With the coronavirus pandemic grinding the global sports world to a halt, Major League Baseball is exploring ways to start the season as early as MayAccording to multiple reports this week, the season would start in May with teams traveling to play each other in Arizona. There are 10 ballparks within 50 miles of each other in the Phoenix area, and one Major League stadium: Chase Field, the artificial turfed, enclosed, air conditioned home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, that could host daily triple headers. The other venues are open-air, and will be stiflingly hot during the Arizona summer, so any games in those parks would presumably need to be played at night. Fans would not be allowed into the stadiums....
Football remains resistant to the increase in scoring in other sports, with even penalties becoming harder to convertSomething strange happened in Major League Baseball last year. Batters on the 30 teams started hitting home runs at an unprecedented rate from opening day in late March and kept it up all the way to the World Series in October. May brought a record for homers in a calendar month. It was broken in June. By the end of the season, MLB’s increasingly traumatised battalions of pitchers had collectively given up 6,776 homers, an advance of nearly 11% on the previous record of 6,106. While professional baseball has more teams now than it did in its early days, the per-game rate of...
Fans flocked to the Red Sox-Yankees clash in their droves to guzzle hot dogs, belt out YMCA – and see a sublime openingBaseball makes cricket look like an almost stat-free zone. This weekend in London records have been falling over themselves with a regularity that probably constituted a record in itself.But the one that will resound through Major League Baseball’s executive suite is this: its first two games played in Europe drew the sport’s highest attendances in 16 years. US baseball no longer even has a stadium that can hold 60,000 spectators, never mind fill it, near as dammit, in mid-season. So by coming to London the sport seems to be on to something – if not big, then at...
New York Yankees against Boston Red Sox will draw a bigger attendance for each game than the weekend’s two Cricket World Cup blockbusters combinedNearly seven years’ worth of Saturday nights have passed since what was then London’s Olympic Stadium played host to an exhibition of British sporting magnificence – which lasted a good half-hour. On Saturday comes the precise reverse: a weekend of something even more un-British than winning: the Yanks are coming – to play the most alien sport of all.In the 1980s, suborned by Channel 4, a sizeable minority of British sports followers became infatuated with that strange sport for sizeable people, American football. Basketball, being simple to organise and economical on space, has long been played in...
The club’s sudden and unexpected upturn is a serious threat to American League powerhouses, and confirmation of one man’s skillsBilly Beane, the executive VP of baseball operations and resident mad scientist of the Oakland Athletics, is back disrupting American League powerhouses, safely ensconced beneath 50 feet of crap. After four losing seasons the ballyhooed Beane, made famous around the globe thanks to his portrayal in Moneyball, has his A’s on the brink of bringing Hollywood storylines back to the Bay Area. And only now, after nearly two months of piling up victories, is the baseball world finally taking notice. Related: 'It was intentional': Braves and Marlins brawl after Urena hits Acuna with 97mph fastball Chaptain America has a PSA for...