2026-01-22 03:02:58
Around this time last year, I wrote about why so many men's tennis players hated the tennis balls used on tour. Chief among those critics was Daniil Medvedev, who said that the allegedly inferior balls moved slower through the air, thus undermining his counterpunching style and making him feel "zero pleasure of being on the court." A year later, he already sounds a lot happier.
Medvedev won the Brisbane 250 earlier this month, and looks as if he might be shaking off the roughest season of his career. After he won Tuesday's second-round Australian Open match against Quentin Halys—thus surpassing the sum of matches he won at Slams in the entirety of 2025—Medvedev fielded a reporter's question about slow courts and heavy balls. The former malcontent sounded totally peachy:
Q: There's a lot of talk about the slowness of the courts, heaviness of the balls in tournaments around the world. How does the Australian Open compare to that this year, and in particular, the two stadiums that you've played on so far this year?
A: Yeah, I already said in Brisbane, for sure it's been talked for a long time, but I do feel like court's getting faster. Like, I heard Hong Kong is super fast. Brisbane was pretty fast as well. Feel like Australian Open is not slow. I'm not going to call it fast, because you do see some rallies, and maybe ace is a bit less than in Hong Kong, Brisbane for example. But it's kind of medium speed, or maybe even tiny bit to the faster side.And same about the balls. I've been the biggest—probably at one point—crying about the balls and this and that. I do feel like they're getting better. It's still the reality that racquets change, courts change, games of players change. Now everybody is ripping the ball, and we still have the same change rules of balls. [Under current rules, new balls are swapped in after the warmup and first seven games of the match, then every nine games after that.] This is maybe something to look into, because I don't know when this rule of 7-9 was implied. But if it's like 15 years ago, maybe. If it's 40 years ago, it was a different story.
But again, in general, I think that's what I feel right now, that we're being heard, and pretty much a lot of variety on the court and on the balls as well.
2026-01-22 01:33:51
Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones are not in and of themselves exemplary Hall of Famers, but as of Tuesday evening they are duly elected Hall of Famers and are being celebrated as such. They may also end up being the last two Hall of Famers to be elected to applause and admiration until we remember why baseball pisses us off as often as it does.
The 2027 Hall of Fame ballots will be mailed out in 10 months, and the assumption at this point is that Buster Posey will be the likeliest candidate to sail into Cooperstown, and good on him for that. The problem for him is that he will be announced as such a month and a half after the owners vote—or are expected to vote, as they are already desperately signaling that they plan to vote—for a lockout over a salary cap. The result will be renewed hatred of the business of the game over its greatest and longest-running rivalry: labor v. management. Nobody is going to cheer for Posey at his moment of career-capping triumph, because everybody is going to be too busy screaming at whichever party in the industry they blame for shutting things down as part of a dispute over who gets how much of a slice of a still gigantic money pie.
Timing, as they say, is a vicious old bastard, which Posey will learn through experience in a way that hiring a mystery manager to run his San Francisco Giants never could teach. Posey is quite possibly the most popular Giant of the post-Willie Mays era, and his hiring as the Giants' new president of baseball operations in October of 2024 was hailed as a public relations triumph by even the most jaded of fans. Posey built up a great deal of goodwill over the playing career that will earn him that Cooperstown invite, and has no apparent natural enemies—at least, not until the manager he hired guides his team to three straight 79-83 seasons.
2026-01-22 00:57:33
This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to be joined by Jeremy Gordon, writer, editor, and author of last year's See Friendship. Topics discussed include: Rich Paul and Max Kellerman's unsavory podcast situation, intergenerational warfare vis-à-vis Jeremy's formative experiences watching Michael Jordan, Angel Reese's cameo in Kathryn Bigelow's latest movie, and, finally, Jeremy's polarizing unified theory of basketball.
You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!
2026-01-22 00:42:48
Minnesota is in turmoil, thanks to masked federal agents who spend all day driving around the Twin Cities terrorizing whoever the hell they want. This is a time that calls for strong leadership. Can I interest you in a senate bid from a lady you vaguely remember mumbling questions on NFL sidelines a decade ago?
That's right, former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya announced Wednesday that she wants to be the next Republican senator from Minnesota. She unveiled her candidacy this morning with a campaign ad that wastes no time getting to her qualifications: "For years, I covered the biggest football games in America."
2026-01-22 00:16:14
There comes a time in everyone woman's life when she must decide if she is getting on the party bus or not. In this case, the party bus is a metaphor for the whole concept of bachelorette parties, and all the nonsense and spiraling costs associated with the whole tradition. The party bus is also, in fact, a party bus, because how could you get the girls together for the Bride's Last Ride without an intermediate-size bus loaded down with booze?
Calling all Omega Theta Pis and hot librarians—who’s ready for a trip to Nashville? Today’s episode is the recording from our September 2025 live show in Seattle!
2026-01-21 23:40:53
The following is excerpted from a chapter of Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, by Danny Funt. The book is available for purchase now.
Bill Simmons never seemed like the type to bite his tongue. In many ways, he earned the nickname he gave himself, “the Sports Guy,” by sharing beliefs—in his ESPN column, on the pregame show NBA Countdown, on his podcast, on the long-form sports-writing site Grantland that he launched under ESPN—without a filter, as someone might while watching a game with buddies at a bar. He was also fluent in what boorish men call “locker-room talk” (like when he told a reader that his friends “lost the ability to call themselves guys the moment they allowed a female in their football fantasy league”), but his brazenness about sports usually came off as bravery, and for that he became one of ESPN’s most valuable stars.
