“God hates (fill in city name)” was a meme Bill Simmons worked into the ground during his writing days. He could hardly go a month without revisiting the topic, tweaking it slightly, looking at it from another perspective. Sure, it usually came out with Cleveland and Buffalo near the top, as “most benighted sports cities” […]

[Read more →]

Back in February I looked at the list of the 10 bobblehead nights the Dodgers were planning for the 2015 season, and saw a name there barely familiar to me: Justin Turner. And I did a post entitled The Unknown Bobblehead … referring to this Justin Turner person, who for all I knew might have […]

[Read more →]

I don’t know Mat Latos. Pretty sure I’ve never been in the same room with him. Maybe not even in the same stadium, since he got to the bigs just as I was leaving California. But he seems to be the sort of guy who gets under the skin of people around him, and Dodgers […]

[Read more →]

Gasoline price hikes always come as something of a shock in the Gulf, where many countries are pretty much floating on oil and consumers expect to pay very little at the pump. Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading producer of oil and gas prices there have always been cheap — about 59 cents a gallon, […]

[Read more →]

It isn’t clear how long it will take cycling to escape the long shadow cast by Lance Armstrong‘s six doping-tainted Tour de France victories. It hasn’t happened yet, as Chris Froome found out while winning the 2015 Tour yesterday. He was a little too convincing as the winner of a tough mountain stage on Bastille […]

[Read more →]

I much prefer people from some professions to be older than I am. Presidents. Ministers. Doctors. The ones I deal with, anyway. I have always assumed that someone is certainly going to be wiser than me if he or she is older. I don’t think that’s an unusual preference; as you get older I believe […]

[Read more →]

What I wrote then? Jurgen Klinsmann needs to be fired as soon as possible if the U.S. national soccer team is going to make any real improvement ahead of the 2018 World Cup. The latest?

[Read more →]

For most of my life, airline food was mocked and derided. “Cold” … “rubbery” … “tasteless” … “inedible”. We ate airline food because it came with the ride. It was distributed, free. No, really. (And I realize some Millennials have never seen anything more tasty than peanuts given away/sold. Or, worse, a bag of mini-pretzels.) […]

[Read more →]

Watching the match, or hearing the score, is enough to make a U.S. soccer fan wince. Jamaica 2, United States 1. In the semifinals of the Gold Cup. Played on American soil. But consider it Step 1 of what cannot help but be an unpleasant stretch for the U.S. national team — if things are […]

[Read more →]

When we left the country for Abu Dhabi, in 2009, the whole of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ season could be seen on TV by consumers who had even lower-end cable packages. This month, we came home during ball season … and I was able, for the first time, to experience the ridiculous situation — now […]

[Read more →]