The Chicago Cubs are “ineffectual, overpriced, and ultimately irrelevant” according to one of the latest and frankly more merciful assessments on ESPN.com. That’s almost the opposite of the effectual, underpriced, and, well, marginally relevant Marlins. That’s not to say the Cubs are appreciably worse than the Marlins — the Cubs…
Just when the Marlins look ready to compete for the title of most craptastic team in baseball, whoa, they come back to mere mediocrity by doing what they seem to do best: slapping the pill around the yard. Dan Uggla just hit his 100th career homer, and in fewer games…
What would you do with that $150 you could use to buy into the Seminole Hard Rock & Casino’s Summer Open Poker Series? You could pay for five days’ rent. You could buy enough gas to drive to Pensacola and back. You could buy two grams of meth. You could…
Not long ago, this would have been the Barry Bonds Show — the game itself a footnote to admiring the feats of a slugger who had somehow transplanted a mule’s hind legs onto his shoulders and a prize-winning pumpkin onto his neck. In retrospect, it was pretty obvious that Bonds…
Exemplifying the woeful second act to the Marlins’ quick start this season was their performance against Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who, until he took a no-hitter into the eighth inning against the Marlins, had sported the worst road ERA in the Major Leagues. At least the guy who broke up…
Looks like the Dodgers have picked up where they left off last year, when Joe Torre — who’s chill even by the high standards of reanimated corpses — Left Coasted his new team past the World Series favorite Chicago Cubs in the first round of the playoffs. Granted, it helps…
On April 14, the night when the Marlins thumped the Braves to take sole possession of the National League East, a division that by all most prognostications was the birthright of those selfsame Braves or the Mets or the reigning World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies, ESPN.com took a poll: Which…
Just what the hell, again, is everyone’s problem with the Spurs? Yeah, Tim Duncan plods through life without flipping off Section 107 or getting busted with an Uzi in his britches. Big deal. We’ll spot you Duncan, and still not concede that the Spurs play boring basketball. Michael Finley is…
Yeah, it’s the Bobcats again. If you’re still wondering whether Charlotte really does have a team (only since 2004, after the Hornets left), this is your chance to verify it. There’s not much to distinguish the Bobcats these four-plus seasons other than losing aplenty. This season, though they’ve got a…
The only bright spot of Shawn Marion getting his groin tweaked against the Hornets, and Dorell Wright and James Jones also out with injuries, was that the Heat learned it could beat a team as good as the New Jersey Nets while starting something called a Yakhouba Diawara at small…
After trading its best player, Florida is among the NHL’s worst teams Ah, but it hurt to say goodbye to Olli Jokinen, the hard-charging Fin who had been our best Panther for quite some time. He had, by dint of his dedicated service to such a crumb-bum team, set the…
If anyone doubts that basketball can be a brutish game — or that Shawn Marion is something of a space cadet — consider that he didn’t realize until after the game that he broke his nose in the Heat’s Nov. 1 loss to Charlotte. That the Matrix has a busted…
Yo. Thirty-nine years old, in fact. To be a 39-year old boxer, you gotta have ropey old-man muscles, hardness built on hardness: That’s the only remedy for the light, flicker-fast fists of the 25-year-olds who want to bow the ropes. Punks. You’re Glen Johnson. You turned pro in 1993, back…
Aside from Harriet Miers and bodybag manufacturers, probably no one else in America has seen their fortunes rise faster with Dubya’s reign than comedian Frank Caliendo, who does a ripping impression of the Prez. When Caliendo spoofed Bush on David Letterman, the host asked him whether it bothered him that…
On one end of the wrestling spectrum is the spectacle of your typical WWE match, with Armageddon choreographed like a hair metal video. Then there’s the ER-filling backyard jump-off-the-garage crap that the neighbor kids are always pulling. Somewhere in the middle stands independent semipro wrestling. Wrasslin’, you might call it,…
It’s hard to find many teams that rose faster and fell further in the NBA than the Memphis Grizzlies, who won 50 games as recently as 2004 and 22 apiece the past couple of seasons. That kind of precipitous drop will make your ears pop, and… no, no, wait. There’s…
That the 2008 Marlins did as well as they did — which is looking more and more like a squarely .500 run, no better than it is worse — is a bit of a miracle. After 145 games, they were near the bottom of the National League in most of…
To announce his starting quarterback for the season opener, Dolphins coach Tony Sparano told reporters simply, “It’s Chad,” leaving them to guess just which Chad — Pennington or Henne — would actually get the first snap. Turns out — duh — it was Pennington, he of the 69 percent completion…
With the likes of the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies propping it up, and the Washington Nationals guaranteed to crawl under the house and die, the National League East was destined to be a two-tier division this year. The pleasant surprise is that the Marlins have joined the upper…
Even if you don’t know you know Rascal Flatts, you have only to think the words “life is a highway” to begin humming their stuff. The Nashville-based, huge-selling modern country trio achieved what few bands can when they turned their cover of Tom Cochrane’s merely catchy tune of that title…
There are several other teams in the mix – the charging Milwaukee Brewers, the stinkin’ New York Mets, the hard-slugging Philadelphia Phillies – but there’s a chance the National League’s Wild Card slot could fall to either the Marlins or the St. Louis Cardinals. After all, both are teams accustomed…
More than perhaps any other Marlins opponent, the New York Mets have a way of turning visits to Dolphin Stadium into de facto home games. You wonder why people refer to Boca Raton as the sixth borough of New York, until you see the line of guys with double chins,…
