Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Throughout both his campaign and his presidency, Donald Trump has insisted that reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs is a top priority. But, according to a bombshell new report from ProPublica, the White House has essentially ceded control of the VA to a trio of the president’s rich buddies who he knows from…Read more...

Soon, you’ll be thinking about layering and wool socks (I promise). But right now, Columbia is giving you 50% off select styles, no code needed, during their Summer Sale. Choose from over 1,000 styles for everyone. Pick up layering pieces, rain shells, t-shirts, and outerwear that’s perfect for the fluctuating…Read more...

Here’s something improbable: two minor league teammates in the Pirates system hit for the cycle Tuesday night, in the same game. Kevin Newman got his in five at-bats, notching a single, a pair of doubles, a triple, and finally, in the eighth inning, a solo dong to left:Read more...

King Félix has some of the nastier stuff in baseball. Tuesday night he K’d up his old nemesis Adrián Beltré on a wicked 78-mph breaking pitch, drawing a hilarious truncated swing out of Beltré, followed by a look of pure bafflement. It was more than Hernández could handle:Read more...

It has long been known that Carmelo Anthony, upon working out the finer details of his buyout from the Atlanta Hawks, would join the Houston Rockets. Melo finalized his buyout and was waived by the Hawks on July 30; he cleared waivers on Wednesday, August 1. Today brings the expected development:Read more...

During the always-sacred pre-game performance of the U.S. national anthem in our nation’s capital, ahead of a game between the Nationals and Braves, Washington pitcher Erick Fedde was faced with an impossible choice. He could continue to stand at attention and give his deepest respects to a dull song about one battle…Read more...

Brian Bowen, whose allegedly greased recruitment to Louisville cost Rick Pitino his job and essentially cost Bowen two years of eligibility, has decided to join the Sydney Kings of Australia’s National Basketball League.Read more...

Back in the golden age of soccer TV in the U.S.—think back, if you were lucky enough to be there for them, to those naive, innocent, halcyon days of 2016—America was the best place on earth to be a couch-dwelling soccer fan. In those heady times, stateside followers of the beautiful game could gorge themselves on what…Read more...

Offensive lineman and noted racist bully Richie Incognito—who has since the end of the last NFL season retired, un-retired, been released by the Bills, and had a public meltdown at a gym—got very upset on Twitter today because Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer denied that Minnesota was interested in signing him.…Read more...

With just seven games left in the regular season, in the middle of a playoff push, the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces have had to forfeit a game against the Washington Mystics that was supposed to be played on August 3. The Aces were backed into this corner by a hellish travel experience and some unforgiving decision-making by…Read more...

Former NFL player Kellen Winslow Jr., currently charged with multiple counts of forcible rape and kidnapping, got the feature treatment recently from USA Today and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Buried in those stories were some important updates on the criminal case filed against Winslow—he’s now charged with raping a…Read more...

Conor McGregor will return from his two-year hiatus from the UFC to fight Khabib Nurmagomedov for the lightweight championship belt on Oct. 6. The press tour for that fight will inevitably be full of wild, often-exhausting trash talk, and fans will all get sick of these two assholes before one of them inevitably gets…Read more...

A custody battle is raging between a newspaper and its former reporter over a Twitter account. The Roanoke Times’s parent company, BH Media, is suing one of the newspaper’s former college football reporters, Andy Bitter. They say he refused to hand control of his Twitter account—which he had acquired from the previous…Read more...

As a small number of very stupid Buckeyes fans rally around head coach Urban Meyer—who is currently on paid leave as Ohio State investigates whether or not Meyer properly reported the multiple reports of domestic abuse made against since-fired assistant coach Zach Smith—a statement yesterday from the attorney for…Read more...

Welcome to the Deadspin 25, a college football poll that strives to be more democratic and less useless than every other preseason poll. Leading up to the college football season kickoff, we will give you previews of the 25 teams that you, the readers, voted to be most worthy of writing about. Now, No. 20 Texas.

The Philadelphia 76ers look like they’ll be one of two halfway decent teams in the Eastern Conference next year—and, like the Celtics, they are stocked with a whole bunch of young dudes who look like they’ll be able to keep the team good for a while. One such young dude is Zhaire Smith, for whom the Sixers traded…Read more...

Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re talking about fantasy football, horny queens, airport bars, and more.Read more...

Only a true turd would try to claim that Cubs infielder Javy Báez has not been the most consistently entertaining player in baseball over the last few seasons. From the moment he arrived in the big leagues he went about turning his every movement on the field into highlight-reel material, but there was always a bit of…Read more...

Most sports meltdowns burn out quickly or overstay their welcome and become a bore. But sometimes, a rare and precious freakout pushes beyond that second phase, transcending a few moments of hotheadedness and continuing off into the realm of High Art. Brennan Metzger achieved such a feat last night.

Baseball consensus holds that umpires only get noticed when they make a bad call. Steve Fields’ career as a major league ump was bookended by two calls that put him in the spotlight. But he went to his grave insisting both were right.

Center City, Philadelphia — There are probably few things the world needed less than for Panera to produce a double bread bowl, but since it has done so, and since it is offering the monstrous abomination exclusively in Philadelphia, where I live, I was compelled, as anyone would be, to order one and eat the entire…Read more...

Nick Kyrgios and Stan Wawrinka returned to Canada today for the triennial Kokkinakis Classic, and in the first set the Australian took an easy lead over the step-slow Swiss in their first-round Rogers Cup match. The standout shot from their 6-1 first set had was one of the fastest groundstrokes you will ever see. Not…Read more...

Some people are fans of the Tampa Bay Bucs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Tampa Bay Bucs. This 2018 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

The Premier League season starts this goddamn weekend. It’s been like four seconds since the World Cup ended. Regardless, that’s exciting news.

Knox, the pet English bulldog of former New England Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo, went missing back in June, while in the custody of his trainer. On Sunday, the Rhode Island SPCA found the dog’s dead body, in the trainer’s house, where she’d been hiding it.

Gizmodo Facebook: Hey Can We Pretty Please Maybe Have Lots of Your Banking Information Too? | Kotaku The Internet Reacts To D.va’s New Summer Skin | Lifehacker Lifehacker Pack for Windows: Our List of the Essential Windows Apps 2018 | Jalopnik General Motors Is Likely Next to Hit the Cap on the $7,500 EV Tax Credit | …Read more...

Barstool Sports, a website enjoyed by young men who get really angry when their friends don’t want to go out drinking with them for a third night in a row, no longer has an official Twitch channel. This is because one of their employees threatened to swat another Twitch streamer.

Snag deals on Bosch tool sets, up to $100 rebate on new tires, a 4K Samsung monitor, and the rest of today’s best deals.Read more...

Everybody at the gym has their own plan, their own path. In a perfect world, these paths all crisscross and interweave without any collisions. One person hops off the treadmill, another hops on. One person sets down a weight, another picks it up. Record scratch, here’s the real world: five different people across the…Read more...

As the sun passed over Gizmodo’s New York office on Monday and staffers shook off the muggy torpor of the mid-afternoon, they found themselves drawn into a (seemingly simple, yet surprisingly contentious) debate: Is Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, a dry man? Or is he a wet one?

Lance Lynn was excellent in his first Yankees start, throwing seven and a third scoreless innings and leading New York to a 7-0 win over the White Sox to break a five-game losing streak. But I don’t care. Lynn allowed two hits, and that’s just not good enough. Not when we’ve got Chicago’s Matt Davidson, ostensibly a…Read more...

If your tires are due for a replacement, you can get up to a $100 rebate (in the form of a prepaid Visa card) this month by buying a set of four General Tires. Just check the list of eligible titles here (also embedded below), buy your tires, and submit your rebate online for the fastest processing.

If you have any DIY projects on the horizon, Amazon’s running a handful of stellar deals on Bosch power tools, today only.

In an animated discussion on his radio show Monday, about the four-game weekend series sweep that all but knocked the Yankees out of contention in the AL East, Yankees television play-by-play man Michael Kay was at the very least clumsy with his choice of words while bitching about which Yankees were available and…Read more...

Former MLB All-Star pitcher Esteban Loaiza is expected to change his plea from not guilty to guilty in a felony cocaine distribution case, per a report from ABC7 Chicago:Read more...

The Yankees are looking to get healthy against the woeful White Sox Monday night, following a decisive four-game sweep at the hands of the Red Sox that all but ended the race for the AL East. Mostly they’re having their way, but the highlight of the game came in the top of the fourth inning, when Yankees first baseman…Read more...

The lowly Reds are taking on the even lowlier Mets Monday night, for the start of a three-game series. The occasion marks the return of Matt Harvey to New York, for the first time as a member of a visiting club. The Mets, perhaps feeling some regret over the way Harvey’s time as a Met ended, put together a lovely…Read more...

Ohio State head football coach Urban Meyer is currently on indefinite paid administrative leave while the university completes an investigation of reports that he knew of but did nothing about domestic violence allegations against assistant coach Zach Smith. Meyer is not dead; he is not in jail; he has not been exiled…Read more...

What you are looking at here is a Mariners fan fucking up, just as the M’s have been doing for the past several weeks now. The team, though still 18 games above .500, has recently slipped to 2.5 games behind the A’s for the second wild card spot. This is despite the fact that, as late as June 16, they were 46-25, just…Read more...

A couple of extremely pumped and jacked fitness guys chucked some watermelons at each other, proving that people will do just about anything in the pursuit of rock hard abs and/or more Instagram followers:Read more...

BuzzFeed’s Steven Perlberg wrote a thorough story today about official White House mascot Jared Kushner personally ordering a software developer at the New York Observer—which he owned for years after receiving it as a “graduation present” from his father, a convicted criminal—to delete potentially negative articles…Read more...

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

North Carolina football has announced the suspension of 13 players. This gang’s heinous crime? Selling their property to a willing buyer. The college students were caught back in January selling pairs of team-issued special edition Air Jordans to a local business for as much as $2,500, after which the school forced…Read more...

When Errick McCollum headed to the bank in August of 2015, he was mostly hoping that his check for nearly $100,000 would clear. He wasn’t broke or anything like destitute at the time—the older brother of Blazers star C.J. was, at the time, making a good living playing professional basketball in China. Still, that…Read more...

If you’ve found yourself confused about why those familiar with Argentine mad genius manager Marcelo Bielsa were giddy with excitement when he got the Leeds United job earlier this summer, just watch the bizarre, hilarious, Google Translate-in-the-flesh pre- and post-match interviews he gave to Sky Sports yesterday…Read more...

Recent history tells us that 2018-19 is going to be a good year for Chelsea. Over the past four seasons, the Blues have see-sawed back and forth between amazing, Premier League–winning seasons and disastrously disappointing years in which unmotivated players coast through 38 games. With a fifth-place finish in 2017–18…Read more...

Marquette King has only been in Denver for a few months, and he’s already gotten himself involved in a rather pointed dispute with a local radio station. This beef first got cooking on Friday, when 104.3 The Fan hosts Zach Bye and Brandon Stokley interviewed King after practice. The normally chatty King was subdued…Read more...

The 2008 Tampa Bay Rays were one of the coolest and most delightful out-of-nowhere success stories in recent baseball history, a team filled with a bevy of teen stars and veteran hitting that coalesced to make an astonishing World Series appearance after having gone 66-96 the season prior. As an oral history in The…Read more...

If you already have an Alexa device, Amazon wants you fill your house with even more smart tech with 20% off security cameras, lighting systems, light bulbs, plugs, and more.Read more...