Tommy Pollock

[Jeff Passan @JeffPassan]

An all-time pitching performance by Jacob Misiorowski. He threw a one-hit Maddux and punched 15. The most in a >99-pitch shutout before was Tarik Skubal's 13. This is Miz finding out in real time what he can be. The velocity is mind-bending. All of it is.

[Front Office Sports @FOS]

An inside look at the game-winning shot from inside Madison Square Garden.

[Kirk Herbstreit @KirkHerbstreit]

Incredible experience just being a fan at Game 4 at MSG!
This is why we love sports-Here was my angle for the game winner… @nyknicks down 29 and just kept choppin wood to give themselves a chance at the end-and won it with poise and determination.
Appreciate Mark Shapiro for the invite to witness it in person. Nothin better!

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

Ben Stiller’s angle of the Knicks final stop is going to win him an Oscar

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

125 Years In The Making: The 2026 Red Sox offense hit a historic rock bottom after getting swept by the Rays

[Alex @ajak1033]

The Spurs know how to TAKE the lead, they just don't know how to HOLD the lead. And that's really the most important part of the lead: the holding

[Velo @velovelovelo__]

The Pennsylvania velodrome is turning 50 years old. Take a look back over its storied history as told by the people who worked tirelessly to turn it into an icon.
https://t.co/VijCDIBBiV

[bart @soxbart]

Just this week:

Rafael Devers - 5 homeruns, 16 RBIs
Dustin May - 10 inning no-hitter
Kyle Harrison - 2nd 17k game this year
Vaughn Grissom - Go ahead GS

It’s Wednesday.

[Buster Olney @Buster_ESPN]

The Red Sox are in the market for a right-handed hitter with thump. Last year, they gave up Blaze Jordan, a former 3rd round draft pick, for two months of Steven Matz. Jordan, 23, has a Class AAA slash line of .317/.378/.537 so far this year, with 8 homers, 14 walks, 20 Ks. Chaim Bloom knew the player.

[Jordan Howenstine @AirlessJordan]

Spurs are rolling out the youngest starting lineup in the all-time history of the NBA Conference Finals.

Harper (20)
Castle (21)
Vassell (25)
Champagnie (24)
Wembanyama (22)

Average age: 22 years, 346 days.

[Matt Carey @RealMattCarey]

Joel Embiid, Tobias Harris, and James Harden all winning game 7's in the same weekend, hopefully Ben Simmons caught a nice-sized bass this weekend too

[Hoops Reference @HoopsReference]

@JoelEmbiid my glorious goat

[Yahoo Sports @YahooSports]

Joel Embiid speaks on overcoming his injuries over the years and what being on the court means to him.

[NBACentral @TheDunkCentral]

VJ EDGECOMBE TONIGHT:

30 POINTS
10 REBOUNDS
2 STEALS
12/20 FG
6/10 3PT

A YOUNG SUPERSTAR HAS BEEN BORN

[Gordo @BOSSportsGordo]

Really no facet of the game has gone well for the Red Sox:

🔺SP ERA is 5.27, 3rd worst in baseball.

🔺Scored 68 runs, 22nd in baseball.

🔺Committed 14 errors, 4th most in baseball.

🔺Stolen 6 bases, 2nd least in baseball.

🔺9 ABS challenges won, 2nd least in baseball.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The research behind this is wild. If you played Pokémon as a kid, you have a tiny region in your brain that exists only because of Pokémon. Not a metaphor. Stanford put people in brain scanners and found it.

The study was published in Nature Human Behavior in 2019. They scanned 11 adults who grew up glued to their Game Boys and 11 who never played. When they showed both groups images of the original 151, the players' brains lit up in one specific spot every time. Same spot across all 11 people. The non-players showed zero response.

That spot is a little fold in the back of your brain that normally processes things like animal shapes and cartoon faces. In the Pokémon players, a chunk of it had been permanently reassigned. Their brains carved out a Pokémon department sometime around age 6 or 7 and just never took it down.

And the reason it ended up in the same place in everyone's brain comes down to the Game Boy itself. The screen was 2.6 inches. Every kid held it at roughly the same distance. So those 151 characters hit the exact same patch of each kid's retina, thousands of times, during the years when the brain is still soft enough to reorganize itself. Where an image hits your retina in childhood is what tells your brain where to build the wiring.

Reading works the same way. Humans invented writing about 5,000 years ago. There's zero evolutionary reason for a brain region dedicated to recognizing words. But every person who learns to read grows one, roughly the size of a dime, in the same part of the brain.

Brain-imaging research from 2018 actually watched it appear in children's heads as they learned their letters. It grew by quietly taking over nearby tissue that wasn't doing much yet. Stanford published a follow-up this year showing this region is way smaller or missing entirely in kids with dyslexia, and that 8 weeks of intense reading practice physically grew it back.

London taxi drivers show the same thing in a completely different part of the brain. Brain scans from a 2000 study found the region that stores mental maps had physically expanded, and the longer they'd been driving, the bigger it got. These drivers spend 3 to 4 years memorizing 25,000 streets before they get licensed. About half wash out.

The common thread is childhood. Harvard researchers trained young monkeys to recognize new shapes and they developed brand-new brain regions in predictable locations. Adult monkeys trained on the same shapes never got those structural changes. The young brain wires itself in a way the adult brain cannot replicate.

If you're wondering whether a Pokémon patch in your brain means you lost something else, no. The region sits alongside your normal visual processing areas, not on top of them. Your brain has hundreds of millions of neurons in that zone alone. The lead author noted that every participant in the study had gone on to earn a PhD.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

NEW: It's now more lucrative to have a losing sports team than a championship team.

We examined the Boston Red Sox to see how private equity and cost cutting invaded sports.

In this era, teams want to sell good players for profit more than they want to have a good season.

[Chris Cotillo @ChrisCotillo]

Alex Cora says Marcelo Mayer is the second baseman. He told him he made the team this morning.

[Bleacher Report @BleacherReport]

Shoutout Michael B. Jordan on his Oscar and his role in NBA 2K17 😂🏆

(via @Suns)

[Red Sox @RedSox]

ROMAN FOR USA!!!