Andrew Kerth 
If you’re new to soccer, one of the first things that trips you up is the clock. In most American sports — football, basketball, hockey — the clock counts down and the game ends when it hits zero. Soccer does the opposite: the clock starts at zero and counts up, and it never stops. So … Read more
Baseball names its best pitcher award after a man who won 511 games — a number so far beyond anything possible in the modern era that it functions less as a benchmark and more as a monument. Cy Young pitched until he was 44 years old, threw complete games the way today’s starters throw four-inning … Read more
Professional football stadiums in the United States are massive, purpose-built venues that cost billions of dollars and seat somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 people. They are considered among the largest sports facilities in the world. College football blows past all of them. Nine college football stadiums in the country seat more than any NFL stadium … Read more
Every July, the game stops pretending baseball is about pitching for one night. Eight of the biggest power hitters in the sport step into the cage and just swing. No defense, no strategy, no stolen bases. Pure distance and volume, counted out loud while a crowd loses its mind in a stadium that was built … Read more
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