This s*** should be illegal. It is not OK. | | | | Matt Kenseth celebrates after winning the Can-Am 500.
(Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “This s*** should be illegal. It is not OK.”
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| | rantnrave:// CARLOS BELTRAN was the biggest star nobody really talked about as a star. Nine All-Star games. A historic 2004 postseason with the ASTROS. A rare combination of speed, defense and power. One of the smoothest players of his generation. A player so flush with talent that it looked too easy. He retired Monday after 20 MLB seasons. Went out with a WORLD SERIES title. He should be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Will he be? His reputation isn't as great as his stat-line. Why? Because he played in KANSAS CITY while the ROYALS were mired as perpetual losers? Because he struck out looking to end the 2006 NLCS for the METS? Because there's no singular storyline to narrate his career? Is narrative the only way to latch onto a player and give him validation? Who gets to write the story? No fanbase can claim Beltran as their own. He wasn't bombastic or self-indulgent. Beltran was just a fantastic player, and one of baseball's best ambassadors. He pushed for mandatory team-employed interpreters for Spanish-speaking players. He built a baseball academy in his native PUERTO RICO. His veteran savvy helped propel the Astros to a ring. There were few players better than Beltran during his career. There were few more likable. It never made much sense why he wasn't appreciated as much as he should've been. The only mystery now is which hat he'll wear in COOPERSTOWN... Doesn't matter who you are, leave me alone on the subway... How the NBA and NFL are alike: seems like we're always talking more about what's going on off the field than on it. How they're different: the NBA is light and fluffy, the NFL is heavy. The NBA is fueled by gossip and social media postings of grown men. With the NFL, we're talking concussions and protests. If sports is an escape, which world do fans want to run to? The NBA is MEAN GIRLS. The NFL is LORD OF THE FLIES. Does it matter in the big picture? Does that help the NBA gain fans or cause the NFL to lose them? Or is this all idle chatter?... Would NFL owners strip JERRY JONES of the COWBOYS as payback for fighting the GOODELL contract? Let me know when discovery starts for that lawsuit... What happened to just throwing tomatoes at people? | | | - Mike Vorkunov, curator |
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 | The New Yorker |
| For the stars of the streaming service Twitch, success means working around the clock. | | |
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 | GQ |
| Colin Kaepernick's protest against police brutality puts him in rare company in sports history. | | |
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 | The Atavist Magazine |
| How the best baseball pitcher in the American Negro leagues played for the cruelest dictator in the Caribbean. | | |
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 | Yahoo Sports |
| What Brad Augustine knows makes him very dangerous to nervous souls across college basketball after he got swept up and potentially turned in the feds' corruption investigation. | | |
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 | Slate |
| The statistics say teams should go for it on fourth down. Are NFL teams finally wising up? | | |
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 | Bloomberg |
| If anyone is privy to the inner workings of the NFL it’s sports industry consultant Marc Ganis, who advises Commissioner Roger Goodell and the 32 owners on business matters. Ganis talks about a number of issues related to the business of the NFL, including whether Roger Goodell is in jeopardy of losing his job because of a squabble with Jerry Jones. | | |
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 | Uninterrupted |
| Ben Simmons, the 2016 NBA No. 1 overall draft pick, sits down with Maverick Carter to discuss his journey from Australia to the NBA and his take on college ball. | | |
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 | The Players' Tribune |
| I am blessed to have played this game for 20 years. Now, it is time for me to go home. | | |
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 | Remezcla |
| Eddie Guerrero was born and raised on the El Paso-Juárez borderlands, and the duality of being a fronterizo helped shape his life and career. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| When the photographer Peter Widing, a close friend of mine, died last year I decided to do something the two of us had often talked about: finding the three young players from a picture I had loved since I first saw it 11 years ago. | | |
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 | Awful Announcing |
| Run by 23-year-old Omar Raja, the Bleacher Report-owned House of Highlights is SportsCenter for the social-media generation. | | |
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 | Forbes |
| This sort of manic, manifest destiny hasn’t been seen in soccer since the old North American Soccer League expanded from 18 to 24 teams in a single year, 1978. | | |
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 | ESPN |
| The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto is a hallowed collection of important artifacts representing the great history and achievements of the best players in the world. And then there's this stuff. | | |
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 | For The Win |
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 | FanGraphs |
| Carlos Beltran didn't play in Triple-A. Technically, that isn't true - Beltran appeared in five games with Omaha in the year 2000. But by that point, he was already a major-league regular. Beltran didn't make the classic stop in Triple-A, and, for that matter, he didn't make the classic stop in Double-A, getting called up after just 47 games with Wichita. | | |
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| The Players' Tribune |
| In my heart, I knew it was over when we walked off the field. I think we all did. There were all of these complicated mathematical scenarios, but we knew the biggest one: We had to at least tie. Had to have that last goal. | | |
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 | Bleacher Report |
| One of them inspired a comparison to fellow Yankees star Derek Jeter, which sounds pretty good until you find out someone compared the other one to Ted Williams. One of them set a National League record with 39 home runs as a rookie, which would have gotten him much more attention except the other one set the major league rookie record by blasting 52. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| The president made the request of his Chinese counterpart during a two-day state visit in Beijing. | | |
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 | Vice Sports |
| A group of cheerleaders at Kennesaw State University in Georgia kneeled for the anthem in late September. Their lives have since changed forever. | | |
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 | Jeff Pearlman |
| With little fanfare, Emmett Leo Pearlman, age 11, retired from baseball today. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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