By Phillipa Velija/The Conversation

The latest data from the Office of National Statistics estimates there are about 76,000 people identifying as Afghan nationals living in the UK. When their cricket team played their first match in the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup on June 1, it must have felt to their Australian opponents as if a fair proportion of that population had come to Bristol to cheer their team on.
As it turned out, Australia – a giant of the cricket world who has won the World Cup five times – beat Afghanistan quite easily, as expected. But the spirit in which the Afghanis played and the ebullience of their supporters in the crowd won them many friends among neutrals, who were quite happy to cheer them on against the “old enemy” from down under.

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Posted on June 12, 2019

By Jim Coffman

What the heck are we going to complain about now, Cubs fans?
Kyle Schwarber had a big weekend in the leadoff spot. It has been more than a week since the Cubs bullpen blew a save, and sources tell me they might have a new guy coming in to upgrade the whole operation.

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Posted on June 10, 2019

By Roger Wallenstein

Deep within the Lubyanka Building in Central Moscow at Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters, agents Mikhail and Ivan were biding their time last week on a particularly slow day.
(Translated from the Russian by our Beachwood interpreters, who have listening devices buried deep within the Russian intelligence agencies.)
Mikhail: I know there’s not much going on, Ivan, but get your feet off the desk and look busy.
Ivan: I’d be happy to if you can suggest something for me to do.
Mikhail: Well, we can’t interfere in an election in America for another year-and-a-half, but I’ve discovered a good way we can practice. Have you ever heard about the American game of baseball?

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Posted on June 9, 2019

By Thomas Chambers

Horse racing nearly always exists in circular logic, no pun there to be pardoned.
We love the stars, sometimes even to destination viewing. Curlin, Rachel Alexandra, Goldikova, California Chrome, Gio Ponti, Zenyatta, I guess. American Pharoah was a million-lumens time exposure and we felt damn lucky he saw it through all the way to the Breeders’ Cup Classic before retiring at three. Seabiscuit and then Secretariat soothed their times and were the toasts of the globe.
But a consistent winner, or dominator, is also the wolf, stifling betting scenarios through tote favoritism.

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Posted on June 9, 2019

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Go get an elite player in push for World Series – but do so under an artificial budget imposed by Tom Ricketts that depended on a player unexpectedly getting waylaid by a divorce. Plus: Joe Sheehan Sucks; CarGo, We Go?; How Pedro Strop Is Like Cheap Trick; Freezing Cold Takes; The White Sox Could Have Easily Afforded Keuchel; The Chicago Media Got The Tim Anderson Imbroglio Exactly Wrong; Bears B.S.; The Raptors Could Actually Win This Thing; and The Blues Could Actually Win This Thing.

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Posted on June 7, 2019

By Gamal Abdel-Shehid/The Conversation

The Toronto Raptors have succeeded in establishing themselves as a major cultural and economic player in both the city of Toronto and beyond, with several offshoots of the outdoor fan zone Jurassic Park popping up in the suburbs and across Canada. The Raptors have cemented themselves into the fabric and psyche of the city, with Raptors gear flying off the shelves.
The Raptors have also succeeded in telling their story from the point of view of individuality and hard work. These are themes I wrote about 15 years ago in my book, Who Da Man?: Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures, which was based on what is probably the only scholarly article written about the Toronto Raptors, “Who Got Next? Raptor Morality and Black Public Masculinity in Canada.”
In Who Da Man?, I tried to understand sports outside of its own narrative. That means that I didn’t want to look solely at the fan’s perspective on things; instead I looked at what sports, and the Raptors, meant from a sociological, or let’s say deeper, point of view.

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Posted on June 7, 2019

By Steve Rhodes

One in an occasional series tracking the movements of former Cubs.
1. Darwin Barney.
Barney is an investor in a consortium trying to land an MLB franchise for Portland.

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Posted on June 5, 2019

By Jim Coffman

A number of Cubs haven’t been hitting, but what has really been killing the club the last few weeks has been the struggles of two: Javy Baez and Willson Contreras. If they aren’t hitting, and they didn’t hit at all in Houston and then St. Louis, it creates a gaping hole in the middle of the lineup that is almost impossible to fill.
The good news? They both hit home runs to cap off an 8-2 victory over the Angels on Monday in the team’s return to the Friendly Confines after a brutal road trip. Maybe, just maybe, that was a sign that they’ll both snap out of their slumber this week. And as those two go, so go the Cubs.

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Posted on June 4, 2019

By Roger Wallenstein

At the risk of providing legitimacy for what I regard as a mostly meaningless statistic, let’s consider run differential, an item that has become popular in the past five seasons or so.
We can start with the bright side. Unlike much of sabermetrics, run differential is extremely simple without any complicated formula. It’s not difficult to take the number of runs a team scores during the course of the season and subtract the number plated by the opposition. An understanding of positive and negative numbers is required, but that’s about it. My apologies for repeating what you already know.
One other positive aspect of this exercise is that teams from any era can be compared to one another. Doesn’t matter whether home runs are the soup du jour, as they are today, or whether the stolen base ruled major league baseball as it did in the days of Rickey Henderson and Lou Brock.
The games are played to see which team scores more runs. Therefore, good teams that win a lot of games should have a very favorable run differential. That’s not news. What would be unique is if a ballclub that wins, say, 90 games in a season scored fewer runs than the opposition.

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Posted on June 3, 2019

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Excuses exhausted. Plus: Patrick Mannelly Great Ever; The St. Louis Bores; Astros Series Asinine; Defining Darvish Down; Contreras Can’t Catch; The Dooche; Justin Verlander Reminds Us He Wanted To Be A Cub; The Cubs’ Bill Buckner; White Sox Wild?; Burton’s Boo-Boo; Stanley Cup Finals Moves To Nation’s Most Boring City; and Why You Should Both Love Steve Kerr And Root For The Raptors.

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Posted on May 31, 2019