Andrew Kerth 
It is one of the most common questions casual fans and youth-baseball parents ask: do baseball players actually wear protective cups? With baseballs flying around at 100 miles per hour and foul tips deflecting in every direction, it seems like an obvious yes, but the real answer is more nuanced and depends heavily on the … Read more
Every July, a rookie drops 30 in Vegas and the same two questions flood search bars: do those stats count, and do they mean anything? The answers are no, and it depends who you are — which is a more interesting answer than it sounds. Summer League numbers count toward nothing official, and their predictive … Read more
The two-way contract is modern basketball’s most important invention for players you haven’t heard of yet. Created in 2017, it lets each NBA team carry three extra players who split their season between the NBA and the G-League — paid roughly half the rookie minimum (about $600,000), capped at 50 NBA games, ineligible for the … Read more
Every July, mid-Derby, millions of viewers ask the same question: do these count? The short answer is no — not one of the hundreds of home runs hit in a Home Run Derby counts toward anything in a player’s official statistics. Josh Hamilton’s legendary 28 in 2008 appear nowhere in his career record. Kyle Schwarber … Read more
The most-watched Home Run Derby ever is the one everyone would have guessed: 2008, when Josh Hamilton hit 28 first-round homers into the old Yankee Stadium night and 9.1 million people watched him do it. What almost nobody knows is that the list this record sits atop just became a closed book: 2025 was the … Read more
If Tuesday’s All-Star Game is tied after nine innings, there are no extra innings. Instead, baseball deploys the most entertaining tiebreaker in American sports: a home run swing-off — three hitters per side, three swings each, most homers wins the game. It sounds like something invented on a playground, it was written into the actual … Read more
The Seattle Seahawks just sold for $9.612 billion — the biggest price ever paid for an NFL team and the second-biggest for any sports franchise on Earth, landing within sight of the $10 billion Lakers deal that tops the all-time list. Two of the three largest team sales in history have now happened within about … Read more
MLB’s luxury tax — officially the Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) — is baseball’s substitute for a salary cap: teams can spend whatever they want, but every dollar above a set threshold gets taxed at escalating rates that reach 110% for the biggest repeat spenders. In 2026, the final year of the current labor deal, the … Read more
No nation has a relationship with the penalty shootout like England’s. Ten shootouts at major tournaments, seven defeats, a thirty-year stretch in which “penalties” became shorthand for national sporting trauma, and then, in the modern era, something like a cure. With England facing Norway in Saturday’s World Cup quarterfinal, and the memory of every knockout … Read more
Lionel Messi is 39 years old, has scored eight goals at this World Cup, owns the all-time tournament scoring record, and every match Argentina plays now doubles as a global farewell watch: is this actually his last World Cup? The short answer is that everything, his age, his own words, his contract, the calendar, says … Read more