The quiet but effective way Kaepernick has created the take a knee movement would resonate with the baseball legend whose brilliance helped combat the terrible racism he encountered in the 1940s and 50sWhen Time magazine conducted a poll in 1947 with the aim of identifying the most popular person in the United States, Bing Crosby came out on top. Close behind was Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who, earlier in the year, had become the first African American to compete in the major leagues. Not everyone had cheered that seismic event. Some teams threatened to strike rather than play against a team including Robinson. Individual opponents greeted his appearance on the field with shouts of “Hey, nigger, why don’t you...
Columbus Crew’s owner plans to move the team from Ohio to Texas. And MLS doesn’t appear too bothered about stopping himComing off the United States’ failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, Major League Soccer fans needed good news. What they got instead was a blindside. Last week, Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl published a story detailing how Anthony Precourt, the California-based owner of Columbus Crew since 2013, had plans to move the team to Austin, Texas, over 1,000 miles away, in 2019. The stated purpose was to force the city of Columbus, Ohio, into giving the club a sweetheart tax deal on a new stadium in a downtown location. But the language of a press release from Columbus’ front...
When Houston and Los Angeles take the field on Tuesday their players will have been picked by data and analytics, rather than scouts with years in the fieldThe future of the World Series does not wear Dodger blue or Astro orange. It won’t throw a strike, hit a home run or chase a line drive into the gap, though it can predict the probability of such things occurring with remarkable accuracy.The future of the World Series lives not in the mortal realm, but in mainframes and clouds and flash drives and smartphones carried by men with pedigrees much loftier than half a lifetime in the worn fields of the minor leagues. Related: Baseball no longer a supergiant but it is...
The teams are decided for the post-season. But who will have the biggest say on the destination of this season’s MLS Cup?Josef Martinez (Atlanta United) Nothing in Major League Soccer is as thrilling as an Atlanta United game at their new Mercedes Benz Stadium home. Tata Martino’s men have scored more goals than any other side in becoming the first expansion team to make the play-offs in their debut season since the 2009 Seattle Sounders. Much of that attacking success has been down to Josef Martinez.The Venezuelan is United’s master of chaos, scoring 18 goals in just 16 starts. If Atlanta are to make a play-off run, keeping Martinez firing will prove critical. Of course, without the supply line of...
The World Series does not consume the US as it once did. But baseball still offers a window on the best and the worst of AmericaBaseball has long seen itself as America’s game, a game as great-hearted, humble and fundamentally decent as America itself. And for the better part of the 20th-century, at least in terms of the game’s popularity, baseball was indeed America’s game, and its biggest stars were famous in a way that athletes simply aren’t famous anymore. Fans in the 1920s traveled hundreds of miles just to see Babe Ruth, and the New York Daily News hired a journalist to write about Ruth, and only Ruth, 365 days a year. The most famous players of later eras...