The NFL’s decision to uphold the four-game suspension of Tom Brady for his alleged role in deflating footballs at the AFC Championship Game last January simply can’t be defended by any reasonable person when you consider the context. And that context is this—every piece of available evidence says the league never considered this a serious […]
If there was a better fit for Johnny Cueto than the Kansas City Royals, I can’t imagine what it is. The Reds dealt their ace to Kansas City yesterday for two minor-league pitchers and talented young reliever Brandon Finnegan. The acquisition of Cueto makes the Royals the clear favorite to win the American League pennant, […]
When ESPN’s Mike Sando released his quarterback ratings this past week it created the usual buzz that comes with these silly overblown rankings. Is RG3 done? Is Andrew Luck now elite? Those were the questions buzzing around the media. What I found most interesting was the seemingly universal consensus that Peyton Manning is no longer […]
The Arkansas Razorbacks closed last college football season as the team on the rise in the SEC West. After going through a miserable 2012 season under John L. Smith, followed by twelve straight conference losses to begin Bret Bielama’s tenure, the Hogs got rolling down the stretch. They shut out LSU & Ole Miss, got […]
I became familiar with the sabermetrics movement in baseball the way a lot of people in my generation did—through the writing of Bill James, which I read in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a college student (usually while consuming massive amounts of beer by myself, but that’s another story entirely). I was a […]
The state of Ohio has enjoyed a good sports run recently. They won the national championship in college football with Ohio State, reached the NBA Finals with the Cleveland Cavaliers and both teams looked primed for a lot more in the seasons to come. Baseball hasn’t gone so well, with the Reds and Indians each […]
The Los Angeles Dodgers are an organization renowned for their pitching. The large confines of Dodger Stadium have made it an amenable working environment for pitchers and the best Los Angeles teams have thrived on pitching—from Don Sutton to Fernando Valenzuela to Orel Hershiser to Clayton Kershaw in our own day, along with All-Star Game […]
This wasn’t supposed to be the New York Yankees’ year. Alex Rodriguez’ comeback was dismissed, no one gave much thought to Mark Teixeira coming back, C.C. Sabathia looked shot and now Derek Jeter’s retirement—on top of Mariano Rivera’s the previous year—stripped the team of its heart and soul. Yet, here the Yankees are at the […]
The American League had a pretty decent crop of catchers to pick from in the voting for this year’s All-Star Game. That’s what makes it disappointing that the nod went to Kansas City’s Salvador Perez. There were at least two, and maybe even three better choices. And the one most clearly deserving to start on […]
The last time Navy football played in a major bowl game was when Roger Staubach, a future Dallas Cowboys’ legend, won the Heisman Trophy for the Midshipmen, took them to an undefeated season and they played in the Cotton Bowl against top-ranked Texas. Navy lost that game and hasn’t been back to college football’s biggest […]
The All-Star voting is complete and the American League’s starting shortstop nod went to Alcides Escobar of the Kansas City Royals. Escobar benefitted from the enthusiastic voting support of Kansas City’s Pendergast machine passionate baseball fans, who got him 11 million votes for a pedestrian .314 on-base percentage/.374 slugging percentage and some good defense. While […]
Jim Harbaugh’s interview with ESPN talk show host Colin Cowherd last week was, to put it mildly, on the uninspiring said, so much so that The Herd had to terminate the interview. Before Harbaugh’s boring answers, clearly done to tweak the host, Cowherd said that we need to be patient with Harbaugh in Ann Arbor, […]
