Andrew Kerth 
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
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