Because sometimes things just need to be said….
Sports rants, observations, comments
Every player, captain, and assistant captain at this week’s Presidents Cup collected a $250,000 check before a single putt dropped. Add up both rosters and that’s $8.5 million handed out for an event that still bills itself as an exhibition played for pride, not pay. Nobody bothered updating the pitch. The money itself isn’t new. …
In August 2023, the Women’s World Cup final aired for free on Fox, and it drew the biggest U.S. television audience a Women’s World Cup final has ever pulled in. Four years from now, watching the next one will cost you a Netflix subscription. FIFA and Netflix just made it official. Netflix is now the …
I never expected to write a sentence defending baseball’s owners. But here we are, six months into MLB’s ugliest labor fight in a generation, and I keep landing on the same uncomfortable conclusion: this time, they might actually have a point. Formal CBA talks between MLB and the players’ union started on May 12. The …
Major League Baseball is on pace for about 0.5 errors a game this season. That would break the record of roughly 0.52 a game set just two years ago, and five of the lowest error-rate seasons in the sport’s 150-year history have all landed since 2021. Nobody got better at catching a baseball. Scorers did. …
I sat through a full month of NFL preseason football. None of it counted. Most of it was ugly. I’d do it again. That’s not sarcasm, either. Preseason has a well-earned reputation for being close to unwatchable, third-string quarterbacks throwing to receivers who won’t have a job by Labor Day, offensive lines that look like …
Nine teams got hit with a luxury tax penalty after both the 2024 and 2025 seasons, the most in the sport’s history, a level of tax-dodging math that would embarrass anyone else’s business plan. The Dodgers alone paid $169.4 million of it last year. They still won. That’s the whole argument for a salary cap, …
A base is fifteen inches square. That’s plenty of room for a runner’s hand to lose contact with it for exactly one video frame — and somehow, that’s apparently enough for a stadium full of people who just watched a guy get to the bag safely to be told, actually, no, he didn’t. That’s not …
Gary Woodland is playing East Lake this week, and I want you to sit with that sentence for a second before I tell you why it matters. Three years ago, Woodland had brain surgery to remove a tumor. That’s the kind of sentence that usually ends a career, not launches a comeback. It didn’t end …
Eight straight wins, capped off by an 11-7 sweep-clincher over Detroit this weekend. For a few days, Kauffman Stadium felt like 2024 again, back before this team apparently forgot how to win a baseball game for four straight months. Here’s the number that doesn’t make the highlight package: 58-74. That’s the record after the streak, …
Bunting is having a real moment in Major League Baseball this year, and I hate that I have to admit some of it is actually working. As a lifelong Royals fan, I’ve spent years watching a perfectly good rally get strangled because someone in the dugout decided a free out was a good trade. So …
The US Open kicked off this week, and buried in the schedule is a number that stopped me mid-scroll: the singles champion walks away with $5.5 million. Not for a season. Not for a career. For two weeks of tennis. The total prize pool this year is $108 million, up 20% from last year and …
Somebody buys a sports team, and within a few years the city is somehow paying for their stadium. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just how the math works out almost every time. A guy worth a few billion dollars buys an NFL or NBA franchise, then turns around and tells the local government that …