C.B. Bucknor has got to be the only person on Earth wishing that Angel Hernandez was still an active major league umpire. Ever since Hernandez abruptly retired in 2024, the search for baseball's new bad-call bogeyman has been on. It seems that the spotlight is settling on Bu...

JAŸ-Z is coming back, umlaut included. Not that he’s been some kind of recluse the past few years, absent from the public imagination—he’s been doing evil billionaire things, laundering the NFL’s post-Kaepernick reputation through the grandiose production of the Super Bowl h...

Tiger Woods was “sweating profusely” and appeared “lethargic and slow” after his crash last weekend, according to an arrest affidavit released Tuesday. The golfer told investigators with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office that he had taken “a few” prescription drugs earlier in the day, and a deputy later found two hydrocodone pills in Woods’s left pocket. Wood was…

In the first of the recent rambling Instagram live sermons that got him fired by the Chicago Bulls, Jaden Ivey hunts through a bible for passages to share with his followers. He evidently did not do the prep-work to place sticky tabs or bookmarks in there, so there are awkwa...

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, guest host Dave McKenna is talking about cowboy hats, music, high-risk eating, and catch phrases.

What an honor this is! Other than initials I have nothing in common with Drew, the legendary Funbag founder and a real man of letters. But now somebody messed up and let me have the keys to his column. I’m reminded of the time the Exxon Valdez was commandeered by Captain Hazelwood. Let’s commence this voyage. 

Your letters:

He looked a little bigger, and a little greyer. But Justin Verlander in a Tigers jersey is still 2011 AL MVP Justin Verlander in a Detroit Tigers jersey. Nine years, two World Series wins, and two Cy Youngs since he last pitched for the club that drafted him, the 43-year-old...

A half-decade ago in the early days of this website, long before ABS or "The Big Dumper," I became obsessed with a very rare and unexciting way to play baseball. Frustrated by the prevalence of the long ball over small ball in MLB, I imagined a different world: one where pla...

Hockey fights always feel a little absurd when their performativeness is laid bare. We know how it works, and why it's done, but crave permission to suspend disbelief. Just give us the smallest fig leaf of interpersonal dislike, and we'll buy it. But a move toward a safer an...

This week on the show, we were joined by Papo2oo4, the New Jersey rapper behind last year's excellent Papaholic, Vol. 1 and, more relevantly, a New Jersey basketball expert par excellence. We talked about Andrei Kirilenko, when Papo briefly started a podcast that was derailed because his co-hosts were only interested in talking about Kanye West, and why Kyle Anderson was the best high school basketball player he's seen. We also talked a little at the top about a harrowing basketball-watching habit I have, and Harry shared a galactic-brained Darryn Peterson take.

You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!

Any hotshot high schooler who commits to South Carolina is also committing to a kind of amnesia. How many points you scored last game, how old you are, whether you’re a starter or come off the bench, whether you’ve been on this stage before—none of those things seem to matte...

The West Sacramento Athletics are the last winless team in baseball, which is not much of an accomplishment in and of itself. Someone is always the last winless team in baseball, going all the way back to the beginning of baseball and for that matter, winning in general. All...

Among a certain class of politics reporters and pundits, the single most legitimizing thing a Democratic politician can be is "loathed by everyone younger than, browner than, or to the ideological left of James Carville." Safer by far than engaging with a politician's polici...

Rayan Cherki is not the best soccer player in the world. In fact, he's not even a locked-in, sure-fire starter for either of the two teams he currently plays for, Manchester City and France. But though there are certainly several other players who make a bigger, more consist...

The phrase "31-0 run" in basketball might trigger visions of rhapsodic, jogo bonito ball movement, virtuosic shooting, and impregnable defense. The actual 31-0 run achieved by the Toronto Raptors on Sunday looked a little more ordinary than that. If there was anything specta...

Formula 1 has a qualifying problem. This, the FIA acknowledges—that the new power unit regulations have resulted in unfortunate and confusing qualifying laps in which the cars physically cannot go, by some definitions, "as fast as possible." The actual racing, however, is mo...

In the supermarket or at the taco truck, whether it's government subsidies for agriculture or the working conditions of food workers, food and politics are never far apart. Under the second Trump administration, the government has used food stamps as a political football, sh...

Here's one mark of a legendary highlight: You can show it to someone who hasn't seen a minute of the sport in years, with no explanatory context, and get a reaction that's something like, "Wow!" Such is the case with UConn's Braylon Mullins and his shot to beat Duke in the E...

Desperate times call for desperate measures, which of course means that Tottenham Hotspur and John Tortorella are in the news simultaneously. Sadly, their paths do not converge, or anyway do not yet converge, beyond the fact that Spurs have fired another coach in ...

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Rafael Musa and Owen Bergstein, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.

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. 

Barry: The first dedicated reliever entrance song was, of all things, "(Won't You Come Home) Bill Bailey," played on the ballpark organ. This is absolutely true. Betty Boop probably loved it, and there was a pun involved, which I must respect—the pitcher’s name was Bill Dailey—but it did not rock. Sparky Lyle, one of the first and best proto-closers, used “Pomp and Circumstance”—the graduation song. If it’s good enough for Randy Savage it’s good enough for me. But again, it did not rock. Baseball rocking was only invented in 1998, when Padres closer Trevor Hoffman began coming out to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells.”

All of which is to say that the entirety of baseball history and music history have been leading to this moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HuM8_CJ2RU

Even with all the testing data from the minor leagues and spring training, it was hard not to wonder how MLB’s new automated ball-strike challenge system would feel in big league games that count. When would teams use their challenges? Who would use them? How often? Might we...

UConn freshman Braylon Mullins watched his last shot Sunday night arc toward the basket from 35 feet away. If his eyes had been shut, he still would've known, not only from the pandemonium of the crowd and the euphoria of his teammates, but from the wonderful knife-plunge no...

Chances are you—and certainly not I—did not need redemption at 21. At that age, I was in college, and my world mostly revolved around working at the student-run newspaper, getting "clips," doing my best to line up another summer internship, hanging out with my friends, and a...

Campy, goofy, stylish, a little chaotic—there is something so college basketball about Olivia Miles. Her decision to forgo last spring’s WNBA draft, where she was poised to be a top-three pick, and use her final year of NCAA eligibility might have surprised WNBA fa...

Tiger Woods is out on bail after he was charged Friday with suspicion of driving under the influence and refusing to submit to a drug test on Florida's Treasure Coast. It was the second time the legendary golfer has been charged with suspicion of DUI; police in Jupiter filed...

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have a mirror dilemma, a kid- and guest-friendly bathroom, and dinner plates that feel more dignified.  Margot asks: My partner and I fell in love with Rejuvenation's Bentwood Roun...

It’s two days before Christmas, and my family and I are in Munich. We got here on a red-eye the morning prior, and remain barely functional thanks to jet lag. But we didn’t fly all this way just to sleep, no matter how badly all of us want to do so. And if there’s any city that demands you keep your eyes wide open, it’s Munich in all of its Christmastime splendor.

We arrive at the Marienplatz, where the outdoor Christmas markets are already bustling. I don’t know where to look; everything is so beautiful. The famed Glockenspiel dominates the square, but today it has aesthetic competition from the light-strewn evergreens, the handmade sausages sizzling out on open griddles, the pop-up ornament shops with their eaves lined by boughs and flocking, and a life-sized Erzgebirge Pyramid.

BRITISH COLUMBIA — Staring up from the base at the high walls of the Montana Bowl, a backcountry ski zone in Revelstoke, British Columbia, feels like gazing upon a deadly cathedral. My eyes naturally gravitate to the dangerous bits, but I realize they're pinballing around wi...

In the sixth episode of Apple TV’s Imperfect Women, the soft-spoken housewife Mary (Elisabeth Moss) nervously awaits the judgment of her writing group. She is sharing a work of autofiction titled “Mary,” which revels in the narrator’s secret affair with her dissertation advisor’s husband.

“Takes real bravery to depict yourself as such an amoral person,” one participant comments. “Amoral, yes, and just unlikable!” another adds. The group pushes her to emphasize a different character, to “lean into the mystery, and the thriller!”

Mary is quietly crushed: If you can’t be the main character in your own work, where can you be?

Opening night of the men's NCAA tournament’s round of 16 will be remembered for the guys who weren’t on the floor when the games were decided. An intense and otherwise beautifully played Iowa-Nebraska game was decided by one of the most bizarre coaching boners in recent Mar...