Earlier this week, the Houston Astros called up Max Stassi from the Double-A Corpus Christi Hooks. On Tuesday, he made his Major League Debut against the Rangers, going a solid 2-3. On Wednesday, he faced Rangers reliever Tanner Scheppers. Things did not go very well. On the SportsCenter replay, fast-forward…
“You look nervous,” is how Deion Sanders greets me, loudly, as we meet me for the first time. I am not nervous. “That’s just the way my face looks,” I respond. He says that I look fine but definitely nervous. I am confused. We are standing in a fancy indoor…
The NBA, like other professional sports leagues, is in the midst of a statistical and technological revolution. Advanced stats are helping teams better evaluate players and tweak in-game strategy while new gadgets emerge that better evaluate just about everything. Take SportVU, an advanced camera-tracking system recently purchased by 15 NBA…
Congratulations, Cowboys fans. When any rational human being would have long since turned away in disgust, you’ve stuck by your team, undaunted by nearly two decades of unrelenting mediocrity. Your patience has finally paid off — not with a Super Bowl victory, which is still probably too much to hope…
Alex Tanney completed more touchdown passes during his college career (157) than any quarterback in NCAA history, though you probably wouldn’t know it. Tanney spent his time as an undergrad in the obscurity of Division III, leading the Fighting Scots of Illinois’ tiny Monmouth College. Tanney is way more famous…
The Ticket is and has long been the undisputed king of Dallas sports radio, consistently owning its two main competitors, ESPN 103.3 and 105.3 the Fan. But The Ticket’s ownership of the local market has always been figurative, in the sense that it consistently gets two or three times as…
Fact: Mormons will stop at nothing to convert you, hence the young men dressed for a business meeting you occasionally see riding their bicycles through Dallas’ triple-digit summer heat. Everyone knows about that. Less famous is the basketball-hustler strategy documented in the video above, which has been making its way…
Already this summer, we’ve been fed a steady diet of Johnny Manziel-related news and speculation. Was the Texas A&M phenom kicked out of the Manning Passing Academy because he was hungover, or was he just sleepy? Does he really have a Texas Longhorns tattoo? If so, did he think that…
It’s been more than six months since our sister paper in Miami broke the news that Rangers slugger Nelson Cruz, who was listed in patient logs as “Mohamad,” was a customer of Biogenesis, a shady South Florida steroid clinic. Major League Baseball finally brought down the hammer today, suspending Cruz…
When a half dozen bulls chase hordes of borderline-suicidal pedestrians through the cobblestone streets of Pamplona, Spain, every year, they do so as part of a cultural tradition dating back centuries. The bull run began as a way to goad the animals from corrals to the bull ring. The weeklong…
Over the weekend, Mark Cuban posted a long and extremely detailed open letter explaining what’s happened to the club over the past three seasons: how 2011’s championship squad came together; the reasons it was subsequently picked apart (basically, the the players were too old); why the Mavs have whiffed on…
The square jaw and impressively rectangular goatee should be proof enough of the incredible manliness of the Rangers’ newly acquired righty Matt Garza. So manly is he that it’s all but inevitable that the testosterone that courses through his veins will eventually boil over and spill out onto Twitter, which…
There are still things you can’t do on a Texas in Sunday. Buy liquor, for example. Baseball, however, is perfectly fine. That wasn’t always the case. On this day in 1905, the entire Dallas and Fort Worth professional ball teams were arrested for playing a couple of games at what…
The image of John Rocker, his rope-veined neck pulsing as he charges maniacally from bullpen to pitcher’s mound, lives on in baseball history as a visual testament to the ubiquity of steroids in the game at the turn of the millennium. It lives on despite the fact that, unlike other…
Rangers reliever Tanner Scheppers had a simple explanation for the black eye that left him unavailable to take the mound during Friday’s 11-inning loss to the Indians: He’d been sucker-punched the night before as he walked back to the team hotel after grabbing dinner. He decided against filing a police…
Dwayne Harris doesn’t typically get a lot of ink in the local sports press. The wide receiver, selected in the sixth round of the 2011 draft, didn’t catch a pass in more than half the games he played last year, and his 222 receiving yards put him seventh on the…
The name “Cowboys Stadium” is everything the structure itself is not: concise, blandly functional, lacking in imagination, panache and, most notably, a high-dollar corporate sheen. There was never any chance that it was going to last, despite Jerry Jones’ protestations to the contrary. Today, it’s officially gone…
Mavericks were first introduced to Flula Borg way back in 2011, when the German DJ released a song, “His Name is Dirk,” and heaped praise upon his basketball-playing countryman. “He has dominated the NBA with a smooth jumper and intelligent plays,” he explained at the time. “He is like a…
When center Dwight Howard spurned the Mavericks and decided to take his talents to the Bayou City, it marked the second straight year the team had epically flamed out in free agency. And, for the second straight year, Mark Cuban is trying to rewrite history. “I think we’ve put ourselves…
Your browser does not support iframes. Because the way Andrus continually screws with Beltre like an annoying little brother — stealing his hat, touching his head, and constantly interfering with pop-ups clearly destined for Beltre’s glove — is the best thing going in baseball this side of the Canadian border…
If you’re a fan of the web site Deadspin, you’ve been mesmerized at least once this year by Manny Ramirez and Taiwanese baseball, which seemed to have a pretty fun marriage going. But that’s over now, because your Texas Rangers have signed Ramirez to a minor league deal and assigned…
Hoping to make a long-awaited splash in free agency, the Mavericks met for a few hours with free agent big person Dwight Howard on Tuesday, one of his last stops on his semi-annual You Know You Want Me Tour. If the experts are to believed, it will come down to…
