Baseball scored a rare ratings victory over the NFL boosted by a thrilling World Series. Could it mean a challenge to football’s TV dominance? Don’t bet on itEarly last Thursday morning, as the champagne flew in the Chicago Cubs clubhouse, Fox put to bed a rollicking World Series that smashed all expectations of what modern baseball can do on television with a 25.2 rating for Game 7. Later that night, on the NFL Network, the Atlanta Falcons clobbered the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and drew a once-unfathomable 3.2 rating, a 35% drop from the same Thursday night game last year. While in other years, the Falcons and Bucs game might have been written off as an anomaly, it was yet another...
The public are still footing the bill for stadiums across the US but many see it as a way of helping out the local economyAt a cost of $1bn to put a chill in the air during Texas Rangers games, it would surely go down as the sports world’s most expensive air-conditioning bill.Voters in the city that is home to the Rangers go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to finance a new Major League Baseball stadium that would replace a popular facility that is barely two decades old. Related: Only in Texas: can $70m on a high school football stadium ever be justified? Continue reading...
On Wednesday night, for the Cubs at least, the World Series ended in that rarest of things: an authentic, earned happy endingThere was a baseball game last night.There are three stories to tell about it, and they’re stacked on top of each other, tottering, each bigger than the last and relying on the one below it to make sense. The first story: the Cubs took a 6-3 lead into the eighth inning of Game 7 of the World Series, and Aroldis Chapman blew it. Then he won the game. Related: Chicago Cubs end most storied title drought in American sporting folklore | Bryan Armen Graham Related: Bill Murray basks in 'beautiful' victory as Obama invites Cubs to White House Continue...
No team has failed better over the last century but this extraordinary victory suggests the next World Series will not be far away for history’s glorious losers Baseball is a game of failures. A hitter with a .300 batting average, the traditional benchmark of a star player, fails seven times out of 10. Errors are given equal billing alongside runs and hits, a naked public accounting of imperfection consistent on scoreboards from Little League diamonds to major league stadiums. The game is a turn-based series of individual conflicts where mistakes are amplified. The difference between good and great, between winning and losing, exists in the management of the inevitable, incremental defeats that unlike other sports are not mere hazards of...
The former pitcher’s new show debuted on Tuesday morning and like boiling a pot of water, it took a few minutes for the takes to heat all the way up“Nothing that this government does feels in any way shape or form American. And that’s the thing that scares me. We’ve accepted the fact that our White House and this administration: they are cowards. They are bowing before the world. And they don’t represent any of the things I was brought up to believe this country stands for. So.” Curt Schilling’s podcast on Breitbart.com debuted on Tuesday morning and like boiling a pot of water, it took a few minutes for the takes to heat all the way up. But by...