Team USA Loses a Man; Tim Lincecum is Terrible at Baseball

Dashiell Bennett
Team USA Loses a Man; Tim Lincecum is Terrible at Baseball

Today in Sports: Ticket scalping in London, a soccer star is vindicated, and a big blow to U.S. basketball.

  • And we have yet another pre-Olympic scandal: The BBC reports that tickets that were given free to sponsors are being sold on the secondary market for more than 20 percent of their face value. UK residents were already a little annoyed that sponsors received 8 percent of all the London 2012 tickets and now it seems that some are trying to make a further profit, in violation of IOC rules. [BBC]

  • Two-time Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum is on pace to have the worst season of any starting pitcher. Ever. His adjusted ERA+* of 55 is the lowest number for any pitcher who has thrown at least 95 innings in the modern era of baseball. How this happened to a man just three years removed from back-to-back Cy Young Awards and with no obvious injuries is anyone's guess. (*ERA+ is Earned Run Average adjusted for ballpark factors and weighted so the score of a league average pitcher is 100.) [The Wall Street Journal]

  • Junior Seau's brain has been donated to National Institutes of Health so that it can be added to studies of long-term brain injury on people who play football. The probably future Hall of Fame linebacker killed himself in May by shooting himself in the chest, possibly to preserve his brain for just that reason and raising speculation that injuries sustained while playing football led to his depression and health problems. [AP/Yahoo]

  • Team USA is already down one member after L.A. Clippers forward Blake Griffin hurt his knee during practice and had to drop out of the Olympics. No. 1 draft pick Anthony Davis has been summoned to replace him. Luckily, the team did survive without him, winning its first exhibition game by clobbering the Dominican Republic by 54 points.  [NBA.com]

  • Sprinter Jeneba Tarmoh is still upset about the dead heat ruling that cost her a spot on the U.S. Olympic Team. Tarmoh finished the 100-meter final at the U.S. trials believing she had finished third, but officials later ruled that she tied fellow runner Allyson Felix. Tarmoh declined the chance at a run-off, but still feels she was treated unfairly by U.S. Track and Field. "I don’t accept what happened,” Tarmoh said. “They said, ‘You won,’ and took it away.” [The New York Times]

  • John Terry, the Chelsea star defender and former captain of England's national soccer team, was found not guilty today on charges that he verbally abused Anton Ferdinand of the Queens Park Rangers during a Premier League game last fall. But because Ferdinand's account of the incident was inconsistent and inclusive (and no one else on the field heard the alleged comment), the only "evidence" in the entire five-day case was Terry's own account. (He claimed he did say the offensive words, but only to repeat what Ferdinand had accused him of saying.) The judge said he believed Terry and since no else came forward on either side, he can't convict him. So it sounds like a waste of time that probably won't sovle the problem of racism in soccer. The end. [The Telegraph]