Andrew Kerth 
Has anyone ever won the Home Run Derby back-to-back? Yes — exactly twice in the event’s four-decade history: Ken Griffey Jr. in 1998-99, and Yoenis Céspedes in 2013-14. That’s the entire list, which tells you how hard repeating is in an event where eight of the world’s best power hitters swing under identical conditions. Pete … Read more
Every Home Run Derby, the same mid-broadcast question sweeps living rooms: wait, who’s that pitching? The answer is one of the event’s best quirks — there is no assigned pitcher. Every hitter brings his own: a batting-practice coach he’s seen ten thousand pitches from, a bench coach, a personal hitting guru, a brother, and in … Read more
Every July, the same argument: does the Home Run Derby ruin swings? The “Derby curse” is baseball’s most durable folk belief — born the summer Bobby Abreu hit 41 Derby homers and then nearly stopped homering entirely, fed by a generation of second-half slumps, and stubbornly resistant to the statisticians who keep explaining it away. … Read more
Every Home Run Derby, the same mid-broadcast question sweeps living rooms: wait, who’s that pitching? The answer is one of the event’s best quirks — there is no assigned pitcher. Every hitter brings his own: a batting-practice coach he’s seen ten thousand pitches from, a bench coach, a personal hitting guru, a brother, and in … Read more
The most storied list in women’s sports has its newest name — Linda Nosková, winner of the first all-Czech final, joining the Wimbledon women’s singles champions, a roll call that runs from Billie Jean King through Navratilova’s untouchable nine titles, the Williams era, and last year’s astonishing double-bagel final. This year’s edition arrives with a … Read more
The Pro Football Hall of Fame has 387 members counting this year’s class — the 2026 group headlined by Drew Brees and Larry Fitzgerald that gets enshrined in Canton this August — and the way they distribute across the NFL’s 32 franchises is a map of the league’s entire power history: the Bears and Packers, … Read more
The World Cup’s Best Young Player award has the best hit rate of any trophy in soccer: its winners list reads like a preview of the next decade, Thomas Müller before the Müller era, Paul Pogba before the nine-figure transfer, Kylian Mbappé the summer he arrived as a teenager and left as a world champion. … Read more
The Open Championship is the only major without a permanent wanderlust problem: instead of a new venue every year (the U.S. Open, PGA) or one course forever (the Masters), golf’s oldest championship rotates through a closed club of links courses called “the rota” — ten venues, all seaside, all in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, … Read more
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