So powerful that he can't persuade a single marquee basketball player to join his team, despite the fact that his team plays its home games inside of the "World's Most Famous Arena," which is located in the heart of the world's #1 media market, which is populated by millions and millions of die-hard basketball fans…

Who Really Runs New York Sports?

Those A's teams, the ones that introduced steroids to baseball, launched La Russa's career.

OK, fine. Of course, McGwire's own bash brother is the obvious example of another guy in the Oakland clubhouse who was juicing, and Canseco's numbers were nothing to sneeze at on those late-80s A's squads. You take him off those teams as well, and things start to look a little bit tight for Tony.

This. A harsh punishment and Rice surely appeals it, pointing to every past instance of convicted domestic abuse that drew a lighter reprimand (and possibly highlighting unprosecuted instances of domestic abuse that the NFL did nothing about because they never made the papers). If the appeal succeeds, the NFL comes…

I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure that if Ray Rice had participated in the confinement, serial rape, forced breeding, torture, drowning, shooting, and murder of dozens of women over a period of several years he'd be looking at at least 8 games.

And another generation of athletes and fans begins to view the women in sports as just a little less human.

Gumbel's 43% number is also complete horseshit. That number, I believe, refers to the percentage of LaRussa's 2,728 total wins that were earned while McGwire was under contract with the team LaRussa was managing. McGwire certainly didn't play in 43% of all games won by LaRussa. Not even close. In fact, McGwire was…

You're absolutely right that there could be certain meaningful knock-on effects if you remove McGwire from LaRussa's teams. But, as a practical matter, we have no way of divining what those would have been. Hell, maybe LaRussa gets into a fatal car accident driving home after a game that would've ended at a…

LaRussa is being honored for guiding teams he managed to 2,728 wins, a total that ranks third in baseball history. But here's the rub: about 43% of all of those wins were recorded when LaRussa was managing Mark McGwire and winning because of his prodigious power.

Furniture is the pride of Hickory, NC.

And this chart represents the horizontal movement of his pitches throughout the night. (A number close to zero or a negative number indicates the ball diving toward a right-handed batter)

Knoblauch was convicted in 2010 of hitting a different ex-wife.

The comparison to the Vick situation is completely spurious, but not at all for the reasons you cite.

Thanks, Tom! Since you made it clear that nobody at Deadspin was going to do the heavy lifting, but failed to mention that the good folks over at Slate had already done just that, I went ahead and tried to see what I could glean from the few short pages of Harman's work that are publicly available online. …

Yikes. This is bad. Just from reading the few pages excerpted in the Amazon "Look Inside" preview for Harman's Court Confidential: Inside the World of Tennis, which was just published earlier this year, you start to get the gist that this guy is shamelessly lifting lots of little bits from lots of different tennis…

Meanwhile, in a counterfactual universe . . .

The "and a half" is every bit as superfluous as the "going on 26."

We're not talking about his "every move" here. We're talking about The Decision. And, in that instance, LeBron took what could have been as private an exercise as he wanted, announced with as little fanfare as he chose, and decided to turn it into an egomaniacal and completely tone-deaf televised spectacle. This…

It's official: Michael Sam is one of the six hottest tops in the NFL.