Articles

Yakkin' About Baseball: Sniffing Around Marlon Byrd Is Upsetting

David Roth

 et al.

The search for new and less upsetting ways to say "wants to trade for" and a frank discussion of abusive batting coaches with DJ Khaled. Also lifetime bans for various people, for various reasons, some having to do with orange juice.

The Boy King: An Interview with Magnus Carlsen

Jonathan Zalman

The world of competitive chess has been noticed most on the periphery of other eras or stories: the Cold War, the rise of the supermachines, the tax evasion fueled anti-Semitism of a former legend. But if Norway's reigning chess prodigy can become a world champion, we may find ourselves living in the age of Magnus Carlsen. 

Seven Innings

Dmitry Samarov

The rewards and punishments of following a baseball team are many and infinitely varied. If your team isn't expected to do much and ends up competing, you can celebrate that; if they're expected to win it all but end up barely breaking even, you can bemoan that. But what if everyone predicts they'll be bad and they turn out much, much worse?

The Ghost of Robert Swift

Sam Riches

Robert Swift was one of the last prep-to-pro big men before the NBA instituted its one-and-done rule. He never became the player he might have become, and was paid a lot of money for a few years of nondescript basketball. And now he's all the way gone.

Loud, Quiet, Loud: At the Races in Dover

Gregg Gethard

NASCAR isn't the juggernaut that it was a decade ago, or the outlaw regional entertainment it was a couple decades before that. What it is, though, is something of an open question. A weekend at the races with Kyle Busch and the fans who love and hate him answers a few questions, and raises some others. A preview from Classical Magazine Issue 4, Being There.

Bryce Harper, Human Mormon

Evan Hall

Bryce Harper may well wind up as a generation-defining baseball talent, and is definitely one of the more interesting people currently playing the game. He's also a Mormon. Let's leave it at that, maybe.

Gangster, Prankster

Damon Agnos

I’d chosen not to work the investigation after the Malice at the Palace. I didn’t want any part of that hangover. Still, I ended up Detroit anyway, training police detectives and legal investigators to become basketball P.I.s for a particularly competitive lawyers’ league. Not my favorite assignment, but a basketball P.I. can’t live on love of the game alone.

The Sure Thing

C.J. Tuttle

When DMX’s “Ain’t No Sunshine” started blaring over the arena’s speakers the tension in the room became palpable. Anderson Silva and Chris Weidman's entourage each took about ten minutes to reach the octagon, and from the moment the two combatants decided to forgo the ceremonial touching of gloves, we knew this was going to be a fight. And there is nothing like being at a fight.

Why We Watch: David Wright, The Man Who Was The Mets

Patrick Sauer

David Wright is still young and still great, and has a lot of baseball left in his career. This is good news for Mets fans, but Wright's modest, half-goofy greatness already defines his team, in the best possible way.

Boxing, Fighting, and Nelson Mandela

Sam Riches

The long fight for equality in South Africa is the struggle that has defined Nelson Mandela's life. So it makes sense that boxing was Mandela's greatest sporting passion, although it's a little more complicated than that.