About Last Night: Fister’s Close Call

In case you were out living a life of leisure, here’s what you missed in sports on Tuesday.

• Detroit’s Doug Fister took a perfect game into the seventh, and the Tigers eventually prevailed, 2-1, on Ramon Santiago’s 10th-inning walk-off home run. Fister didn’t get the win, but Tigers manager Jim Leyland gave him a nice sticker with a yellow meteor and the words “I pitched like a star today!”

• Five Miami players, including quarterback Jacory Harris, have been suspended for the team’s season opener against Maryland for accepting benefits from infamous booster Nevin Shapiro. Twelve players total are being forced to pay restitution for the benefits, but that’s no big deal since they can just get the money from Nevin Shap- OH, CRAP.

• Michael Vick signed a six-year, $100m deal with the Philadelphia Eagles, making him the third highest-paid player in the NFL. It was a day of triumph for Vick, who told reporters, “God was on my side.” Across the nation, priests and other holy men stopped what they were doing. “Wait a second,” they said. “If God’s on his side…” They proceeded to strip out of their vestments and commit a sin before it was too late.

• Roy Halladay struck out nine and helped his own cause at the plate in a 9-0 Phillies rout. No other players participated for Philadelphia.

• Kevin Durant scored 59 points in an exhibition game at Baltimore’s Murray State University Morgan State University, but his team lost 149-141 to a team featuring Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, and Chris Paul. The final score would have been more lopsided, but James spent most of the fourth quarter in an extended panic attack, at one point forcing the others to chase him into the locker room when he stole the ball.

• French Open champion Li Na lost in the first round of the U.S. Open, but Serena Williams advanced with ease. This just proves what I keep saying: Serena Williams is a better tennis player than Li Na.

• Rafael Nadal won in straight sets on the men’s side, though Andrey Golubev didn’t make it easy. Still, it proves what I keep saying: We can all agree that Rafael Nadal is an attractive guy. Wait, what?

• The Rangers maintained a 3.5-game lead in the AL West as five pitchers combined on a three-hit shutout to top the Rays 2-0. It was the best collective effort in Texas since the Texas Revolution, though the revolutionary rallying cry, “Remember the Alamo!” was slightly more inspiring than the Rangers’ equivalent: “Hot enough for ya?!”

• Texas A&M’s drama with the Big 12, easily the most obnoxious sports story of the year, is still ongoing. The latest is that A&M president R. Bowen Loftin may have called someone to talk about the possibility of leaving the conference. Whether it was a legitimate threat or just an attempt to strengthen the middle school romance analogy wasn’t clear.

• CC Sabathia finally managed a win in his fifth start against Boston, and the Yankees pulled to within a half game of the AL East lead, winning 5-2. He also punked John Lackey in a bench-clearing incident in the seventh. If he had kicked a Gatorade cooler and been ejected for throwing a rack of bats on the field, he’d have become the first man in history to achieve the mythical Badass Cycle.

• Make it eight in a row for the Diamondbacks, who topped the Rockies 9-4 with the help of home runs by Miguel Montero and Justin Upton. Their place atop the NL West is looking pretty unassailable at the moment, which is good news for the Giants, Rockies, Dodgers, and Padres, who were pretty fine with not assailing it anyway.

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