Andrew Kerth 
The World Cup has always been the biggest stage in football. What it pays, though, is a different story depending on when you showed up. When Italy won in 1982, the prize for lifting the trophy was $2.2 million split among a squad of players and staff. Good money in 1982, but pocket change by … Read more
Baseball is the only major sport played without a clock. No buzzer, no horn, no timer ticking down — just outs, and when both teams run out of ways to get them, extra innings. Then more extra innings. Then, sometimes, a few more after that. Most extra-inning games resolve themselves in the 10th or 11th. … Read more
Baseball has never had a 7-footer. That’s the strange thing about a sport where size is supposed to be everything — the NBA has had dozens of players taller than 7’0″, but in nearly 150 years of major league baseball, nobody has ever cracked that mark. The average big leaguer stands around 6’2″, and anything … Read more
Here’s a stat that captures how lopsided NBA history really is: of the 79 championships handed out since 1947, more than half belong to just five franchises. The Celtics and Lakers alone have combined for 35 titles — and yet right now, the league is in the middle of the longest run of different champions … Read more
Watch a match from the upper deck and the players look tiny, lost in a sea of green that seems to stretch forever. That impression is not an illusion. A football pitch is genuinely enormous, big enough that fans reach for farmland comparisons to make sense of it, which is exactly why so many people … Read more
The World Cup Golden Boot goes to the top scorer of each tournament, and the most recent winner is France’s Kylian Mbappé, who netted 8 goals at Qatar 2022 — edging Lionel Messi’s 7 as Argentina took the title. The all-time single-tournament record still belongs to France’s Just Fontaine, whose 13 goals in 1958 have … Read more
The most runs ever scored by one team in a College World Series game is 24, set by Florida in a 24-4 rout of LSU in the 2023 finals — a performance that included six home runs and a record-tying 23 hits. That broke a 66-year-old mark of 23, set by Notre Dame in a … Read more
The NBA Finals MVP award, given since 1969 and now named the Bill Russell Trophy, goes to the standout performer of the championship series. Michael Jordan holds the record with six, all won with the Chicago Bulls, followed by LeBron James with four. Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Tim Duncan each won three. The most … Read more
The U.S. Open is golf’s toughest major, first played in 1895 and won most recently by J.J. Spaun, who became the 125th champion in 2025 with a dramatic two-shot win over Robert MacIntyre at Oakmont Country Club. Four players share the all-time record with four titles each: Willie Anderson (1901–1905), Bobby Jones (1923–1930), Ben Hogan … Read more
Lionel Messi holds the all-time record for most men’s World Cup appearances with 26 matches, set across five tournaments from 2006 to 2022. He’s followed by Germany’s Lothar Matthäus (25), Miroslav Klose (24), Italy’s Paolo Maldini (23), and Cristiano Ronaldo (22). On the national side, Brazil leads everything: the only country to play in all … Read more