Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

The first Clásico of the season isn’t until the end of October, but Real Madrid and Barcelona are currently in the throes of a battle with much higher stakes than any one match. After a summer’s worth of rumors and reports linking Paris Saint-Germain’s star forward Neymar to a return to Barcelona, Real Madrid have…Read more...

Will the first-round U.S. Open meeting between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova be a good match in terms of play quality? Probably not. Does it promise rich entertainment value anyway? Hell yes.Read more...

Everyone loves “The Freeze,” the masked sprinter who makes a living humiliating amateur athletes at Braves games, but there is a similar hero plying his trade at Gwinnett Stripers games, and he is quite the specimen.

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

A Detroit Free Press reporter was barred from the Houston Astros’ postgame press conference last night because Justin Verlander said he would refuse to speak with media if the reporter was present.Read more...

Browsing the internet generally feels exhausting for me. Mostly, it’s because everything is bad. The websites I once visited for “fun” are now saturated with reminders of society’s collapse, brands making painful jokes, lies, outrage, and actual Nazis. I only visit these websites out of habit and poor impulse control.Read more...

Yes, yes, we’ve all seen various versions of a video showing a baseball fan grabbing a foul ball in a way that is funny or charming. But have you ever seen a young baseball fan get his hands on a foul ball and respond like he just gained possession of the One Ring?

If you want the simplest, hardest piece of news from Kalyn Kahler’s fantastic writeup for Sports Illustrated of the Chicago Bears’ offseason kicking saga, it’s that the decision to cut Cody Parkey was made immediately upon the second doink. If you want the most important and still-relevant piece of news, which emerges…Read more...

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Carlos Vela is MLS’s top goal scorer this season, and is tied for second in assists, and a person doesn’t get to those positions in a professional league without being either a FIFA 19 creation or just comprehensively superior to 99 percent of the other people in the league. The numbers tell the latter story on the…Read more...

The Mets, not too long ago baseball’s hottest team, gave back a little of their late-summer mojo in a recent series loss to the Braves, and find themselves still tantalizingly outside of the second NL Wild Card spot. They’re still whole worlds better than they were in the first half, and as a result of their recent…Read more...

Professional athletes are known to enter some strange head-spaces in order to stay focused and conquer doubt and all the rest of it. Still, it must be said, Cubs outfielder Nick Castellanos is truly smelling the psychosphere these days. He was asked Tuesday night why he greets manager Joe Maddon with “Happy Opening…Read more...

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

Everything is fine in Toronto, because training camp doesn’t even start for another few weeks. But ... is it really? The negotiations between the Maple Leafs and their wunderkind RFA winger Mitch Marner have, perhaps unsurprisingly, plodded through the offseason with minimal progress, or at least with minimal progress…Read more...

SARASOTA, FLORIDA — The sun hadn’t yet risen over the Sarasota Kennel Club, and Deb Linn was wrist deep in 100 pounds of bloody meat. She had been been up since 4:30 a.m., when she made the 45-minute commute south from Ellenton, a small town where the rent is more affordable than in the wealthy beach city of Sarasota.…Read more...

An article over at CNN today formally advances a claim dropped casually by commentators, coaches, fans, and any crank with a taste for caricaturing a whole generation. Here goes: Smartphones are hampering tennis’s young players, which is why they can’t stop the Big Three in the men’s game, who enjoyed the advantage…Read more...

Baseball players are too damn horny. So says MLB, which had to send out a memo to its players on Monday telling them to stop using over-the-counter “sexual-enhancement pills.” The risk, beyond engorged wooden bats, is that these pills have substances in them that might get flagged on a drug test.

The second, flaghumpinger incarnation of the XFL is, it appears, truly actually happening next spring. Landry Jones is in and the league has real teams and everything! Unfortunately, these are those teams.Read more...

Big Blanket Co. specializes in—wait for it—big blankets. And now, they’re finally coming out with a really big weighted blanket.Read more...

Artist Jules Muck recently painted a mural of Larry Bird in the Fountain Square section of Indianapolis, which features the image of Bird in his Indiana State jersey doing the “Shh!” gesture, similar to the Nov. 28, 1977 cover of Sports Illustrated. This time, though, Bird is doing the shushing instead of the Indiana…Read more...

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

The modern discourse is a never-ending cascade of Expanding Brain memes. Everyone plays their part, and when Deadspin is doing its job well, we provide takes that belong to one of the latter panels, ones hopefully more sophisticated than this but less out-there than this. Proving that our angle on the handball call…Read more...

Last time we checked in on Nationals pitcher Hunter Strickland, he was sending himself to the injured list for two months after punching a wall. While not as self-evidently stupid, his most recent injury is just as bizarre: in the run-up to Tuesday’s game against the Pirates, Strickland got hit in the face with a…Read more...

No.

Okay, yes, I know the answer to the question posed in this headline, but I’m not going to tell you what it is until you watch this clip from a minor-league baseball game and formulate your own theory:

URBANDALE, Iowa—Really, what Joe Biden looks like is a game show host. The tan, the blindingly white dentures, the “Hey folks.” Give him a long, skinny mic and a little more bouffant up top and he’s Bob Barker. But if Joe was a TV guy, he’d be getting eased off to the golf course right about now. All the zingers have…Read more...

Poor Pittsburgh. They have this gorgeous stadium, maybe the best in baseball, and yet the team is next-to-last in the National League after going 7-28 since the All-Star Break. They rank 24th in attendance with 19,692 fans a game. And now children are ragging on that fact!Read more...

Bernie Sanders put his Brooklyn stickball training to good use on Tuesday by playing a fairly competent game of softball at Iowa’s Field of Dreams. Generally, these kinds of events feel forced, but please tell me if you don’t see a soupçon of fun and whimsy in Uncle Bernard’s astonishingly capable softball skills.Read more...

Last night’s game between the Dodgers and Blue Jays turned into a blowout win for Los Angeles, and a late-August game between one team with a 19-game division lead and another that’s 14 games under .500 wouldn’t normally be worth our attention. But this game had something special, which mattered far more than the…Read more...

I suppose the only way the Antonio Brown Body Issue could wrap up was with him turning into a penitent and eager company man. He fought the law, the law yawned, took its feet off the desk, mixed itself a drink and hammered him flat, and he went “all-in” on being an Oakland Raider by playing Jon Gruden’s best friend on …Read more...

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For the second night in a row, a daring squirrel has invaded the field at the Twins’ stadium. Monday night the furry fellow invaded the home dugout and sent several players fleeing in terror. Tuesday night our intrepid rodent pal bolted down the first baseline, nutmegged a baserunner, briefly leapt into the crowd, and…Read more...

Dolphins head coach Brian Flores and wide receiver Kenny Stills have not been on the same page when it comes to Stills speaking out about systemic racism. A couple weeks back, Flores delivered a weak-sauce admonishment when Stills criticized owner Stephen Ross’s hefty support of Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. N…Read more...

Hey, remember back in mid-July, when the Lakers traded the moon and stars for one of the most talented young players in the NBA? Remember that? Remember when the team and the player did their big introductory press conference? Remember during that press conference, when that player—who is listed by the NBA as standing…Read more...

Jerry and Stephen Jones held a press conference Tuesday with Cowboys linebacker Jaylon Smith, who just signed a hefty five-year extension with the team. Smith’s successful negotiations stand in stark contrast to those of wide receiver Amari Cooper, quarterback Dak Prescott, and running back Ezekiel Elliott, all of…Read more...

MLS and its clubs are currently embroiled in a fight against their own supporters over what the league claims are violations of its anti-politics rules. Over the last two weeks, multiple fans in multiple stadiums have been ejected for banners that run afoul of the league’s Fan Code of Conduct. There has also been a…Read more...

Let’s issue the warning up front: You’re going to see a pretty gross finger if you keep reading. It looks like a bloody lowercase “Z,” if that helps you sharpen your imagination. Okay, you’ve been warned.

Antonio Brown’s long struggle with the NFL and the Raiders for the right to wear whatever old helmet he most desires may have reached a ceasefire on Tuesday. The brand-new Oakland wideout practiced with the team in an NFL-approved helmet for the first time since he went AWOL a couple of days ago, according to head…Read more...

Hall of Fame reliever Goose Gossage has been complaining about the state of baseball for so long that his complaints have spanned multiple decades of the sport. It feels like just yesterday, he was lecturing Joba Chamberlain on “the Yankee way.” (Joba Chamberlain is now retired.) Eleven years later, Gossage is still…Read more...

Today, we’re talking about ex-girlfriends, pens, secession, King Kong at the plate, and more.

Who is ready for a particularly grim session of Let’s Remember Some Guys? Because according to reports coming out of the Dominican Republic, former MLB players Octavio Dotel and Luis Castillo have been arrested in what authorities have described as “the largest operation against organized crime” in the country:

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

It has been two weeks since the finale of HBO’s R-rated Riverdale knock-off, Euphoria, aired to glowing reviews. Everyone wants to talk about how the show found its earnest heart, and whether Jules will come back, and how all the teens may be doomed by sexting and drugs, but no one wants to talk about how East…Read more...

At this point you are not exactly going out on a limb when you say it was stupid for the New York Giants to draft Daniel Jones. Everybody is already saying this, and will likely continue to say it up until the point Jones throws a bunch of touchdowns and leads the Giants to the playoffs. With that in mind, we can give…Read more...

The long wait to watch David Beckham’s Miami MLS franchise play in all the promised glitziness has hit yet another unfortunate snag: the ground where Inter Miami’s ritzy new stadium is to be built is literally poisoned.Read more...

A couple of Edifier bookshelf speakers, Super Mario Odyssey, and up to 40% off Climb Gear at Backcountry lead of Tuesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

In general, it’s fine to have informal house rules in a pickup basketball game. “Guard your man” is a good one, for example: Few things are more annoying or more ruinous to the flow of play than the lazy sack of crap who sags 20 feet off his man, substituting the aggregate strategic soundness of letting an amateur…Read more...

You know the big, climactic ending to The Natural, where Robert Redford booms a huge, pennant-winning bomb that knocks out a lighting fixture in the stadium? Okay, so maybe Paul DeJong’s sixth-inning homer in the Cardinals’ 3-0 win against the Brewers in mid-August isn’t quite that dramatic, even if the ball did break…Read more...

The important thing is that Jimmy Garoppolo is healthy. It has to be, because to focus on the 49ers quarterback’s performance in his first game action since tearing his ACL in Week 3 last season is to invite some serious collar-tugging.