With the Yang-Mills existence problem seemingly solved…we now move on to the Heyman existence problem. Or something.

And sometimes there isn’t much you can do. I wrote what I did about Hawk Harrelson and The Will To Win because at some point, you have to come to the conclusion that someone isn’t worth talking to anymore. Hawk’s problem wasn’t that he was wrong, it was that he was stuck in a frame of mind that starts from conclusions and will, when it cares to, circle back around to ...

Sounding more like Bats Battaglia than Joey Bats…

“I think it’s a cheap shot and uncalled for to say something like that without having some sort of evidence to back it up,” Bautista said Friday in the visitor’s clubhouse at Fenway Park. “Comments and articles like that is what sometimes makes us wonder what’s the true intention of somebody that’s in the media. It blows my mind that somebody would just go out there and do something like that, and write an article where you’re ...

So it wasn’t the 7.96 ERA over his last three seasons that made Mitch Williams retire. It was the fun factor! #tommyrot

This team I did pick to win the AL West because I thought the additions of Josh Hamilton and Jason Vargas would help them because they are both low-key players who would fit in to the Angels clubhouse — which I have since found out from a player who has since left was not a very cohesive clubhouse. And it shows on the field.

Harold Reynolds pointed out one specific play ...

Neck Twitch Of The Death Nerve Strikes Again!

Mitch Williams appeared on 94.1 WIP this morning and ripped into Phillies pitching coach Rich Dubee, saying the Phillies need a new man for the job.

He said Roy Halladay‘s problems were a simple mechanical fix that Dubee simply could not find. He mentioned an encounter he had with Dubee in Spring Training, when Dubee yelled at him for trying to talk to his pitchers, although he claimed that did not make his criticism this morning personal. ...

Daugherty v. Social Media Vanguard #notaprayer

I don’t know if Jay Bruce regrets the tweet he sent out after the game Tuesday night. Reds media relations director Rob Butcher declined to ask Bruce if he’d speak to me, from St. Louis early Wednesday. I’m guessing Bruce isn’t happy with himself. He’s not a confrontational guy. He’s very pleasant, almost all the time. It was out of character for him to tweet this:

I appreciate all the tweets, good and bad, actually. You guys are what ...

The thought goes like this: When a network pays huge money for a sports team’s TV rights, it hikes its carriage fee for cable providers. The best regional sports networks (RSNs) cost upward of $3 a month for cable and satellite providers to provide to each household. With monthly TV bills already exorbitant and more options to provide entertainment, from Netflix to Hulu and beyond, consumers could rebel against the single-payment system and choose what they view a la carte. One executive who ...

~~ “I don’t want to look stupid!” ~~

Here we sit on April 25th and there are three aces who have yet to record a win for their teams: Matt Cain for the Giants, Cole Hamels for the Phillies and 2012 Cy Young Award winner David Price.

If I could have made a wager on this happening, can you imagine the odds I could have gotten? At least a million to one. But here we are, all three pitchers without a win.

Not only are all three without a win, but their teams have lost all 15 combined games the ...

Please read…

As an autism awareness advocate and parent of a child on the spectrum, Garfinkel’s comments struck a nerve. Being a caregiver to one with autism is hard enough. Having an exec make the comment, and having the season-ticket holders laugh was rubbing salt in the wound. “Rain Man,” of course, was an autistic savant. April is International Autism Awareness month. And the day before the brawl was Autism Awareness day at PETCO Park. It added up, and the seething turned into a ...

That’s the bold claim advanced last week by Michael Brendan Dougherty, who just took a step away from political writing to found a baseball newsletter (news-email?) called “The Slurve” [http://www.theslurve.com/], and who gives a great interview about the decision here. His case that baseball is peaking acknowledges the sport’s various difficulties (the Hall of Fame’s steroid problems, the pace of games, the Florida Marlins), but then follows with this:

   But overall the sport has ...

Fire Jon Miller!

On Former ESPN Broadcast Partner Joe Morgan: “I can’t presume to speak for Joe, but I think he definitely feels statistical analysis has its place. He works with Walt Jocketty now; he’s a consultant with the Reds. Walt picks his brain and Joe tells him what he thinks, based on his experience. Walt has his number-crunchers as well.

“Making up a roster based on numbers, or a decision based simply on the numbers, is where Joe disagrees. I remember talking about that with ...

Baseball in social media.

Brian Kenny…sigh.

Robinson Cano today fired his agent, Scott Boras, and signed up to become the first client of Roc Nation Sports, the Jay-Z-branded arm of Creative Artists Agency. Does this mean much? It’s not as though Memphis Bleek’ll be handling Cano’s negotiations for a new contract—he’ll be represented instead by Brodie Van Wagenen, who has brokered extensions for Ryans Braun, Zimmerman, and Howard. If anything, the move appears to be good news for the Yankees.

...Read More...

Turns out you can watch video with the radio announcer overlaid. I just tried it. Seems to work.

Your cable bill—$80 or $90, or whatever it is—is best understood as two prices. The programming (i.e. the channels you watch) and the distribution (i.e. the infrastructure and profits for the cable companies). Every time you pay a cable bill, the channels collect a small fee. It’s called an “affiliate fee.” The most in-demand channels tend to negotiate the highest fees. And those tend to be sports channels. Take a look.

By my rough calculation, if you pay $90 a month for cable, you are ...

McLean living my ass.

Pete Gaines, a friend of the site, said something stupid on Twitter to Chipper Jones over the weekend, and then spent most of the day day getting blasted—at Chipper’s Bieber-style behest—by both Jones and his followers. It was ugly and dumb and went on for hours, and we asked him to write about it.

Perhaps I was miffed that Jones’ mere presence happened across my Twitter timeline. I’ve heard stories over the years of Jones’ hypocrisy—that he put on a convincing ...

David Roth Sings Selections from The Great American Gongbook.

Since he announced earlier this week that he’d be retiring from broadcasting after this year’s World Series, the discussion about Tim McCarver—which was always and already defined by a heavy payload of “ugh, this guy”—split in two. The more generous argument holds that McCarver—a player for 21 years, and a broadcaster for an astonishing 29 postseasons—was once a more generous and less grandiose broadcaster than he is in his prickly, ...

Didn’t Bob Gamere mention WHIP one time and get into all sorts of trouble?

Orel Hershiser, an analyst on “Sunday Night Baseball,” contended that “it’s easier to bring the stat to the broadcast if it’s a formula that everybody understands.”

“All of us on this call listening to my voice right now, nobody can tell me the formula for WAR,” Hershiser said. “We know what it stands for, wins above replacement, but how do you come up with a number? I think people know what an RBI is, know what a home ...

Ax Falls (tired Joe joke).

There’s no way to put this delicately – it was a bad day at the Sporting News.

Sources tell me that the Sporting News fired around 12 writers/editors today, and here’s a partial list of those who were let go:

* Lisa Olson, one of the last remaining members of the AOL Fanhouse “merger”* from 2011
* Clifton Brown, formerly of the NY Times, whose most recent column and mugshot are on the front page of the Sporting News right now
* Stan McNeal, their baseball ...

“Delicious strawberry-flavored death!”

All that stuff stinks. But I could better tolerate such erosion if it didn’t coincide with the continuing loss of my heroes and personal icons. Time has taken Mickey, Cronkite, Carson, DeBusschere, Orbison and the great Bob Sheppard; Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and the Great One, Mr. Gleason; Ray Charles, Johnny Maestro and Vada Pinson. And Lou Grant, Andy Sipowicz and Big Dan Ingrahm have retired. There isn’t enough Willis Reed and Elgin Baylor to suit ...

In its report, Forbes, which has been tracking the league’s finances since 1998, revealed that the money that all teams made from the $450 million sale of the Montreal Expos in 2006 was invested in hedge funds are now worth more than $1 billion.

“The value of a team used to be about a team itself,” Forbes executive editor Michael Ozanian said in a phone interview with ESPN.com. “Then it shifted to the stadium value and then to the television deals and now it’s more about what’s not on the ...

In the past few years, I’ve bought eighty-one leather jackets. Dozens of boots and leather gloves. I’ve purchased pants that cost $5,000. I own a $22,000 coat. This winter I took a tour of Milan’s Fashion Week (all expenses paid by Gucci, in appreciation of my many, many purchases), where I spent tens of thousands more and began to seriously grapple, once and for all, with a compulsion that could cost me more than just my life savings. My name is Buzz Bissinger. I am 58 years old, the ...

I put those concerns to Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. Sheriff Joe is a noisy supporter of SB 1070 and stricter deportation policies. It is a strange fate of the times that Sheriff Joe has jurisdiction over the Cactus League territory.

“Nobody’s going to go around stopping them at a restaurant, asking for their ID,” Arpaio says.

He pauses and adds, “Unless there’s some other reason to do that.”

Sheriff Joe is a Red Sox fan. Since he was raised outside ...

Must rifle through 45 boxes for The Herd’s “Here Comes the Fool”.

“Robinson Cano plays a lot harder in those [WBC] games than he does for the Yankees,” Colin Cowherd said on his ESPN Radio show Wednesday.

I like Cowherd’s show a lot. I’m a guest on it sometimes, but I think Cowherd has it completely wrong on Cano.

Colin was making a larger point about how the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico cared more about the WBC than the United States. I agree with Colin on that one. Winning that ...

Manny Acta, the second manager in Nationals history from 2007 to 2009, will join ESPN as an in-studio baseball analyst in English and Spanish. Acta will debut Sunday night on Baseball Tonight, the cable network’s baseball show. He will be a frequent voice on baseball across several of the network’s English and Spanish language shows and programming — but he still hopes one day to return to the dugout as a manager.

“It’s a great opportunity for me to step back from the game for a ...

Just when you thought ESPN was the only network out there trotting out an endless array of debate shows, this trailer for a new MLB Network show popped up during the World Baseball Classic… and I’ve lost all faith in humanity.

Head to head, it’s “MLB Now” starring Brian Kenny vs. Honking Harold Reynolds. [trying the embed]