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Could someone close to Oakland Raiders running back Jalen Richard explain to him why he should vaccinate his children? He’s not grasping it, and now I feel bad for his kids and other kids around them.

CONCACAF’s convoluted World Cup qualifying format has always been tilted in favor the big boys at the expense of the teams in the confederation’s bottom tier, making it so the dozens of small nations had essentially no hope of ever playing in the World Cup. It’s understandable why CONCACAF sought to fiddle with the…Read more...

The United States women’s national soccer team cruised through the World Cup, winning every game all while getting slammed for being too arrogant. They’ve now been celebrating for about three days, including today’s ticker-tape parade through the streets of Manhattan.Read more...

Jelena Ostapenko is one of the fiercest power hitters in the women’s game. She hasn’t quite lived up to the promise of her 2017 French Open win, and she had a disappointing first-round loss in the singles draw at this Wimbledon, but she’s still alive in the quarterfinals of the mixed doubles. And she is still…Read more...

The American Hockey League’s long-awaited schedule announcement for the 2019–20 season hit a minor road block on Wednesday, when the code behind the official app of the NHL’s top minor league became self-aware and demanded money from Stewart Zimmel. At least, that’s one way to interpret these confusing but very real…Read more...

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Statisticians have to take all sorts of factors into account when calculating live win probabilities for a cricket match: run rates, the remaining number of overs, the recent and historical performances of the players, the condition of the pitch, and more. Even so, after the rain forced officials to suspend play in…Read more...

On Monday, 610 AM in Kansas City published a fuller version of audio first obtained and reported by KCTV-5, in which Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill can be heard telling his fiancée, Crystal Espinal, “You need to be terrified of me too, bitch.” The extended audio, to my ears, wasn’t newsworthy. It sounded like more…Read more...

When the 2019 Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham kicked off, I wasn’t jammed into a sports bar downing beers with hundreds of other soccer-mad Americans, as I had originally planned to be. Instead, I was dead sober, watching the game in a lecture hall situated on the Columbia University campus in…Read more...

Baseball giveth, and baseball taketh away. In these perilous times when every little moment is a referendum on whether the game will survive until Christmas, and every act of untrammeled joy comes with two asterisks that scream, “Yeah, but they’ll screw it up because it’s baseball and only old people who will die soon…Read more...

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After the long journey to get back home to California, and the incredible finesse in free agency to secure Paul George, it seemed safe to assume that Kawhi Leonard would set down roots in Los Angeles. He’s 28, in the prime of his Hall of Fame career, signing his third contact. After a sour exit from San Antonio and a…Read more...

The World Cup-winning USWNT is currently parading its way through New York City and continuing the bender that began immediately after the women dispatched the Netherlands on Sunday. Today’s highlights include the entire team pounding Ace of Spades at 8:40 a.m., backup goalkeeper and unofficial team documentary…Read more...

Here is some weapons-grade stoogery, from The Athletic’s Jared Weiss:Read more...

An Instant Pot IP-DUO60, the Firefly 15th Anniversary Set, and an IZOD Gold Box lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

It is not exaggeration to say that the Cincinnati Bengals’ revised stadium lease with Hamilton County, agreed in November 2018, is still largely secret. Among the many figures that weren’t released at the time the agreement was announced was how much the county—and thus, taxpayers—will be spending to buy land near the…Read more...

If you thought this was painfully obvious, well, you would be extremely right, as one guy quickly found out with a BMW E36.Read more...

Thanks to an open records request filed by the Chicago Tribune, we now know that Todd Ricketts, finance chairman of the Republican National Committee and co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, has been getting a substantial tax break that he doesn’t deserve thanks to false documents filed by his attorney.

An uneventful All-Star Game had a few nice moments, none more confusing to everyone involved than when AL manager Alex Cora sent out CC Sabathia to talk to Aroldis Chapman after two batters in the ninth. “I thought he was going to take me out of the game,” Chapman said through a translator. “I looked over at the…Read more...

Remember last year, during the All-Star break, when commissioner Rob Manfred responded to questions about MLB’s struggles to promote the historically great Mike Trout by shifting blame onto Trout himself? Remember how Manfred said Trout would have a “very big” brand if he’d work more with MLB, which incidentally has…Read more...

Commissioner Rob Manfred was prompted Tuesday to respond to comments from American League All-Star starting pitcher Justin Verlander, accusing Major League Baseball of deliberately juicing baseballs in order to goose offensive production. To no one’s great surprise, Manfred maintained once again that MLB has neither…Read more...

Harvard University has fired longtime fencing coach Peter Brand, who was involved in an admissions scandal having to do with the extremely suspect circumstances of the sale of his home to the family of a high school junior who was later admitted to Harvard as a fencing recruit.Read more...

Before Rose Lavelle was a World Cup champion, a bronze ball winner, or a USWNT player, she was a kid doing totally sick soccer tricks in her backyard so she could impress Grandma. Apparently, in addition to Mia Hamm, Rose loved Eurythmics.

It’s the middle of July, the worst part of the year for sports. There’s exhibition baseball, MLS, and, uh, the World Series of Poker. But never fear: The doldrums of cucumber season aren’t just a dry spell that pushes you to go outside, travel, and reevaluate your life. It’s also a brief, wonderful moment when you…Read more...

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

Jared Dudley was a solid pickup for the Lakers in free agency, but I had some questions lingering in my mind. Just the other day, in fact, I was folding some laundry and wondering whether he’s capable of controlling a defense with communication, telling a point guard what plays to run by seeing the flow of the game…Read more...

A few weeks ago, I saw a Lightning Deal for 8Bitdo Wireless Bluetooth Adapter $16, and had an honest-to-goodness no thought, just bought moment. Luckily for me, it turned out to be a great, cheap way to add a second controller to my Switch setup. Let me explain.Read more...

Today, we’re talking about subtitles, dad shoes, sexy words, pot luck, stray penis hairs, and more.Read more...

Serena Williams, currently in the middle of another Wimbledon title hunt, has an essay out in Harper’s Bazaar today that lays out the emotional aftermath of her 2018 U.S. Open final. That match, which resulted in the first major title for then-20-year-old Naomi Osaka, was marred by a long umpire dispute late in the…Read more...

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On August 15, 2013, Jared Remy, a former Red Sox security staffer and son of longtime broadcaster Jerry Remy, fatally stabbed Jennifer Martel, his fiancée and the mother of his daughter. Jared had a history of violence toward women, assault, and steroid use. He is currently serving life in prison without the…Read more...

Allow Lucy Kennedy to show you what the horror of losing looks like at the Giro Rosa in the final meter of Stage 3 on Sunday. If it’s not miscounting the laps, it’s easing up before the finish line. Why do athletes do this?!Read more...

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The following is an excerpt from The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb, by Sam Kean. The book is out today and can be purchased here.

Where there’s smoke in soccer transfers, there’s often fire, and it sure looks like Neymar is about to burn it all down in Paris. A little under a month after we wondered whether Neymar could actually be on the move again, two recent reports sure make it seem like the 27-year-old superstar winger is going to leave the…Read more...

Schaumburg, Illinois has no shortage of spectacle. A cursory Google search reveals that this suburb of Chicago has an indoor water park, an Ikea, and a Rainforest Cafe all stuffed within its city limits. But despite all of those commercial pleasures, I can’t imagine any of them fill the gaping spiritual hole left by…Read more...

A rare Buffy comforter gold box, a 6.5 Qt. Ninja Foodi, and 20% off Dyson orders lead off Tuesday’s best deals from around the web.

English striker Daniel Sturridge, who played for Liverpool last season, posted a video on his Instagram account last night showing the aftermath of an apparent burglarization of his Los Angeles home. In the video, Sturridge says that whoever broke into his house also stole his damn dog:

The President of the United States went off on a Twitter rant about the media on Sunday evening. This isn’t news, because the President loves to yell into his computer box about things he saw on his TV box. What made this different, though, was that his target was Fox News.

Monday night in Las Vegas, New Orleans Pelicans rookie center Jaxson Hayes caught a nifty wraparound pass on a side pick-and-roll and dunked someone named Mychal Mulder into The Further.Read more...

The second round of the 2019 MLB Home Run Derby was, dare I say, the very coolest sequence in the history of the event. Pete Alonso beating Ronald Acuña Jr. on his final swing was very cool, but the real show was the insane dong-off between Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Blue Jays and Joc Pederson of the Dodgers.Read more...

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. made quite the impression in the first round of the 2019 Home Run Derby Monday night. The record for dingers in a round was 28; Yung Vlad, in the first round of his first appearance in the derby, as a 20-year-old rookie, socked 29. It was very, very fun.Read more...

Astros pitcher and American League All-Star Justin Verlander is convinced that baseball’s ongoing surge of home runs is not only the result of a more aerodynamic baseball, but is the result of a baseball that has been intentionally juiced during manufacturing in order to produce more offense. Verlander told ESPN on…Read more...

The strongest testament to the United States’ comprehensive supremacy in women’s soccer is how unspectacular their successful defense of the World Cup title was this summer.

After two days on a Dutchman’s shoulders, the Tour de France’s yellow jersey is back with the French for the first time in five years. The question now is how long it will stay there.Read more...

After beating the Netherlands to win the World Cup Sunday, the United States women’s national team partied hard—in the locker room, on the bus, at the club. Thankfully, backup goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris documented the whole thing on her Instagram story.Read more...

You hear things. Rumblings and dark intimations, whispers that skitter down corridors on ghostly little feet. People say that there’s something there, something hard to name, some kind of power. Something that doesn’t listen or bargain or play by the rules that hold the rest of us fast, something strange and dark that…Read more...

Those of you wise enough to read Splinter should understand that the two best candidates policy-wise in the Democratic primary are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In order for their good policies to triumph, they must both be willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause if necessary. Sooner, rather than later.Read more...

The trade that brought Paul George to the Los Angeles Clippers also in effect brought Kawhi Leonard to the Clippers. That alone makes it one of the more momentous trades in recent NBA history, and the shockwaves haven’t even finished circling the globe yet.Read more...

It’s never fun to lose to Mexico if you’re an American soccer fan. It’s doubly painful when it’s in the Gold Cup final, on American soil, as was the case Sunday night, when a 74th-minute golazo by Jonathan Dos Santos gave Mexico their eighth Gold Cup win—and fourth over the United States in a final—by the score of 1-0.Read more...