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The first time I visit the “ass-kissing booth” at Butt-Con, the bizarre marketing party for entrepreneur Miki Agrawal’s latest venture, the ass asks me to kiss it. The booth is pinstriped and flimsy, a gag on the more chaste version you’d find at a country fair: A self-described “friend of Miki’s” is on her knees with…Read more...

Aristides Aquino is a phenomenon. But with every home run the Reds’ rookie outfielder hits and just keeps hitting, he makes it slightly harder to dismiss as a late-season, Kevin Maas/Shane Spencer–type smash-in-a-pan, and adds evidence that he might just be a young dude who’s really, really good at hitting.

In what is quickly becoming a late-summer tradition, another frustrated player had to be separated from a coach in the Orioles dugout as tempers flared during a loss. This time it was reliever Richard Bleier, who had something to say to O’s infield coach José David Flóres about defensive positioning on his way off…Read more...

Shaq, that lovable character you can’t get enough of in his capacity as the grumbling grouch on TNT’s NBA studio coverage, apparently has a new docuseries—a fancy word that means “reality television show”— coming up on TNT. The show, apparently already hard-up for content, is hoping to put together a series of…Read more...

Rhys Hoskins has been having a bad time of late. His current slump—he’s batting .130 in August coming into Wednesday night—was at the heart of Sean Rodriguez’s ill-advised rebuke of Phillies fans; Tuesday night, in a stupid and disheartening loss to the horrid Pirates, Hoskins dropped the relay throw on what would’ve…Read more...

The air at North Cove Marina, a small slip amid the towering high rises of Lower Manhattan, felt pregnant. With rain. With hope. With anticipation.Read more...

NBA 2K20 is supposed to be a game primarily about playing basketball, but you wouldn’t know that from the game’s latest trailer, which makes the game look like something you might see in a casino.

UFC Hall of Famer B.J. Penn was part of an extended bar fight with a shirtless man on Hawaii’s Big Island Tuesday night, and TMZ has obtained a pair of videos showing the various stages of the bout. Penn, who has lost seven straight fights in the UFC since 2011, was out at the Lava Shack in Pāhoa when he got into a…Read more...

There are going to be somewhere around 10 in-season openings for NFL placekickers this year because there have been somewhere around that many every year since the rules were changed to make kicking more stressful. The chance that one of them will go to Carli Lloyd is minimal.

On the same day that Bury were officially expelled from the English Football League, Bolton Wanderers have narrowly avoided a similar fate. The club announced on Wednesday that it had been sold to Football Ventures (White) Limited, and thus will avoid expulsion:

Honestly, don’t even watch this video where I definitely won the Texas Exes Chili Cook-off in New York City using the Magary family chili recipe. If you do, you’ll just see that I had a super easy and not sad time gathering the votes it took to annihilate the competition and validate my hubris.Read more...

Some people are fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

On Tuesday night, incoming Virginia Tech lineman Brock Hoffman announced that the NCAA had denied his final appeal for immediate eligibility, which meant Hoffman will be forced to sit out the upcoming season. Hoffman has been scuffling with the NCAA over the particulars of his transfer from Coastal Carolina to…Read more...

Empathy isn’t one of football’s commanding virtues. You don’t play because you care about the other guy’s pain. You play because you want to crush him. Same goes for watching—either you disconnect from the consequences, or you can’t really enjoy it.

TriggerPoint’s GRID foam rollers are the most popular on the market, and Amazon just discounted the 26" extra long model to $45, from the usual $60. Foam rollers use compression from your body weight to simulate a sports massage after you work out, and they hurt like hell, but they really work!

ESPN reported this morning that the wife, child, and mother-in-law of Blake Bivens, who pitches for the Tampa Bay Rays’ Double-A affiliate, were murdered in Keeling, Va. on Tuesday. An 18-year-old named Thomas Bernard, who is the brother of Bivens’s wife, was arrested and charged with the murders after leading police…Read more...

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A game console coffee table book sale, Hulu subscription, Perry Ellis, and Borderlands 3 pre-order bonus lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Sometime in the middle of August, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen quietly launched a spicy chicken sandwich that gripped the nation. I first became aware of the sandwich thanks to Jezebel’s very own influencer, Clover Hope, who quietly shared with the group one day that she had tried a spicy chicken sandwich at Popeyes and…Read more...

ESPN’s Adam Schefter is a reporter who reports on the NFL. That implies certain things, or at least it used to, namely that a reporter should not have a personal financial stake in the NFL, a business they ostensibly cover objectively, making more money. This seems uncontroversial to me, and for decades upon decades…Read more...

The deadline came and went, and now one of England’s oldest soccer clubs has been kicked out of the English Football League. Bury had been on the ropes financially for the majority of this year, and with neither a sale nor a proof of financial stability coming through before Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline, the EFL has…Read more...

Yesterday, while attempting to beat her own land speed record, the 52,000 horsepower jet-powered car driven by racer, fabricator, and television personality Jessi Combs crashed in the Alvord Desert in Oregon, killing her, as local news reports. Combs was 39 years old and held the title of “fastest woman on four…Read more...

I regret to inform you that the Los Angeles Dodgers, a powerhouse that always seems to find new sources of talent whenever it needs, have a new shutdown reliever on their hands. He’s short, he’s Canadian, and he simply cannot be touched.

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Baseball, for all its supposed problems, must still be a pretty good business to be in. Prior to the Marlins’ sale two years ago, an MLB franchise hadn’t gone on the market since 2012. But the Kansas City Royals are now on the block, with owner David Glass reportedly in advanced negotiations to sell the team for more…Read more...

The Los Angeles Sparks, to be sure, are no scrubs. They’re sitting near the top of the WNBA standings, with a future Hall of Famer in Candace Parker, All-Star forwards in the Ogwumike sisters, and one of the league’s greatest perimeter threats in Chelsea Gray. Alas, none of it was enough to prevent the 95–66…Read more...

Perfectly serviceable rotation guard and tough-luck injury casualty Jeremy Lin was deeply bummed to find this summer that NBA teams had for the most part lost interest in him as a free agent. Now, a month later, Lin has made the decision to move on from the NBA and continue his basketball career elsewhere.Read more...

Reigning National League MVP Christian Yelich will appear in the upcoming ESPN Body Issue, the worldwide leader’s annual effort to capitalize on everyone’s desire to see the bare butt-cheeks of attractive famous people. The Body Issue is 10 years old now—no one who is not hoarding survival gear in an underground…Read more...

Ben Roethlisberger, churlish in his old age, dissected Antonio Brown’s route-running last December for an entire local radio audience to hear. Brown didn’t take it personally...

Pinch-hitter Sean Rodriguez hit a walk-off dong Monday night to put his Phillies over the Pirates, 6–5, in extras. Afterward, in the post-game locker room, Rodriguez decided the moment had come to call out notoriously stubborn and impatient Philadelphia sports fans for their habit of booing players on the home team…Read more...

Stefanos Tsitsipas has already concluded his time at the U.S. Open in a bizarre, brief run.Read more...

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

Last night, in the bottom of the 11th inning, Sean Rodriguez hit an 0-2 pitch into the left field stands to win his team the game. That was when the problems started.

TMZ Sports has released video that allegedly reveals Lakers center DeMarcus Cousins on a phone call with his ex-girlfriend Christy West. According to court documents, the call happened last Friday. Cousins seems to ask West to allow their 7-year-old son to attend Cousins’s wedding, which took place this past Saturday.Read more...

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Today, we’re talking about soccer snobs, voiceover acting, bad keys, eating wrappers, and more.

Reformed footballer Rob Gronkowski showed up at an event in New York City today to push some CBD product. Since the NFL world has been engrossed by the abrupt retirement of Colts quarterback Andrew Luck, Gronkowski brought up an injury he had suffered in this past season’s Super Bowl to illustrate a point about what…Read more...

Roger Federer, a 38-year-old father of four, sometimes has the stubble to match. “I played a little bit like my beard today,” he said after his first-round U.S. Open match. “Rusty.” The beneficiary of that rust was Sumit Nagal, an Indian qualifier ranked No. 190 in the world, who stole the first set and looked,…Read more...

Some people are fans of the Dallas Cowboys. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Dallas Cowboys. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

As Serena Williams easily drubbed Maria Sharapova in their first-round U.S. Open match last night, she got to be magnanimous in victory, applauding one of Sharapova’s few winners in the second set and then telling the on-court interviewer post-match that facing Sharapova was an “incredibly tough draw” because she is…Read more...

One of the best traditions in hockey is the customary “players’ day with the Cup” that happens after a team wins a championship. And while the St. Louis Blues are gallivanting around with the Stanley Cup doing god knows that, we can say with some certainty that the Calder Cup, which is given to the champions of the…Read more...

There are more than 363 million civilian-owned guns in the United States. We kill each other and ourselves with them almost constantly, at a rate of around 100 deaths per day.

An Eddie Bauer sale, Stream Deck Mini, Anker power tools, and Daniel’s Briefcases lead off Tuesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Nobody goes to baseball games anymore. That’s the common alarmist wisdom that has become one of the overarching themes of the 2019 season, which had barely gotten underway before USA Today was declaring that MLB’s attendance slide of recent years had taken on a “more permanent look.” By May, the Associated Press was…Read more...

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The single most telling thing in the wake of Andrew Luck’s surprise retirement is the near-unanimous support for his decision from other football players. The sports shouters on your TV and in your Twitter machine can rail against soft millennials all they like, but the people who know what it’s like to play…Read more...

New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens has long seemed thin-skinned, but it now appears that skin might actually be more like an insect shell casing. If you suggest this, though, you better do it to his goddamn face, at his home, in front of his wife and children. OR ELSE.Read more...

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The way the robo-umpire experiment down in the Atlantic League is configured, it should not especially threaten the jobs of human umpires, who are still tasked with communicating balls and strikes and acting as a failsafe against computer glitches. That’s good news for all human umpires, but perhaps none more so than…Read more...

I prefer to live in a world where the action that got Keon Broxton ejected from Monday night’s Yankees-Mariners game was 100 percent intentional. What’s more, I prefer to live in a world where Broxton becomes the Homer Simpson of the no-look glove-slap, and goes around flinging gloves across the faces of everyone who…Read more...