Outside The Confines: Firing up the second half

There will be Cubs baseball again today.

The New York Times announced that they are closing down their sports department and will instead rely on coverage from The Athletic. The Athletic does great work (although the NYT has laid off a lot of good journalists there recently) but fewer people covering sports is always bad. The New York Times says that none of the people currently working in the sports department will be laid off, but they may be assigned to non-sports departments.

The second half of the season starts today and Manny Randhawa has seven storylines to follow.

Bob Nightengale has storylines for the second half as well.

Ken Rosenthal lists the ten biggest questions of the second self.

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