Joe Posnanski

Nothing is better than a great college football game—except one that ends with a sensational Hail Mary touchdown.

The comedian and writer is always seeking out new life experiences. That’s how he hit it big with his one-man Broadway-show-turned-HBO-special, “Just for Us.”

Major league starters almost never make it to the seventh inning anymore, and the game has lost much of its excitement as a result. How can we bring the thrills back?

Today the sky is a little less bright, the music sounds a little bluer, and the stars feel farther away.

One of baseball’s best players is hurt yet again. Will the star outfielder’s chronic injuries harm his chances of being a first-ballot Hall of Famer?

Pretty much everywhere I go, someone will inevitably ask the question: “If you were commissioner, what would you do to improve baseball?” I’ve been asked this question so many times that, well, you would expect me to have come up with an answer for it. But what I tend to do instead is sort of riff about a bunch of vague ideals I’d chase—I’d want to make the minor leagues more vital to communities, I’d want to figure out a television and streaming package that allows people to watch the baseball…

The small-market franchise keeps finding new ways to bend the game and exploit market inefficiencies. But how long can it defy gravity?

With his giant baseball head and permanent smile, the enigmatic New York Mets mainstay is unapologetic and unwavering in his support for the star-crossed franchise.

After decades of unfulfilled dreams, the team has racked up four World Series titles this century. But the club and the fans don’t have the same desperation they used to.

It’s strange: I have so much to say about the Dodgers signing Shohei Ohtani to a 10-year, $700 million deal … and also so little to say, because I get the sense that everybody has already said just about everything I’ve been thinking.I don’t say this as a knock; this is just where we are. It has felt like everything I’ve read about Ohtani and the Dodgers and the money and the process and the marketing and the reporting has sounded more or less the same. Again, it’s not a knock; it’s not like I h…

Okay, so look: I’m happy. Of course I’m happy. The Cleveland Browns did something on Sunday that, frankly, I’ve been waiting for them to do all my life. They out-Steelered the Steelers. They out-Tomlined Mike Tomlin. For 50-plus years, I have watched the Pittsburgh Steelers crush the spirits of opponents (most often the Browns) by simply being tougher, meaner, making the key play in the key moment, making their own breaks at the right time, getting the big stop at the end.For 50-plus years, the…

Lots and lots of managerial things are happening around baseball right now, but two things in particular caught my attention. One, I read some stuff musing whether or not four-time World Series champion Bruce Bochy is, in fact, the greatest manager ever. Two, the ultimate Milwaukee guy, Craig Counsell, left the Brewers for a $40 million windfall with the Chicago Cubs, making him, by far, the highest-paid manager ever.I’m not sure these two things are related, but for some reason, they connected…

Patrick Mahomes II didn’t want to be a quarterback. He wanted to play baseball. Of course he did. Pretty much every kid whose dad is a Major League Baseball player wants to be in the big leagues, too. Think of the sport’s astonishing list of Juniors—Ken Griffey Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., to name but a couple. Barry Bonds is the son of a ballplayer. In all there have been 259 sets of fathers and sons who have played Major League Baseball and countless more who came close.Growing up, Mahomes s…

In the half-century or so that I have been a Browns fan, I’d say they have had a Super Bowl-caliber unit—which is to say, a Super Bowl-level offense or a Super Bowl-level defense—maybe three or four times. Maybe. I’m judging generously here, because the Browns have not had too many great units.I’d list the best Browns units of the last fifty years as these:The 1980 Brian Sipe offense. Being honest, the Kardiac Kids’ offense of Sipe, Ozzie Newsome, Reggie Rucker, Mike Pruitt, Dave Logan and so on…

In the wide-eyed summer of 1954, that time of Willie Mays and Rocky Marciano and Brown v. Board of Education and the miracle of color television—there was a larger-than-life ballplayer in the Pecos River Valley of New Mexico named Joe Bauman. Nobody called him that. It was an era of nicknames, and they called him Boomin’ Bauman and Sluggin’ Joe, Jarring Joe and Joltin’ Joe and Jumbo Joe, the Man Mountain, the Mammoth Man, the Southpaw Swatter, the Roswell Rocketeer, and the Economy-Sized First S…

When Muhammad Ali was young, the question that surrounded him was about seriousness: How serious a fighter was he, really? Sure, he could dance and slash, appear and disappear at will, float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, all that stuff, but boxing is not a sport for butterflies. Over rounds and years, the legs grow weary and the reflexes dull and the hardest question is asked: Will you go on? Can you go on?“Everybody has a plan,” Mike Tyson famously said, “until they get punched in the…

First introduced 125 years ago, the rule that four balls equals a trip to first has caused a lot of controversy—and produced some of the game’s biggest moments.

We’ve never anything quite like him in the history of baseball—or maybe any sport ever.

Baseball’s mightiest slugger is bearing the weight of his blockbuster contract, his own records, and the supersized expectations that come with being the leading man of New York sports. Can he carry the Yankees to their first World Series title in more than a decade?

Stealing signs is a tradition almost as old as the game itself. What was the trick to making it disappear?