On the grammar questions —

Several people wrote in to note that using plural verb forms after geographic names ("Phoenix are 8-3") is the standard British and Aussie practice. In fact, when I asked Steve why he uses that form, he said it's because he likes being Anglophilic. (To which I responded: this is America. Maybe you should go back to Russia, pinko.)

From BeKnighted:

If the noun is referring to the players acting collectively, then it's plural. If it's referring to the entity (as in a court case), then it's singular. These rules work reasonably well whether or not the team name seems to be plural.

So, for instance: "The Washington Mystics are playing in New York." "Washington's hometown women's professional baseball team is the Mystics." (In this example, you can flip the sentence around and it works fine, too.)

You can flip it around for "The Mystics is Washington's team." That sounds a little funny to me, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Sue Short, who teaches English comp, mostly agrees, citing the rules for collective nouns.

The rules about collective nouns might be applicable here, but the result produces constructions that we would have difficulty living with comfortably.

The basic rule about collective nouns: E.g. the jury is unanimous in their verdict (acting in unison as a collective whole, so the singular is used). The jury were deadlocked and unable to decide whether the defendant acted with intent to harm the plaintiff (references individual actions that are different within the group, so the plural is used).

Unhappily, when talking about team records, these would presumably be an act of unity — so we'd have "The Liberty is doing better after the All-Star break," or "The Fever is struggling." [Or even: "The Sparks is bad"?] I agree that it's much more comfortable to use the plural (a British English thing?) for these collective nouns, regardless of the unity or individuality of action — but it's likely more grammatically correct to use the singular, unless the meaning references some individual, diverse activity ("The Shock were hopelessly divided on whether the Katie Smith trade was a good idea or a bad one.")

This is more comfortable with place names, but since they are also being used as collective nouns, the same rule should apply.

Garner notes that the American English practice is now to treat collective nouns as presumptively singular, while the British practice is still to treat them as plural (This might explain the "Manchester are..." construction for British sports writing.) So it sounds a little strange to the modern American ear to say "the jury were divided."

But the bigger issue is that it's not clear to me that team names (whether geographic or mascot) are really collective nouns, or that they function in the same way that other collective nouns do.

From Krista Latham at the Free Press:

At my paper, we treated the Shock as a singular. The Shock is 0-300. The Shock plays the Lynx Monday night, etc. One of our best word editors explained the reasoning behind this pretty simply -- the "Shock" is a singular name, therefore conjugate it as such. Other team names that applied to this rule were the Liberty, Storm, Mercury, Sting, and Fever. Although, as you've noticed, not every paper follows this rule. The two other papers in this area treat the Shock as plural. We think they're wrong.

But even the Free Press is inconsistent on this point. See the 8th paragraph in this recent Silva-bylined article ("The Shock play at Minnesota...")

And in any event, what makes "Shock" an unambiguously singular name? That it doesn't end in 's'? (What about "women" and "deer"?)

The more I think about this, the more I wonder whether sports team names are simply an irregular noun form for which there's no clear rule. The source of the irregularity might be that they are proper names, but they are names constructed from (mostly) plural common nouns.

The problem isn't unique to sports. Slate says "The White Stripes are" a blues band. The New Republic says "The White Stripes is" a two-person one-man band.

A final question: if "Sparks" is a plural noun, does it have any usable singular form? Can you say: "Lisa Leslie is a Spark"?