In my previous career, as a baseball beat writer, I hated the trade deadline. It was all about generating rumors based on hearsay to get people to follow you and truly test how good your sources were. When the deadline came and went and there was no substantial news – no trades, or nothing of relevance – you felt like a guy at a strip club at the end of the night: you just wasted a bunch of time and effort and you might have...

Because the Indians won’t go away and no one else in the AL Central will step up and take control, Cleveland has made a flurry of moves to solidify itself as a legit contender and not just a hopeful, plucky team. The Indians may have trumped everyone in landing Ubaldo Jimenez, perhaps the prize of this year’s trade deadline, for a chance to play deep into October. Sure, you can point to the numbers that Jimenez has put up since...

Over the next several days, as the Major League Baseball trade deadline hovers, we here at Throwback Attack will take a look at some of the worst deadline deal trades over the past 20 years. We’d like to note that we are not compiling a list here. There are plenty of those out there. (Google “worst baseball trades and you get nearly five million links.) Instead we are going to just pick a couple and examine them – for better...

I’m not so sure why people are praising the end of the NFL lockout. Sure, we’ll have football this year. I’m glad, I guess. The National Football League is sacred in America. We love putting cheese on our heads, spending money at the local watering hole on Sundays because we’re too damn poor to afford Sunday Ticket, and most importantly, getting hammered drunk with our buddies during our fantasy drafts- so drunk that someone actually...

There are tons of great baseball names out there. Steve Rushin, a terrific sportswriter, has banged out several columns having to do with player names. Steve Marantz once wrote “Van Lingle Mungo is better than sex” in reference to the former Dodgers pitcher. In my youth, there were great names: Rance Mulliniks, Mark Grudzielanek, Spike Owen, DeLino DeShields. My favorite? Razor Shines. But, as a Dodgers-rooting child, I always...