baseball on Vice

'Class A - Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere,' an Excerpt

Lucas Mann had dreams of becoming a big leaguer. Captain of his high school baseball team, Lucas could throw a decent fastball. But instead of going pro, he opted to get a taste of how the boys of summer roll by embedding with the Clinton, Iowa, LumberKings, a single-A, minor league team in a once-prosperous Midwest town, for an entire season. Full story

Watching Your Baseball Team Get Blown Out Is Like Anal Sex

With each run scored, you grind menacingly into baseball’s pelvis. Slowly at first, you rock back and forth, meeting his thrusts, opening and relaxing and accepting. Wallowing in the luscious depravity of a glorious loss, it barely registers when your team’s manager gets thrown o… Full story

Manny Is Being Manny in Taiwan

As he came to the plate with a runner on third with two outs in the first inning, the atmosphere in Taipei was electric. Fans screamed and chanted his name (“MANN-EEEEE”) while banging on unnecessarily loud cone-shaped noisemakers. Despite stranding the runner with a slow grounde… Full story

The Mercy Rule

Why Sports Help

There is nothing out there on the internet, nothing useful to learn about the Boston bombings, only more of the guilty inertia that leads us to put this shit on in the background in the first place. There’s nothing here for us, at the moment. So I’m going to a baseball game tonig… Full story

The Mercy Rule

Meet the Satire Called the Mets

Mets fans are not notably smarter or dumber, more or less entitled, or even sadder than the fans of any other flailing team. But thanks to their owners, the Wilpon family, the team's narrative is less a standard Shitty Owner Ruins Team story and more like a strange, sprawling sat… Full story

Why Does Anyone Watch Baseball?

A baseball fan and a non-fan chat about whether being bored by baseball is bad, whether the sport is doomed to become the next hockey, and speeding the three-hour games up. And also Terrmel Sledge. Full story

The Nationals Are a Real Baseball Team Now, a Homeless Guy Said So

The Washington Nationals are 100 percent for real. They exist. They are good. How good? Even homeless people in ass-backwards Chicago know about them. Full story

ESGN... With Freddie Gibbs

Screw Bud Selig, Screw Hypocrisy, and Screw You

God bless America. This is the land of getting over. The land of second or even third chances; the land of doing whatever you have to do by any means necessary in order to fulfill the American Dream. I thought about all this while pouring a tall and muddy styrofoam cup of Prometh… Full story

We Saw the ESPN Bo Jackson Documentary and It Ruled

I went to a screening of ESPN's documentary about Bo Jackson, one of the most incredible athletes of all time. What he did in his short, unearthly career is captured better here than it has been anywhere else. You should watch it. Full story

The Mercy Rule

Miami Blues

In some ways, the Miami Marlins are Florida—overleveraged, overbuilt, and cruising blithely towards foreclosure while being ruled by a clownish, childish, tone-deaf, permanent cadre of special-needs elites. Less metaphorically, they’re a fucking bummer. Full story