Thinking on Lou Gehrig Day of late friend + @sportingnews.com coworker Fran Farrell, an all-around good dude and talented publisher who fought valiantly against ALS. In winking tribute to Fran (a big Bosox guy), Charles M. Conlon's close-up portrait of "the Iron Horse," who died 85 years ago today.

Countdown to A Rejection Like No Other® has begun.

Our government and military are being run by racists, misogynists and white supremacists. Full stop.

Ole Miss coach Pete Golding, at the center of a high-profile NCAA probe into alleged tampering, has told the NCAA he'll expose rampant tampering in the sport if sanctioned. Put another way: Don't sanction him and he won't call out the rampant tampering that exists. www.usatoday.com/story/sports...

Shohei Ohtani on Wednesday hit the 3rd leadoff HR by a pitcher in MLB history (the other two: Shohei Ohtani and Shohei Ohtani), and he's held opponents to 2 runs or fewer in his 9 starts (current ERA: 0.82 after 6 scoreless, no-hit innings vs. the Rockies 😳). So, yeah, the GOAT case continues.

How old was the Phillies scoreless-innings record that Cristopher Sanchez broke Wednesday? It was set by this dude in 1911: Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander (📸 Charles M. Conlon)

James Talarico’s masterful re: to his crooked opponent’s perceived insult that Talarico is vegan (😱!): “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

Tennessee softball's Karlyn Pickens has touched 79 mph (79.4 to be exact) this season from the pitcher's rubber 43 feet from home plate. That's comparable to a baseball pitcher, from 60 feet, 6 inches, throwing about 110 mph. Holy Misiorowski! 😳

Elect clown, get a circus. 🤡

Continuing @sportingnews.com's yearlong 140th birthday celebration … www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/...

Bruce Springsteen to Stephen Colbert: "You are the first guy in America who lost his show because we got a president who can't take a joke."

Peruse these numbers and then ponder how all those GOP primary winners backed by you-know-who are going to fare in a general election when there's no grape Kool-Aid served at the polling stations.

Hey, Siri, what does "flogging a dead horse mean"? www.espn.com/golf/story/_...

Win-probability from last night's Eastern Finals Game 1 looks like a rollercoaster at Cedar Point. (CLE WP at 8:02 of 4th was 99.9% 😳) Remember: You must be this tall to ride the ride, Cavs fans.

Politely, @vanityfair.com: FUCK, NO.

A bad look for SI. Very bad. We’re all on a slippery slope trying to hang on.

@sportingnews.com printed every MLB box score every week for 106 years until 1992. Daily papers rendered TSN's boxes outdated. Now newspapers' death-spiral deadlines mean no boxes in one, easy-to-consume place. So @jeffblankenburg.com built a daily e-newsletter. Check it out. It's beautiful. Simple.

Wild stat (via Yahoo Sports AM): Teams this century were 0-640 when trailing by 8+ runs at any point in an NCAA Softball Tournament game. Now they're 1-640 after Texas Tech erased an 8-0 deficit 😳 against Ole Miss WITH ONE OUT LEFT 😳 😳 before winning, 10-9, in extras.

The Athletic: Patrick Arnold, a chemist who invented the steroid known as 'the clear' at the heart of MLB's PED scandal in the early 2000s, died Tuesday in Guilford, CT. He was 59. The cause of death is unknown, family said. His brother John: “The guinea pig for testing products was his own body.”

"In 2025, farmers filed 315 bankruptcy cases, which is higher than the previous four years, according to an American Farm Bureau Federation report. These are Chapter 12 bankruptcies, which are designed for “family farmers” according to the U.S. court definition."

Wild stat: The Avs' comeback from a 3-0 first-period deficit Wednesday to eliminate the Wild in OT marked the first time since 2008 that Colorado clinched a playoff series in Denver. Each of their previous nine postseason clinchers were on the road.

I encourage states to review the text of Fuck You v. Make Me

Task: Sean Duffy completes a TV hit without blaming Pete Buttigieg for his own failures Difficulty: Impossible

Yes, thank goodness we are represented by a president who begins his big trip to negotiate with a foreign power by posting a fake photo of his political opponents bathing in sewer, followed by racist videos of black people stealing fried chicken.

The Donald Trump economy, ladies and gentleman.

FOS: "FIFA’s problem is that demand does not exist at the (World Cup ticket) prices that are being listed." Cue the "Americans won't support soccer" bleats from Infantino et al.

Worth noting and not for nothing: Since moving from Hartford in 1997, the Carolina Hurricanes — 8-0 this postseason — have won 96 playoff games, and Rod Brind'Amour was either a player or coach in 94 of the 96 victories (97.9%). 😳

Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”

Sad commentary on a fractured sports-on-TV landscape: LeBron James may be playing his last game in a Lakers uniform or even the last game of his career tonight in a game that tips off at 10:30p ET on Amazon Prime. 🫤

Longtime friend + former @SportingNews coworker @dan.pompei with a great redemption story. www.nytimes.com/athletic/717...

Interesting read here from Anthony Castrovince with a money quote early on from Rays manager Kevin Cash: “We’re probably understanding and learning as an industry that hitting is [expletive] hard.” www.mlb.com/news/bunting...

The game is rigged. #InsiderTrading (via @paulkrugman.substack.com.web.brid.gy)

Chuck? He's always — ALWAYS — been a talker. A 1990 story from The @sportingnews.com Archives. www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/...

Hey, how many wins do the Knicks need to reach the Eastern Conference Finals?

"Hannah Natanson’s reporting anchored a package of articles from The Washington Post that won a Pulitzer on Monday, four months after agents seized her devices." The latest from @erikwemple.bsky.social... 🎁🔗

Happy heavenly birthday to Willie Mays, the "Say Hey Kid," born May 6, 1931, would've been 95 today.

May 5. Hello springtime in the Rockies! (@cbscolorado.bsky.social live cam)

The @sportingnews.com cover dated May 5, 2006. I gotta be honest, 20 years later it still kinda creeps me out.

Applications close May 8 at 11:59pm ET for the NBC Sports Editorial Rotation Internship – Academic Year. jobs.smartrecruiters.com/NBCUniversal...

This headline is such nonsense. It’s like saying: “Kennedy starts a push to help diabetics quit insulin.” This is eugenics. This is telling people they don’t get the healthcare they need because needing it makes them morally weak. The NYT, as usual, is advancing a conservative agenda.

"Cinco de Mayo. . . reminds us that Texas remains a former Mexican province called Tejas, that braided histories of our state and Mexico, of Texans and Mexicans, cannot be undone," writes @tacotrail.bsky.social. Read more on the history of the holiday here:

Kennedy's goal here is consistent with all of his other policies aimed at undermining proven health interventions: he believes the people who benefit from them are defective and he wants them culled from the population. It's comic book villain logic, specifically Viltrumite logic.

Really sums up a favorite right wing grievance: what's offensive here aren't my actions, but your accurate descriptions of them

Longtime friend + @sportingnews.com coworker Mike DeCourcy (@tsnmike.bsky.social) on LeBron James. It takes real talent to be this good this long. Oh, and LBJ has been pretty good too. www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/los-a...

🚨🚨 Heads up! Day ball now through Sunday!🚨🚨 #MLB

Tell me "I never gas up a vehicle" without telling me "I never gas up a vehicle."

Regular update: The Rockies are 14-17 (.452) entering Thursday's day game in Cincy. Last year, it took until June 15 for the Rox to reach 14 wins, and Colorado had 57 losses at the time (.197).

30K tickets remain 6 weeks from the USMNT's #WorldCup opener June 12 at SoFi Stadium, per the Athletic. FIFA lists get-in price: $1,100. 😳 Big swaths of empty seats at world football's top event is a real possibility across NorAm b/c of prices. Incoming: "The U.S. isn't a soccer market" narratives.

Where my GOP fiscal hawks? Where y'all at? Like foxhole Christians, they only scream about the debt when a Dem is president. Disingenuous cowards and political hacks, every last one of 'em. But that's OK. In the grand tradition, Republicans drive the economy into the ditch and Democrats will fix it.