Posts by Shane Ryan
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![Profar]()
The MLB Weekend Top 10: Into the Wild-Card Wilderness
It’s the last weekend of the regular season, which means it’s also the last MLB Weekend Top 10. That would be sad, in its way, if I weren’t just drowning in Coca-Cola right now. I don’t have any emotions except alert, and so I can’t write a proper eulogy for the Top 10 until this […]
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![Mariano Rivera]()
Ranking Mariano Rivera's Parting Gifts
Yesterday was the saddest of days. Mariano pitched at Yankee Stadium for the last time in his career, and the last man to wear no. 42 is now just three games from retirement. But endings are also a time for celebration, so let’s accentuate the positive and honor the parting gifts given during the season […]
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![Adam Lind]()
Spoiler Alert! Eight MLB Teams With Dream-Crushing Potential
It must be nice to make the playoffs. As a long-suffering Yankee fan, I probably won’t get to experience that joy this season, and it’s been a long time — almost a full year — since we’ve even sniffed the postseason. With six games left on the schedule, the Yankees are four games behind Cleveland […]
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![Bryce Harper]()
The MLB Weekend Top 10: Loving and Hating the Wild Card
Only two more weekends left in the regular season, and to use one of my favorite clichés, these guys have EVERYTHING to play for! Let’s get to it. 10. How the Nationals Will Destroy the NL Central (MIA-WAS) At exactly the moment in the season when it was pretty much too late, the Nationals started […]
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![FedEx Cup]()
Putting for Dough: Analyzing the $10 Million FedEx Cup Finale
If you’re a golf tournament, and your name isn’t the MastersBritishOpenU.S.OpenPGAChampionshipRyderCup … well, you have a prestige problem. And by prestige problem, I mean that the average sports fan probably doesn’t care about you. This is the nature of golf, and it’s why Tiger Woods can dominate a PGA Tour season and still have talk […]
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![Chris Horner]()
Chris Horner, the Unlikely American Cycling Hero
On Sunday, 41-year-old cyclist Chris Horner became the first American to win La Vuelta a Espana and the oldest man to ever win a Grand Tour. But with apologies to the real cycling fans of the Internet, I’m going to make five assumptions about you, the Grantland reader who stumbled on this article. First, you’ve […]
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![Mike Napoli]()
The MLB Weekend Top 10: Fear and Loathing in Fenway
Whoa, whoa, whoa. How is it mid-September? Did we even have August this year? Are the playoffs really sneaking up on us? This is getting serious, gang. Each team has about 15 games left to win, lose, bargain, plead, suffer, and despair. There are only three weekends of regular-season baseball left, starting today, and here’s […]
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![Scott Kazmir]()
Simple Math: Why the Indians Will (Kinda) Make the Playoffs
The Cleveland Indians, who haven’t made the playoffs since 2007, just finished a fairly brutal stretch of baseball. Starting on August 27, they endured 15 games in 16 days against some of the best teams in the game. That list included the Atlanta Braves, Detroit Tigers, Baltimore Orioles, and Kansas City Royals. The first two […]
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![Clayton Kershaw]()
Pitchers' Duel Diary: Clayton Kershaw vs. History (a.k.a. Pedro Martinez)
In this series for pitching junkies, we anticipate one excellent matchup per week and diarize it to learn something about the practitioners of the Mound Arts. In the process, we also discover meaningful things about ourselves and our lives through the lens of baseball. There is always a lesson at the end. Each pitchers’ duel […]
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![Long distance swimmer Diana Nyad]()
How Badass Was Diana Nyad's Swim?
Who is Diana Nyad? Only the first person to swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys without using a cowardly shark cage. It was a journey of about 110 miles, and it took her 53 hours. Also? She’s 64, this was her fifth and final attempt, and she almost died when she tried it last […]
