Fuck Jon Lynch. If what America’s got left to unify it is fucking corporate-shilling NFL football, close up shop, sell the assets and let’s all move to Australia. For fuck’s sake, Jon Lynch: when asked a question about something other than football, just say, “All I know is football.”

Indiana is also the home of the second (current) version of the Ku Klux Klan. What a shitty state.

Avenue Q is correct: we’re all racist. Actually, we’re all prejudiced against people “not like us”; the color of one’s skin is an easy identifier for white people to discern “not like us”. There is evolutionary “justification” for that: you don’t want to trust a stranger to your tribe because they might bring…

This is reminiscent of the NL Cy Young “races” of 1998 and 2008.

Great use of headline and lead picture, Patrick. First rate!

“Major College* Football Coach Values Alleged Talent Over Ethics”

“looked, for one night, like his old, less-old self”

I’m not big on “unwritten rules” but do believe in vague concepts like competitive fairness. Plunking a guy who got a hit off you is bs (particularly when you pitch in the AL and don’t have to ever face the music at the plate, a la Clemens for most of his career), but hitting a guy because he hit a guy who got a hit…

I’m pretty much as white as white gets and have benefited enormously from the accident of my birth: even I can see the horseshit associated with this effort by the traitorous Confederate-sympathizers to remake America into the white utopia it never was.

There was a really depressing article in Slate (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/08/03/outside_of_elite_colleges_affirmative_action_is_already_disappearing.html) that shows how race-based admission selections have basically cratered at all schools but the extreme elite. So this isn’t really about “fairness”…

I grew up next to Stanford University in the late 60s/early 70s; my dad was a former Stanford varsity athlete and we had season tickets. Plunkett was a local boy/legend with a great story (poor kid, blind parents, great QB) and a self-effacing personality. He got a raw deal in New England (just because the team was…

The NFL will be ridden hard until its profit-generating corpse is truly dead. I think what we will see is the slow death of football from the bottom up: there will ultimately be no more players coming through the pipeline.

Rule 5.09(a)(1) “catch” comment: “A fielder may reach over a fence, railing, rope or other line of demarcation to make a catch. He may jump on top of a railing, or canvas that may be in foul ground.”

Advanced statistical measures work in baseball because baseball is a single-moment-at-a-time game, where each moment is a one-on-one event (pitcher vs. batter, outfield vs. fly ball, base runner vs. pitcher, etc.) You can not only break down a game into a discrete chronology of data points, you can compare those data…

You’ve got Mississippi, football, and “higher education” in the same story and you’re professing confusion as to ethics of some of the participants? Will the next Deadspin story express dismay about a story involving the NFL, money, and player health?

As a Dodger fan, it pains me to see Beltre have such success elsewhere, but what an amazingly under the radar great career this guy has had. It definitely helps to start your professional career in your mid-teens, but the dude is still producing at an All-Star+ level at the age of 38 (this season’s numbers on a per…

“Stephen A. Smith is a gross loser who lives on the coattails of professional athletes.”

I’m generally in favor of putting whatever condiment you like on food, but there are always limits. I cite a very insightful philosopher on this point:

My son played AAU basketball for quite a while. The only thing worse than the adults who take the whole thing as their life, are the ones who do that but also have a super-talent as a child. Parents like LaVar Ball are as toxic to sports development as Trump supporters are to America.

I love Lebron, but I think this is his way of avoiding all the hate he engendered the first time he left Cleveland. “I love Cleveland because it is now, and always has been, my home, but I play basketball to win championships, period. I came back, did everything the organization asked of me, delivered 4 Finals and 1…