Shaq's free throw struggles are well documented, so we decided to find out what his career would have looked like if he'd never made a single one. Conclusion: he's still very, very good and valuable to his teams so you* don't need to practice your free throws. *assuming you are Shaq
In all of baseball history, you'd be hard pressed to find a statistically weirder career than Adam Dunn's. The king of the Three True Outcomes, Dunn was both incredibly consistent and full of outliers, and his efforts saved the stamina of countless fielders who got to stay exactly where they were for most of his plate appearances.
Rickey Henderson revolutionized baseball throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. He got on base at will, and once there, played chess on the basepaths while everyone else was still learning how to play checkers. We'll never get another, so this is the best effort to concisely appreciate the career of the one and only Rickey Henderson.
The Houston Rockets have created an offensive system and identity based nearly exclusively on taking shots from either right at the rim or from super far out. Led by James Harden (and a whole bunch of other dudes who could hit threes), they essentially eschewed everything in between -- and it worked! Until it didn't.
The key to a dynamic NFL passing attack is letting non-quarterbacks throw. Since 1970, players at every other position have combined for a higher touchdown percentage than true quarterbacks. Many teams in the NFL have learned to take advantage of this, some far more so than others. Who's the best though?
2018 means that the incredible 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa (and Ken Griffey Jr., until the calendar started getting into August) is now 20 years out in our rearview mirrors. You might have enjoyed their 136 dingers from that season -- but the pitcher who kept both in the ballpark is worth celebrating too.
Even the greatest teams are only a handful of disastrous plays away from missing the playoffs entirely. We’ll prove it. In fact, the 2010 San Diego Chargers already did.
Most batters do all they can to avoid an inside pitch. But Brandon Guyer, the god of the hit-by-pitch, has used it as a weapon.
The most wide-open touchdown run of all time was pulled off by one of the slowest players in the NFL. We might never see anything like it again.
We mean it. “Arson will get you a baseball team” is not the lesson here. In fact, there is no lesson at all. There is only the Seattle Mariners, who in their early years did nothing but screw around and play out some of the weirdest stories in the history of baseball. Welcome to episode one of our six-part series, “The History of the Seattle Mariners.”
After years of abject irrelevance, the Seattle Mariners suddenly became the team of Ken Griffey Jr., one of the most beloved athletes in American history. The Toilet Years were over. The era of anonymous cellar-dwelling had ended. Now, they found themselves in the fight of their lives, battling the California Angels in one of the most dramatic playoff races in baseball history. (Originally titled, "The ascent of Ken Griffey, Jr.")
After nearly 20 years of losing baseball, the Seattle Mariners were likely to be sold and moved out of town. But on the field, they and the Yankees were playing out one of the most dramatic playoff series baseball has ever seen.
The late-‘90s Seattle Mariners were like nothing we’ve seen before or since. This was a team that had featured four Hall of Fame-caliber players – Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez – in their primes. What could go wrong? Absolutely nothing. Everything went fine. In fact, uh, don’t watch this episode.
Ichiro Suzuki was the most unconventional and electrifying baseball player of the 21st century. During the 2000s, he and the Mariners pieced together a beautiful, infuriating story.
Felix Hernandez, the hero of the modern-day Mariners, did everything he could to drag them into the playoffs. Lord, how he tried. He never made it happen, because no one man ever can. But to call them cursed, we’d argue, would be to miss the point of the Seattle Mariners entirely.
The Seattle Mariners are eminently lovable, profoundly human, and outrageously weird. This is the story of the most fascinating sports team on Earth, all six parts of The History of the Seattle Mariners slapped together into one big 3-hour-40 minute cut.
Have you ever tried counting to four? It’s a skill that’s almost impossible to master, and baseball players and umpires find it as difficult as the rest of us do. In this episode of Dorktown, we’re examining the dozens of times that everyone on the baseball diamond has gotten the count wrong.
In 2011, the Jets and Chiefs helped each other put together one of the worst five-minute stretches of football the NFL has ever seen. It shouldn’t have mattered. And yet, it changed both teams forever.
The Atlanta Falcons are really doing it. They’re finally going to win the Super Bowl they’ve spent 51 years chasing. In order to fully appreciate how much the Falcons and their fans have endured, we need to return to the ancient era of Falcons football – the age of endless losing, chain-smoking, and some of the worst quarterbacking the NFL has ever seen.
Few remember this, but the Atlanta Falcons of the late 1970s and early 1980s were good. As in, “greatest defense in NFL history” good. They were thinking Super Bowl, and you couldn’t blame them, either. Grab your miniature pretzels and lemon drink. We’re about to know God personally.
There is nothing in today’s NFL like the Falcons of the early 1990s, who combined Deion Sanders’ otherworldly abilities and swag with Jerry Glanville’s apparent determination to break every rule of etiquette he could. Along the way, though, they missed out on a generational talent who may have altered the Falcons’ history were he ever given the chance.
The thing to know about the Falcons is that they defy expectations at every turn. After the circus of the early-to-mid 1990s, they’d completely bottomed out and cleaned house. Now they found themselves with a head coach in his last stop before retirement, a running back who’d nearly went undrafted, and a journeyman quarterback who had never even appeared in a playoff game. What better time to make a Super Bowl run?
Few athletes have ever inspired a city like Michael Vick inspired Atlanta. Vick was a transformational athlete who forever changed how we think about the quarterback position, an apparent superhero who did things that, even years and years later, still seem impossible. His time in Atlanta met a heartbreaking, devastating end. But in the aftermath, against all odds, the Falcons somehow found a way to make us laugh.
Finally, after their 40th birthday, the Atlanta Falcons seemed to be growing up. They had an outstanding franchise quarterback, incredible talents at skill positions, and a relatively buttoned-up demeanor off the field. They were finally ready to make the long march to a Super Bowl title. But along the way, the Falcons showed us what they were truly becoming: a messenger of chaos that manufactured some of the most catastrophic debacles we’ve ever seen on an NFL field.
Orange man bad! Football team good! These were the bold convictions we fearlessly carried into Super Bowl LI, the first-ever Super Bowl imbued with real political heat. Millions of us jumped on the Falcons’ bandwagon, and we all had a very good time. God bless our big old goofy trickster bird.
“Who’s Dave Stieb?” you might be asking. Well, this is a guy who had never stepped on a pitcher’s mound in his life until age 20. Just four years later, he was the best pitcher in the American League. This is the beginning of the almost unbelievable story of the man who put the Toronto Blue Jays on the map.
Dave Stieb wrote an autobiography in his late twenties, which is unheard of, but it’s tough to blame him. He’d already done and seen so much. Maybe he thought that at this point, he’d seen it all. HE HAD NOT.
Dave Stieb had just experienced a level of heartbreak that only the sport of baseball can deliver. His relationship with the game had always been a complicated one. But the two were not yet finished with each other.
The end of Dave Stieb’s career was as poetic, fascinating, and shocking as the rest of it. To this day, we debate what it all meant, and where his legacy belongs. But long before he hung up his cleats, he told us how this would go. He would not go quietly. It would be loud.
The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won four Super Bowls and fielded some of the greatest teams ever assembled. However, the most important game they ever played was not a Super Bowl, but a 1976 playoff matchup against the Baltimore Colts. Though they couldn’t possibly have known it in the moment, lives were on the line.
The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won four Super Bowls and fielded some of the greatest teams ever assembled. However, the most important game they ever played was not a Super Bowl, but a 1976 playoff matchup against the Baltimore Colts. Though they couldn’t possibly have known it in the moment, lives were on the line.
On June 8th, 1989, the Pittsburgh Pirates produced one of the greatest first innings in baseball history, jumping out to a 10-0 lead over the Philadelphia Phillies. No team had ever before done so and lost. From there … well, come on, you know where this is going. But you might never guess which road we’re taking to get there.
It’s 2011. For Michael Jordan, the year ahead will be a very strange one. Once a player who could seemingly deliver championships through sheer force of will, the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats is finally developing the one skill he had always denied himself: patience. Nothing about that is easy, and nothing about the lovable, unforgettable 2011-2012 Bobcats will be easy. But as much as he despises losing, Mike has always seemed to love the struggle.
In the early years, the Minnesota Vikings were like many new franchises of the time: dysfunctional, bad at football, and often intoxicated. And then a former NBA champion came back home to Minnesota and changed the identity of this franchise forever.
For the Vikings, the 1970s were so full of comedy, drama, and doomed snowmobiling expeditions that we had to split this decade into two episodes. And we STILL had to leave stuff out! What a team.
The Minnesota Vikings of the 1970s were among the greatest football teams ever assembled. Entering 1974, Bud Grant’s teams had reached two Super Bowls, but lost them both. The good times don’t last forever. It’s time to cash in.
It’s the 1980s. The Vikings’ storied Fran Tarkenton/Purple People Eaters era has ended. Seems like the party’s over, right? Believe it or not, though, the truly wild times are just now beginning. This is when we begin to understand who the Minnesota Vikings truly are.
The 1990s Minnesota Vikings were like a fireworks display gone wrong in all the right ways. They smoked, popped, and fizzled out. And just as you thought you had a dud on your hands, they set off every car alarm on the block, exploding into a team the likes of which the sport of football has never seen before or since.
This is a super-sized episode of The History of the Minnesota Vikings, dedicated to perhaps the most dramatic decade a football team has ever had. Featuring Randy Moss, Daunte Culpepper, Mike Tice, Adrian Peterson, and you-know-who.
In this series finale of The History of the Minnesota Vikings, our heroes sail into the present and future. It was easy to wonder whether one day, the Vikings would run out of stories to tell. Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, they’ve made it very clear: they are only getting started.
