It’s probably not surprising, given that I’ve never been there and don’t speak the language, but I’ll admit that I don’t get a lot about Japanese culture. Their game shows scare me, their video games and comics maybe even more so, and in general the Technicolor assault ...

You know how Deadspin commenters are always conflating darker-complected folks with people who look nothing like them? Like how Erik Spoelstra is supposed to look like Kal Penn from Harold and Kumar, or every black person looks like Cleveland from Family Guy? (Actually, that last one was more of a L...

When Big League baseball teams want to make a public relations splash, they can go out and make a big personnel move — like the Royals signing Bruce Chen to a Minor League deal or the Mets bringing Ron Villone aboard — and grab some headlines. But MLB tickets sell themselves, for the mos...

Jim Bowden would be something of a throwback baseball figure if he wasn’t also such a putz. He’s kind of colorful and has a highly flawed, human-seeming persona in a field increasingly populated by dullish young data-heads and their crusty, resolutely backwards human antitheses. But if t...

The absence of venues for serious sportswriting is one of my stock bitches. This is in part because it’s true, although that kind of tracks with the decline in high-profile venues for good writing, period. But it’s also because I like to imagine that a dearth of deserving venues is the o...

From the Washington Post — and then, as per usual, from Brendan Flynn — comes the story of a D.C. prep star named Travon Smith. Smith is his class’s valedictorian, possesses a vertical leap that would would get the soles of his feet over at least one member of the Geto Boys with ea...

Michael Phelps smoking pot on a college campus — you may not remember, but this was a story a little while back. The corn-slingers at Kellogg’s were pissed, some media outlets overreacted, and then everyone went about forgetting about Michael Phelps for a few years. After all, we as a na...

Bruce Ratner’s quixotic quest to move the Nets from New Jersey to a Frank Gehry-designed nest set like a crashed UFO amid a planned patch of (currently unrentable) identikit luxury condos in Brooklyn has been covered before in this space. Fairly often. And I’m so biased in this due to my...

Ah, MMA. It’s for some people — people for whom boxing is too cerebral, people who like their sociopathy straight-up, people who see nothing wrong about having their own nickname tattooed on their bodies in more than one spot. It’s not for me, which I kind of appreciate because I c...

It’s not easy being Baltimore. You’ve got the violence and the accent and the fact that He’s Just Not That Into You was apparently filmed there and a bunch of other problems of varying sizes. But there’s always the Preakness, which is the only one of the three Triple Crown ra...