Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine Intelligencer, has a strong opinion on performance-enhancing drugs and Major League Baseball. He invokes the unholy trinity of McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds.

If Bonds and company had to face the caliber of pitchers standard in today’s game, would they have broken Maris’s record? I doubt it.

The thing is, though: They did. The record is not 61: It is 73. Unlike in Maris’s case, there is no asterisk. There is no footnote in the record book reading, “Sure, Barry Bonds is technically the man to beat, but a lot of people didn’t like him and he probably took cow tranquilizers and had a huge head, so not really.” If Judge doesn’t get to 73, he doesn’t get the record. It’s pretty cut-and-dried.

Those who want to give Judge the record aren’t particularly interested in honoring him. They’re mostly interested in dishonoring Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa, because they think those guys are irredeemable cheaters. Few baseball narratives have lasted longer than the notion that players who tested positive for using performance-enhancing drugs — or even people who very likely used but never tested positive, like, uh, Bonds and McGwire and Sosa — should go down in history as monsters.

He’s got a real point about McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. They did not test positive for any substances, and McGwire is the only one who said publicly what he took: androstenedione and HGH, neither of which were banned by baseball when he took them.

The biggest reason this has become a hot-button issue is because San Diego Padre and face of Major League Baseball, Fernando Tatis Jr., has been suspended for 80 games after a drug test found clostebol, a banned substance, in his system. Whatever his reasoning: accidental or intentional, using Clostebol is pretty stupid since it was easily found. Please don’t ask me what Clostebol does… probably very little to make Tatis a better hitter or to help him recover faster. I have no idea.

Personally, when I was younger, I thought it soiled the game to have players caught with PEDs. Today, I could not care less. As Leitch says, the term “PED” is so nebulous it means nothing. Players are definitely getting cortisone shots, and that is definitely steroids, so drawing lines in the sand seems arbitrary.

Overall, he’s absolutely correct in stating the home run record to beat is 73. Anything else is wishful thinking and sits squarely at participation trophy level. Judge hitting more than 61 would be a milestone, but not the record.

Richard Goldstein, writing for The New York Times, had this to say about one of the greatest to have ever done it.

Vin Scully, who was celebrated for his mastery of the graceful phrase and his gift for storytelling during the 67 summers he served as the announcer for Dodgers baseball games, first in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94. […]

For all the Dodgers’ marquee players since World War II, Mr. Scully was the enduring face of the franchise. He was a national sports treasure as well, broadcasting for CBS and NBC. He called baseball’s Game of the Week, All-Star Games, the playoffs and more than two dozen World Series. In 2009, the American Sportscasters Association voted him No. 1 on its list of the “Top 50 Sportscasters of All Time.” […]

“I regard him, all things considered, as the master of radio and TV,” the sports broadcaster Bob Costas once told The Arizona Republic, recalling listening to Mr. Scully with a transistor radio under his pillow as a youngster in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. “I regard him as the best baseball announcer ever.”

I did not grow up listening to Scully. For me, it was Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. In my opinion, the greatest baseball announcer was Buck. However, I can see a strong argument for Scully.

He was just so good:

Scully called Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run.

“What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South, for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.”

“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

Vin Scully called Dodger games for 67 years, from 1950 through 2016. This is how he said goodbye.

Quadball is the new name of the sport formerly known as Quidditch.

If you are a muggle, Quidditch is the magical game played by witches and wizards in the Harry Potter books and movies. The non-magical version of the game is played as a club sport in colleges across the country. Today, Major League Quadball (MLQ) and U.S. Quidditch (USQ) announced a rebranding to Quadball.

Part of the reason is to avoid being associated with JK Rowling’s terrible anti-trans statements and the Warner Bros. legal team. For obvious reasons, MLQ and USQ could not trademark the term “quidditch,” so this is a good move.

“Quadball isn’t just a new name. It’s a symbol for a future for the sport without limitations,” the MLQ founders wrote in a statement. “With it, we hope to turn the sport into exactly what it aspires to be: something for all.”

My daughter played Chaser at Illinois State University, and it was by far the most violent, dangerous club sport I’d ever seen. At least hockey players and football players are wearing pads. Quadball is soccer, lacrosse, and rugby combined with some old-school dodgeball thrown in.

The only thing seriously hokey about the whole thing is the holding of the brooms.

The Big Ten announced today that the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles will become conference members effective August 2, 2024, with competition to begin in all sports the 2024-25 academic year.

Kind of a big deal. I expect four more schools to join in the next couple of years.

Buried in an ESPN story on Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is something I’ve been screaming about for years—robot umpires.

Generally, Manfred wants to speed the game up and hears the complaints about three hour games and that game needs fixing.

He tells me, in terms far more certain than he has laid out publicly before, that he fully supports revamping the game with pitch clocks, the elimination of the shift and, in 2024, some form of robo-umpires.

Yes. A million times yes. It will call balls and strikes significantly better than humans AND speed up the game. Robot umpires have been tested minor league baseball games for the last couple of years and, guess what, it works.