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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...

Yesterday, we posted a story about the Virginia Tech women’s lacrosse team recording a video of themselves singing along to the part in Lil Dicky’s “Freaky Friday” where Chris Brown sings the word “nigga” a bunch of times. The gag in the song is that Lil Dicky, a white rapper, has swapped bodies with Chris Brown, a…Read more...

The Denver Nuggets came into last night’s game against the Raptors in desperate need of a win to keep their ever-shrinking playoff hopes alive. Beating the best team in the Eastern Conference on the second night of a back-to-back isn’t the easiest proposition, but these sorts of games do present a path to victory:…Read more...

In yesterday’s friendly between France and Russia in St. Petersburg, Russian soccer fans reportedly continued their long and fervent tradition of being super racist to black players by chanting monkey noises at French players Paul Pogba and Ousmane Dembélé. The Associated Press reported that the abuse was “audible on…Read more...

Four years ago, fans watching some of the independent shows in New Orleans via internet pay-per-view during WrestleMania weekend got some strange news. Announcers mentioned that the piledriver had been banned by the Louisiana Boxing and Wrestling Commission, and so would not be seen in any of the events. It’s one…Read more...

To all of you who have shouted at us on Twitter, through our email address, and in my Gchat windows: Yes, we know, we’re late.Read more...

Dodger Stadium is full of shit. It was last night, at least.Read more...

Nordstrom Rack’s uber-popular Clear the Rack sale is back, plus find discounts on reader-favorite RTIC coolers, Anker Bluetooth earbuds, and more.Read more...

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Connor McDavid had three points and the Oilers lost by four. I can’t think of a better way to sum up this season in Edmonton.

Under two minutes into the Cleveland Cavaliers’ loss to the Miami Heat last night, Kevin Love took Heat center Jordan Mickey’s elbow to the face, which knocked his tooth loose, drew blood, and sent him to the locker room. And he got called for the blocking foul.

Only a few thousand fans were able to make it in the arena for the Kings’ loss to the Mavericks on Tuesday night before the building’s entrances were shut down as a “public safety measure” due to the presence of protestors, who were demonstrating in response to the fatal police shooting of Sacramento man Stephon Clark.Read more...

You could tell me that this walk-off dong is from now-Hall of Famer Vlad Guerrero’s big-league career, and my only question would probably be, “When did he play for the Blue Jays?”Read more...