Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

The crack of the bat. The smell of glove leather. Enormous American flags. Cracker Jacks. An idiot on the field, sprinting half-clothed through Arizona’s outfield. Baseball is back!Read more...

I’m not sure exactly what Robin Lopez is saying in this little tirade here—there are clearly several fuck yous, maybe what looks like an instance of bullshit, and some other stuff, all accompanied by very emphatic finger-jabbing—but he was very clearly pissed:Read more...

As of this year, all 30 MLB teams now have protective netting that extends at least to the ends of the dugouts, a change made after a toddler suffered bleeding on the brain when struck by a line drive at Yankee Stadium last year. The netting has a pretty negligible impact on the viewing experience for most fans, and…Read more...

The Pirates got rained out today, but here’s some Pittsburgh hitting that’s better than anything you would have seen from the Buccos.Read more...

The Lightning and Bruins are currently previewing tonight what could be a very good playoff series next month, and going by this game, tempers will be hot if these teams meet again.Read more...

A report yesterday from the Lansing State Journal revealed that in January—the same month over 150 women gave victim-impact statements in Michigan courtrooms about Larry Nassar’s serial sexual abuse—the PR firm Weber Shandwick billed Michigan State, Nassar’s old employer, for more than $500,000. According to the…Read more...

A few days ago, the New York Times talked to Yankees broadcaster John Sterling about the home run call that he’d decided to use for Giancarlo Stanton this season:Read more...

Baseball has a lot of structure to it, so when a relatively mundane in-game move happens, like a third baseman backing up deep onto left field grass for an at-bat, it has a deeper psychological impact that it should. Today, Astros manager A.J. Hinch caught everyone’s attention and did a cool, smart thing by sending…Read more...

Gizmodo Simulation May Finally Explain Why Knuckle Cracking Makes That Awful Sound | Jalopnik Things Are Not Looking Good For Tesla Right Now | Kotaku Todd Howard Won’t Even Tell His Son Anything About The Elder Scrolls VI | Lifehacker How to Pair Your Bluetooth Speaker With Google Home |Read more...

The Sixers are on a long winning streak; Joel Embiid has been a star all season; Ben Simmons is playing great; and Markelle Fultz is back in the lineup after missing 68 games. Of course, this means something bad has to happen.

Darius Bazley, high school senior and top prospect for the 2019 NBA Draft, has retracted a commitment to Syracuse and intends to enter the D-League this fall, possibly carving a new path to the NBA, as Yahoo’s Shams Charania reports. This is cool and basically without precedent!

There is no unpleasantness quite like a bad landlord. All anyone really wants from an apartment is that it do what it is supposed to do—that the stove gets hot without bursting into flames, that the doors and windows stay closed when closed and open as required, that the pipes remain intact and that whatever species…Read more...

If you have any trips on the horizon, you can save 15% on your choice of hotel stay through the end of the year with promo code TravelocitySpring15.

It only took a few innings for today’s season opener between the Cubs and Marlins game to reach the “semi-bored announcers just shooting the shit” phase. Thankfully, ESPN analyst and generally delightful guy Tim Kurkjian was there to participate.

Pat Conroy was full of shit.

Despite a handful of decent upsets in the earlier rounds (11-seeded Buffalo and Central Michigan in the Sweet 16, sixth-seed Oregon State beating Baylor to get to the Elite Eight), we’ve got an all one-seed women’s Final Four in Columbus this weekend—Louisville vs. Mississippi State on one side, and Notre Dame vs.…Read more...

Sometimes I imagine my brain is a collection of baskets that contain everything I know. There’s a basket for the English language, and a basket for music stuff. There’s one for Lord of the Rings lore, and another for Bloodborne monsters. Right alongside those is a worn but sizable basket that contains all my…Read more...

Here are just a few, tiny things that happened in a dark, bizarre, depressing Year of our Lord 2018:

Opening Day is today, which means a bunch of middle-aged sportswriters get to put on their propeller beanies and clap their hands like trained seals and cry out YAY BASEBALL! to a relatively indifferent public. But I promise not to meh my way through this somewhat half-assed preview to the season. As someone who…Read more...

About 25 seconds into the baseball season, the Miami Marlins were losing.

It’s almost Passover again, the Jewish holiday that is notionally about freedom and liberation but, as practiced, is more about cleaning maniacally, covering every surface in your home with tinfoil so it resembles the interior of a spaceship from a 1960’s television show, and refraining eating bread. Some people claim…Read more...

Police arrested former TCU and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Trevone Boykin Wednesday night at his home in Mansfield, Texas, and charged him with aggravated assault against his girlfriend, Shabrika Bailey, according to reports.Read more...

Even though it’s Opening Day, the Phillies are still short one left-handed pitcher.Read more...

There has, over the past several months, been plenty of conversation (and a few official rule changes) directed to answering the question of what baseball needs. Games need to be faster, or extra innings need to be spicier, or broadcasts need more mentions of launch angle. The spike in home runs is good, or maybe it’s…Read more...

At the beginning of March, Entercom announced the launch of 97.3 The Machine, a new San Diego-based station with talk shows and sports programming. It’s not even the end of the month, and The Machine has already been involved in a feud and a fuckup that might jeopardize its relationship with the Padres.

Aw shit yeah, buddies, it’s Opening Day! The good kind of Opening Day, too. One of those classics on which all 30 teams—well, except for the Nats and Reds and Tigers and Pirates, because their games have already been postponed—play on the same day and it’s non-stop baseball. I do have one piece of bad news, though.

When you follow a perennially shitty team like the Miami Marlins, change can feel both sudden and incremental. The single games or plays that torpedoed one season or another in variously spectacular fashion vanish from the memory, if only because there was never anything meaningful to lose in the first place. The…Read more...

Power up with today’s deals on rechargeable Eneloop batteries, up to 50% off Levi’s, nearly indestructible umbrellas, and more.Read more...

Emanuel Santos, the sculptor of the creepy Cristiano Ronaldo bust that blessed the airport in Madeira, Portugal, has tried again. In a documentary directed by Kelly Naqui and published by Bleacher Report, Santos describes what it was like to be mocked by the entire world (he said it was hard, both he and his wife…Read more...

As Valdosta State offensive line coach Jeremy Darveau points out, these beefy little creatures have a lot to teach aspiring offensive linemen:

We’ve decided to form a union here at Onion Inc., home of The A.V. Club and our sister sites The Onion and ClickHole. First, all of The A.V. Club staff, along with an overwhelming majority of Onion Inc. staff, signed cards signaling our desire to unionize. Then we made it official on Monday when we requested formal…Read more...

Get yourself our readers’ favorite meat thermometer for $79 ($20 less than usual) during their blue and orange Thermapen sale. You guys love the Thermapen because it displays the temperature in 2 - 3 seconds, and is accurate within 0.7°F.Read more...

You need jeans. Everyone needs jeans. Levi’s is a classic American denim brand, and they make your favorite pair of men’s jeans (no surprise there). So get yourself some jeans (or other apparel) for a lot less during Amazon’s one-day sale. The best part is that everything is marked down to under $60.

The Celtics were short-staffed against the Jazz tonight—no Kyrie, no Al Horford, no Marcus Morris, no Marcus Smart, and as always, no Gordon Hayward—but Jaylen Brown did enough to make sure that it wasn’t a problem. Ultimately leading the team in scoring with 21 points, he delivered the game-winning three on this…Read more...

Royals catcher Salvador Perez will miss at least the first month of the season after spraining his medial collateral ligament while carrying a suitcase up the steps of his home.Read more...

In a cruel showcase of remarkable self control, LeBron James pulled back from what would have been a pulse-pounding hardcore dunk early in his game tonight against the Hornets, working the crowd into an edge-of-their-seats heat without ever allowing them release. All because of a dumb foul.Read more...

Sixers rookie Markelle Fultz is currently trying to transition from being an injured dude with a busted shot to an actual real-life basketball player, but it’s been a bumpy road, and it hit another hitch in the Philly game tonight.Read more...

Former U.S. women’s national gymnastics team coordinator Martha Karolyi and her husband, acclaimed former coach Bela Karolyi, said in a deposition last year that they did not know about the serial sexual abuse that Dr. Larry Nassar committed on their ranch, according to court records obtained by CNN.Read more...

Gizmodo This Laptop Is the MacBook Pro People Wish Apple Would Make | Jalopnik Here Is How To Buy A Used Supercar And Not Get Ripped Off | Kotaku Top Twitch Streamer Ninja Rapped A Slur, Leading To A Familiar Conundrum | Skillet Why I Always Keep These Three ‘Health Foods’ in My Kitchen |Read more...

You’ve heard by now that the Australian men’s Test cricket team were caught ball-tampering in a match against South Africa. Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera scuffing the surface of the match ball with a piece of sandpaper, and tried to hide the evidence when informed that he’d been filmed in the act. Australia…Read more...

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Of Lot 49 is not as long or as dense or as otherwise inaccessible as the novels that make up the fat part of his canon. It’s the one you read if you didn’t quite feel like committing to V or Gravity’s Rainbow, and it’s the one a savvy professor would assign in a college literature course if…Read more...

A day after William Strampel, the former dean of the osteopathic medical school at Michigan State University and the ex-boss of disgraced sexual abuser Larry Nassar, was charged with criminal sexual conduct and willful neglect of duty, the Lansing State Journal reported that MSU spent in excess of $500,000 keeping…Read more...

The Blue Jays closed out their spring with a game at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on Tuesday, and it ended in the most dramatic fashion: a walk-off home run from Vlad Guerrero Jr., son of the Expos legend. The French broadcast booth lost its mind:Read more...

Here’s some awful news:

Exactly one year ago, Elon Musk revealed that he’d co-founded a new startup, Neuralink, with the ambition of inventing a brain-computer interface or, as it was later called, a “wizard hat for the brain.” These types of interfaces, in their current iterations, are mostly used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other…Read more...

Star Trek, the original television show, is built on Gene Roddenberry’s insanely optimistic view of the future. Someday, he and his show believed, human beings would would learn to split the atom and solve the problem of need; our better natures would take over and we would fly around the galaxy spreading a vision of…Read more...

This past week, 18-year-old Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon took to Twitter to say that she felt ugly and fat. This is pretty standard for someone in that age bracket; Geguri just is the first female player signed to an Overwatch League team, expected to make her competitive debut as Shanghai Dragons’ new flex tank next week.

During a PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streaming session last night, Sixers rookie Ben Simmons tried to convince Karl-Anthony Towns, who was logging off, to play a round with him.Read more...

Broadly defined, a set piece is a thriller within a film, a self-contained showstopper-slash-showcase whose success depends in large part on a director’s chops. Since the 1970s, Steven Spielberg has reigned as its Hollywood master; regardless of what one thinks of his sentimental or narrative instincts, it’s hard to…Read more...

Almost one year ago to the day, Nick Kyrgios and Alexander Zverev had themselves a beautiful baby: a match-long highlight reel starring two ornery geniuses. That was a different time: Kyrgios had embarked on a focused tear through Indian Wells and Miami, playing as well as he ever has; Zverev was about to begin his…Read more...