| | | | | | | Welcome to The Sports Moment, your guide to the buzziest stories in sports. I’m Dave Sheinin, a sports enterprise reporter for The Post, and I’m pinch-hitting for Ava Wallace while she covers the U.S. Open in New York. This week, we’ve got a bombshell investigation into the death of an NFL owner, plus a ranking of the 10 best college football towns in America. But first, a pitching phenom makes history. Did someone forward this to you? Click here to sign up. | | What's happening this week? | In the early days of Paul Skenes’s MLB career, the parallels to Stephen Strasburg were unmistakable: the massive hype, the equally massive talent, the outrageous fastballs, the postseason atmosphere every time they took the mound. In a sport where even No. 1 overall picks sometimes flame out, they were the real things. But while Strasburg’s greatness was largely fleeting — his dazzling 2010 rookie season for the Washington Nationals was cut short by elbow surgery, the start of an up-and-down, injury-plagued career that ended in 2022 — Skenes, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 23-year-old phenom, is the every-fifth-day embodiment of What Might Have Been for fans of Strasburg and the Nationals. On Sunday, Skenes, the 2024 National League rookie of the year, overpowered the Colorado Rockies with a typically brilliant performance: seven scoreless innings, three hits, no walks, seven strikeouts. But it is only when you zoom out from there that Skenes’s historical greatness comes into focus. |  | | Skenes is a near-lock to win the NL Cy Young Award this year. (Frank Franklin II, AP) | | That start was the 50th of Skenes’s career, and it is arguably the greatest such stretch to start a career in baseball history. His career ERA is now 2.02, which is lower through 50 starts than those of Dwight Gooden (2.27), Jose Fernandez (2.47) and Strasburg (2.96), to name a few — with Strasburg, due to injury, not even reaching the 50-start milestone until his fourth big league season. In fact, since 1920, only Oakland’s Vida Blue (2.01) owns a lower ERA than Skenes through his first 50 starts. And since Blue (who debuted in 1969) benefited from playing in a pitching-dominated era, in which teams scored roughly a half-run less per game than they do now, you could argue Skenes has been ever better. There’s also this: Both struck out exactly 351 batters through those 50 starts, but Skenes did it in 85⅓ fewer innings. With about a month left in the regular season, Skenes is a near-lock to win the NL Cy Young Award — especially with Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler now out for the season — which would make him just the third Pirates pitcher, after Vern Law in 1960 and Doug Drabek in 1990, to do so. This weekend (on a day still TBD), Skenes is expected to make his Fenway Park debut when the Pirates visit the Boston Red Sox. If you’ve never watched a Skenes start — or even if you’ve never missed one — that should be worth tuning in for. | | A must-read investigation | On Thursday, our sports investigative team dropped a stunning deep-dive into the final months in the life of former Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, who died in May at 65. Suffice it to say the official, public accounts of both Irsay’s years-long battle against substance abuse and the ultimate cause of his death were both, shall we say, incomplete. You’ll want to set aside some time for this one. | | | |  | You've gotta see this | | | Fans take shots on a 15-shot board before a North Dakota State football game in Fargo, N.D., last October. (Tim Gruber For The Washington Post) | | The Post’s Travel/Sports hybrid project on the 10 best college football towns in America, which published this week, is full of dazzling photos, fun videos and evocative prose — like this gem by Chuck Culpepper describing the frat houses near Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin: “where the inspiring sights might include a beer bong on the second floor delivering the nectar to a drinker on the ground.” Or Rodger Sherman recounting how he once lost a game of beer pong to a 12-year-old near LSU’s Tiger Stadium. (“That kid was sober,” Sherman wrote. “And he was a sniper.”) Beer, as it turns out, is a big part of college football. | | What should I watch this week? | Perusing that project would be a great way to get yourself ready for what might be the greatest Week 1 in college football history — including no fewer than three matchups of top-10 programs: No. 1 Texas at No. 3 Ohio State (Saturday at noon on FOX); No. 9 LSU at No. 4 Clemson (Saturday at 7:30 p.m. on ABC) and No. 6 Notre Dame at No. 10 Miami (Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on ABC). Other enticing options:
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