Posts by Ben Heller

  • Meet the Baltimore O’xpendables

    In the fifth inning of Friday night’s game in Boston, the (then) last-place Red Sox took a 4-3 lead over the (then) second-place Orioles. It was the last time the (still) last-place Sox would have a lead over the (now) first-place O’s during the weekend’s marathon three-game set. Approximately 42 hours after the Sox took […]

  • In Defense of Indefensible Contracts

    The Reds recently gave Joey Votto 225 million reasons to stay in Ohio. Of course, the general consensus of this deal, and the Brandon Phillips one that followed, was that the Reds would one day regret it. Votto might have MVP credentials, but he plays a position that’s easy to fill, and there will come […]

  • The Exciting Excitement of Dee Gordon

    One of my favorite baseball players of the previous decade retired over the winter, and if you’re not the type of person who follows every lukewarm development of the hot stove league, there’s a very good chance that this news — which was casually announced by the player on a Colombian radio station — passed […]

  • An Appreciation of fun.

    The band called fun. spells its name with a lowercase f and a period, and if they weren’t currently selling a boatload of records on account of a Glee appearance and a Chevy commercial, their questionable use of punctuation would probably be the thing you dislike about them most. But if Glee has taught us […]

  • How Deep Is Your NBA Fantasy Team?

    The first rule of writing about fantasy sports club is you do not talk about your own fantasy teams. The second rule of writing about fantasy sports club is you do not talk about your own fantasy teams, unless one of them happens to provide the perfect summation of what this almost locked-out, injury-riddled, stupidly […]

  • Fantasy Basketball, Your New Best Friend

    The thing that separates fantasy teams from real teams (aside from a goofy name, smaller price tag, and come to think of it, pretty much everything else) is that the players you draft don’t have to get along. They only have to co-exist on a website, and in your stat-crazed beautiful mind.