It is a rare occasion when baseball players actually land any solid punches in a bench-clearing brawl, and this clip will be no different. No heavyweight blows connected cleanly in Tuesday's bout between Braves starter Reynaldo Lopez and Angels outfielder Jorge Soler. It was...
Sometimes the best music is the most embarrassing music. That's part of the magic of art: the mystical properties that can make a work simultaneously vulnerable and uncomfortable and alluring and groovy. A desire to jam and to hide my face in my hands—that is Dashboard Confe...
Well, what is it? According to the official 2026 MLB rules, a strike—in isolation, absent swings and foul tips—is called when "any part of the ball passes through any part of the strike zone." The strike zone is duly defined, in a long-winded and broadly unpunctuated phrase,...
While Hikaru Nakamura was making an ignoble sort of chess history, Javokhir Sindarov yawned.
Just 12 moves into their fifth-round match at the 2026 Candidates Tournament, the 20-year-old had tied the world's second-ranked player in quite the knot, forcing Nakamura to sit an...
The most anticipated sporting event of my life was Sunday, Feb. 23, 2014: the Michigan men's basketball team playing Michigan State in Ann Arbor. I'd grown up around Big Ten basketball, but I was a newly minted Wolverine fan (and a freshman on campus). My matriculation coinc...
Willson Contreras has played in 121 career regular-season games against the Milwaukee Brewers, by dint of spending the bulk of his career in the NL Central. In 23 of those games, he has been hit by a pitch, including once when he was plunked twice. No other team has hit him ...
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking chefs, noogies, hoodie storage, and more.
I’m back! YAYYY! And what a treat to have Dave McKenna host the Funbag last week in my stead. Let’s all give the man a round of applause, because he’s got more stories to tell than Shakespeare did. A true original.
There is a particular indignity that comes from living in America, derived from the experience of waking up in the morning to see reports that Donald Trump has said something profoundly evil, and then needing to type "truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump" into your web browser t...
Now that the World Cup field is set, and the international breaks are over, it's time for the club season's final sprint. The top European leagues have comfortable leaders—except for Paris Saint-Germain, who is only four points up on Lens in Ligue 1—but there's still enough ...
It was a lovely day above the Moon. The Artemis astronauts did some science, took lots of pictures, didn't die or get replaced by bodysnatchers, and perhaps most importantly, made me bawl a couple of times. One was when Orion came back into communications range after 40 nerv...
Monday's NCAA Championship Game delivered a huge victory for the University of Connecticut, in that Dan Hurley did not bring himself, his team, the university or the coaching profession into three days of disrepute, nor did Dawn Staley repeatedly offer to kick his ass. ...
Watching an all-time great athlete fade into anonymity comes with a perverse sadness: a slow death on a public stage, with stakes that only matter because people have decided to lend it some fictive narrative purpose. In baseball, a sport that worships statistics if there we...
The Chicago Sky were supposed to be getting a franchise building block when they drafted Angel Reese with the seventh overall pick of the 2024 draft. Instead they ended up with a player who didn't even make it through her rookie deal. The Sky announced Monday morning that Re...
A couple of Antetokounmpos took the court for the Milwaukee Bucks on Sunday, in a home win over the Memphis Grizzlies. Neither of them were the good Antetokounmpo. Thanasis, the second-oldest of the five brothers, played two minutes and scored a bucket. Alex, the youngest, p...
For as reassuring as it may be to know you have a world-spanning team of geniuses overseeing your well-being, the Artemis crew has to get a little annoyed by mission control sometimes, right? They're constantly in your ear and up your butt. They're nagging you to exercise wh...
In December of 1995, Patrick Roy let in nine goals in half a game at home against the Detroit Red Wings. With the crowd getting on his case, and the team already in a spiral, Roy exited the ice and promptly told Canadiens brass that he would not be suiting up for Montreal ag...
Sometimes circumstances force you to conclude that God bets. And while you may choose to question the existence of a deity, or more specifically wonder who or what it is that would book those bets, the evidence is still the evidence.
So, let us walk you over to the Los Ange...
Less than one month after Kalshi got into a legal whoopsie over whether or not they should pay out bettors who wagered on the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the early days of the U.S.'s disastrous war with Iran, the don't-call-us-a-gambling-site's biggest competitor, Pol...
Have a go at our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Faren Roth, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Faren is a soon-to-be Ph.D. student in speech, language, and hearing sciences who lives in Madison, Wis. She discovered the world of crossword construction six months ago, and she's been a bit obsessed ever since! She hopes her first puzzle with Defector is a hit.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1.
There was a moment early in the third quarter of Sunday’s national championship game when you could see exactly how UCLA was going to win and why. The South Carolina Gamecocks, desperate for offense, had taken to gambling now: sending bold passes through traffic, pawing for ...
If Jo Adell hadn't been so precocious, his arrival as a big leaguer would seem right on time. The Angels made him the 10th overall pick of the 2017 MLB Draft and the breadth and voltage of his talent quickly made him one of the top prospects in the sport even before that col...
Claude Monet’s painting The Path through the Irises is hard to ignore. First of all, there’s the sheer size of it—the canvas stretches six and a half feet high and over five feet across. The Path through the Irises hangs center stage in its gallery at the Metropolitan Museum...
As the Final Four game between Michigan and Arizona wound down on Saturday night, the TBS broadcasting crew said a bunch of demonstrably true and contextually confusing things about Arizona. The Wildcats really had entered the game as hot as any program in college basketball...
A college basketball coach in the middle of a meltdown is extended grace that generally wouldn't be granted to any other adult having a tantrum in public. On the merits, there's nothing much to say on behalf of a grown man who is stamping and fuming and turning a Cran-apple ...
Tiger Woods has been charged with driving under the influence and refusing to submit to a drug test, following his March 27 rollover crash in Jupiter Island, Florida. In documents and public remarks, police laid out some behaviors of Woods that suggested to them that he was ...
Conspiracy theories about athlete ages are not infrequent, though they have declined in popularity recently, and it is rare that they are applied to people from the United States. However, after the release of a concerning video by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a discussion must b...
On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it had acquired the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) show. The Financial Times reports that the recently de-Sorafied AI giant paid somewhere in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars" for the purchase. The deal immediately p...
You can count on the things that mark the passage of time on Survivor. Early on, there's the very first tribal council, the first tribal swap, the first double elimination. Nothing looms larger over the early game, though, than the possibility of making the merge. For those ...
HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but quality isn't the point. The show is a transparent attempt to induct a new ...
You know all those photos and videos of folks lined up a million deep at airports last month? It was hard to see those and not feel a sort of ambient discomfort yourself, imagining the stress of being one of those travelers. I know I could only think about how frustrated, anxious, confused, and squished I would feel if I, too, were stuck in that mass of humanity.
With that in mind, check out how crunched the chases for the final playoff spots have become in both conferences, with fewer than 10 games remaining in the NHL regular season. These guys are all close enough to smell each other's breath.
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