

Here’s what the president was thinking about this morning:

She was reclaiming her life. That’s what the parents of Meredith Lane—one of eight people gunned down by Lane’s ex-husband at an NFL watch party she hosted last weekend—have told local reporters back in Texas in the days following the mass shooting. The gathering was to watch the Atlanta Falcons game, followed by the…Read more...

Tennys Sandgren, the Pizzagater with a cute name, let loose on an ump during Thursday’s 6-3, 2-6, 6-2 loss to Cameron Norrie at the Cary Challenger, after what appeared to be a baseless accusation of illegal coaching. (Players are not allowed to get feedback from coaches mid-match.)Read more...

Now that summer is fading into fall and there’s less time to be outside in the sunshine enjoying the best type of games, lawn games, people are starting to think about hunkering down for the long, cold, worst months ahead, pondering alternative, indoor diversions like board games. Here is a ranking of the best ones: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.

Last month, P.V. Sindhu and Nozomi Okuhara met in the final of the Badminton World Championships in Glasgow, and Okuhara eventually won out in what many hailed as one of the greatest women’s badminton games in the history of the sport. It lasted 110 minutes, the longest of the entire tournament, and all three sets…Read more...

Boxers will usually preen and maybe even scuffle with each other at weigh-ins to scare up interest for their match, but when has a fighter’s small child ever punched his rival in the penis?Read more...

If you use the internet with any regularity, or, bless your soul, use it for a living, you’re familiar with the initial stages of this disease. Open browser of your choice and pop open a tab. Navigate to some good Content. Click hyperlink from there and watch as new tab opens. Hit an unfamiliar reference in that page…Read more...

Adrian Wojnarowski has another scoop related to an upcoming NBA board of governors meeting, during which potential rule changes will be voted on, and this one makes the league look pretty stupid:

As the medieval world gave way to the early modern around 1500, European warfare was utterly transformed. Mounted knights and castles gave way to cannon, firearms, and enormously complex fortifications. The scale of war grew as well. Armies that had contained thousands of soldiers in the 15th century turned into tens…Read more...

Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez may be the world’s most popular boxer, and yet he has a problem: He lacks credibility among the sport’s largest fan bases, Mexicans and, increasingly, Mexican-Americans. Questions about Álvarez’s boxing skill extend beyond these two groups, but since he is Mexican, attempting to understand why he…Read more...

Fans in Houston watching last night’s Texans-Bengals game on KPRC missed its wacky final play—one punctuated by local hero J.J. Watt demolishing a poor offensive lineman—because the NBC station cut off the end of the broadcast in a rush to report the game’s not-yet-final score.Read more...

“All the stuff I’ve done in my career,” Don Ohlmeyer once told an ESPN interviewer, “and that’s what I’m going to be remembered for. It serves me right.”

All along it’s been clear that NHL players wouldn’t take part in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and all along, Alexander Ovechkin insisted that he’d play for Russia, no matter what the NHL said. But in a statement released by the Capitals today, Ovechkin admitted that it just won’t be possible.

io9 Our First Look at a Fiery New Foe From Thor: Ragnarok | Jalopnik Check Out This Dealership’s Insane ‘Reconditioning Fee’ On A Used Volkswagen Golf R | Steamed 15 Hours In, Divinity: Original Sin 2 Is Brilliant | The A.V. Club What pop culture did you eventually come around on? | Two Cents The Latest News on the…Read more...

ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski is reporting that a new NBA draft lottery system is one step closer to becoming a reality. According to Woj, the league’s competition committee has recommended a reform proposal that was created by the NBA, and the league’s board of governors will now vote on the proposal on Sept. 28.

With their 13-9 loss to the Texans last night, the Bengals have achieved some ignominious ineffectuality marks. They’re the first NFL team to play their first two games at home and fail to score a touchdown since 1939. This is also the first time Cincinnati has gone two straight games without finding the end zone…Read more...

I completely understand why American broadcasters generally won’t show fans who run onto the field in the middle of a game. You don’t want to reward them with attention (even though, based on nothing, I think most of them do it because they’re drunk and stupid, not because they want their friends watching at home to…Read more...

A spectacularly silly baserunning blunder is not necessarily the most Metsy way to get mathematically eliminated from postseason contention—it’s no “entire pitching staff mysteriously bursts into flames all at once” or anything—but it’s pretty damn close! And it’s how the Mets were eliminated tonight, falling to 63-83…Read more...

Tonight’s Thursday Night Football game between the Texans and Bengals was, with a few exceptions, your typical awful weeknight NFL action. The Aussie rules-style final play, and its equally down-under level game-ending tackle by J.J. Watt, though, deserved our closer attention.Read more...

Like they have in every game for more than three weeks now, Cleveland won tonight. With an extra-innings walk-off victory, they became the first team to win 22 consecutive games in more than a century.Read more...

New Mexico quarterback Lamar Jordan had to be helped off the field tonight against Boise State, after taking a horrific hit from defensive tackle Chase Hatada. Jordan was taken out of the game—stumbling off the field and struggling to walk on his own—and replaced by backup Coltin Gerhart. Meanwhile, a penalty was…Read more...

Mike Fiers had a really bad first inning yesterday against the Angels—five runs allowed, including a two-run shot from Luis Valbuena, who had the audacity to get a little excited and flip his bat. This did not please Fiers. He expressed this displeasure by throwing at Valbuena’s head. That backfired for Fiers…Read more...

After being told that he could not play on the Youngstown State football team this season, Ma’lik Richmond—who was found guilty of rape in juvenile court as a high schooler in the 2013 Steubenville, Ohio, case—is suing the university.Read more...

We haven’t heard from world-class shitbag Floyd Mayweather Jr. that much since he beat Conor McGregor in an extravagant fake boxing match and thank God, because he’s an evil moron. His latest extended interview with Hollywood Unlocked does a lot to cement that notion, and if you want to hear about what he “looks for…Read more...

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Miss you, Grant.Read more...

A Lions fan who recently posted a Snapchat video of two black fans who sat for the national anthem during the Lions’ home opener with the caption “ignorant niggers” has relinquished his season tickets, per the Detroit News.Read more...

Though ESPN anchor Jemele Hill received a lot of shit for her correct diagnosis of Donald Trump, she appeared on Wednesday’s SportsCenter with Michael Smith as usual. Later in the night, she and the network issued statements to give the notion that they were on good terms. But a new report suggests there was a huge…Read more...

io9 Has Everyone Forgotten What Star Trek Is Supposed to Be? | Kotaku How To Level Your Power Quickly In Destiny 2 | Foxtrot Alpha America’s Most Secret Spy Sub Returned To Base Flying A Pirate Flag | Lifehacker How to Organize Your Geeky Stuff and Make Your Home Feel More “Grown Up” | The A.V. Club Rick And Morty’s “Pickle…Read more...

The Los Angeles Times published a pretty tragic profile of LenDale White, catching up with everything that’s happened to the former USC star running back since he left college.Read more...

When Rachael Denhollander reached out to the Indianapolis Star last summer to tell them about the sexual abuse she said she endured at the hands of former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University physician Larry Nassar, she had modest expectations.

Christ, man. This almost feels like the moment where Arsenal’s continually escalating woes cease being hilarious and start being actively depressing. Almost, that is.

Now that true dumb fuck Sarah Sanders has chimed in on Jemele Hill on behalf of the White House and demanded her ouster, we are about to enter a new and insufferable acceleration of a “scandal” that involves one sportscaster daring to state the obvious. Already, Hill has tweeted out an apology that ESPN “accepted,”…Read more...

One of Ireland’s top racing greyhounds, Clonbrien Hero, has tested positive for benzoylecgonine, the main metabolite of cocaine, according to a review by the Irish Greyhound Board. The board has opted to withhold some prize money and titles from the dog, which recently won €30,000 after a first-place finish at the…Read more...

In the most predictable turn of events ever, those estimated 20,000 loud and rowdy Köln fans that traveled to London for today’s Europa League match against Arsenal have gone from being endearingly unruly to actively dangerous—so much so that the match has been delayed for security concerns.Read more...

Barely a month ago, it seemed that the Twins’ front office had given up on a playoff run this season. Pitcher Jaime Garcia, picked up in late July as the team was losing ground in the division race, was traded to the Yankees after making just one start. Closer Brandon Kintzler was also dealt to the Nationals right at…Read more...

This much is true: Rafael Nadal won the U.S. Open, and he’s playing exemplary tennis. In the present, soft field, the tennis is so good that it brought Nadal back to world No. 1 for the first time in four years, with two slams, two masters, and a 56-9 record. But all the hyperbole does make one wonder.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here. Buy his book here.

On July 29, Jon Jones completed his long redemption arc by knocking out Daniel Cormier with a vicious head kick in the third round, winning the UFC light heavyweight belt back in the process. On Sept. 13, Cormier was reinstated as champ after a second test confirmed that Jones had tested positive for a banned anabolic…Read more...

So there’s never going to be a Hüsker Dü reunion after all. Grant Hart is dead.

Alexi Lalas barred up the entire USMNT on TV this past weekend, which was great and deserved and frankly overdue. Lalas’s brief rant included clear shots at a number of national teamers, but his barbs aimed at Michael Bradley and Christian Pulisic were arguably the most pointed. Bradley and Pulisic have responded, and…Read more...