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12 Oct 14:36 • Ray Ratto

The Brewers Will Just Keep Doing This Until Someone Stops Them

The idea that the Milwaukee Brewers can keep playing the same game over and over again and getting the same result is an interesting one. It's probably not a sustaining one because baseball does not tend to operate that way, but you keep watching for something different from...

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11 Oct 22:33 • Israel Daramola

Well, That’s The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen In Some Time

We're in Landover, Maryland. Its the New York Giants taking on the Washington Commanders. A divisional rivalry game on a rainy Sunday afternoon with two teams desperate to win the NFC East, but in bad shape thanks to injuries and general haplessness. The Commanders got their...

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11 Oct 20:33 • Diana Moskovitz

Welcome The Philadelphia Eagles To Jaguars Junction

To paraphrase one of the greats, it's not easy living up to the standards of Jaguars Junction. It's not just about the losing; any team can lose a game, especially in the NFL. And it's also not about the penalties. The yellow flags come for all of us. No, to feel truly welco...

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11 Oct 19:15 • Israel Daramola

OU-Texas Is The Last Truly Bonkers College Football Rivalry

There's no point in trying to predict how a Red River rivalry game will go. Texas and Oklahoma have aligned themselves to this eternal blood feud, some Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid shit. And it doesn't matter what the records next to their names say or what the expectations...

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11 Oct 17:12 • Ray Ratto

The White Sox Lean Into The “Windy” In “Windy City”

The Chicago White Sox had been given oodles of credit for overcoming the three worst years in their history (throwing the 1919 World Series aside). And when they plowed remorselessly and successfully through their first four postseason games this fall, you could sense that m...

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09 Oct 18:51 • Diana Moskovitz

New Details Emerge About 2019 Child Abuse Investigation Involving Tyreek Hill

In early 2019, Tyreek Hill was already proof of just how far athletic talent can take you. Yes, he had pleaded guilty to domestic abuse in college, including signing a document in which he said he placed his pregnant girlfriend in a headlock. Yes, he was then dismissed by Oklahoma State, transferring to Division II…

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09 Oct 18:15 • Ray Ratto

Mike Ditka, Forever Chicago

The relationship between sports and the place where those games are played is largely a matter of fans developing a strong but mostly manageable addiction to their own pheromones. Ritual and iconography matter more than the actual results when the results don't meet the...

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09 Oct 17:06 • Sabrina Imbler

The Secret To Living 194 Years Is Being A Turtle

Geriatric Jonathan has made the news again, this time for having his genome sequenced. The Aldabra giant tortoise, who is estimated to be 194 years old, is the oldest known land animal on the planet. (The ocean, which teems with glass sponges thousands of years old and Green...

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09 Oct 16:33 • Lucy Bloom

What’s To Be Done With Jerry Dipoto?

During a Sept. 28 press conference, Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto stated unprompted that if he had been fired following this season, it would have been justified. This is an extremely funny thing to say when you have not lost your job, especially whe...

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09 Oct 15:54 • Rafaela Bassili

Another Mountaineering Documentary That Asks: What Is Wrong With These People?

Having leisurely picked it up one day without expecting to be taken in, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air arrested me from the first page. “Among my five teammates who reached the top [of Mount Everest], four … perished in a rogue storm,” Krakauer writes. “By the time I’d descend...

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09 Oct 15:54 • Israel Daramola

We Now Know For Sure That We Know Nothing For Certain

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: You'll have to wade through a fair amount of mediocre slop to get to the actual pri...

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09 Oct 15:54 • Israel Daramola

Even Anonymous Stadium Workers Are Scoring On The Cowboys

As if Thursday's 24-16 defeat to a (formerly) winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers team—a loss which never really felt as close as the final score looks—wasn't already bad enough for the Dallas Cowboys. They now have to deal with everyone seeing a video of Dak Prescott walking to the locker room, fresh after losing at home to those aforementioned Bucs, taking offense to a worker inside the stadium calling his performance "embarrassing." The word was so triggering that it forced Prescott into some glaring, perhaps even glowering.

https://twitter.com/AdamJRossow/status/2108426633493242327

Later at his press conference, where Prescott had to sit there and explain his team's ass-kicking in primetime, he was asked about the moment:

Defector
09 Oct 15:54 • Kelsey McKinney

The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off Has A Gem Of A Time During Biscuit Week

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing o...

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09 Oct 13:54 • Patrick Redford

Brazil’s Presidential Election Is One Piece Of A Larger, More Depressing Story

If one wanted to understand the alarming state of international politics in the Western Hemisphere through a single story, it'd be hard to beat Jose Antonio Kast visiting CECOT this past January. Kast spent nearly 20 years at the extreme right fringe of Chilean politics, mo...

Defector
08 Oct 20:09 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Motor Matters

I know how the faint praise goes, but a lot of the important things Angel Reese does actually do show up in the box score. They certainly did in Atlanta’s Game 2 win over New York on Wednesday, a 101-98 overtime thriller that gave the Dream a 2-0 lead in the semifinals.

This showed up in the box score:

Defector
08 Oct 19:39 • Samer Kalaf

Is This Guy Who Uses AI To Run His Fantasy Football Team The Biggest Loser In The World?

Why does anyone play fantasy football? This is not a trick question, although it's also not particularly difficult to answer. Perhaps they do it for money, or they enjoy football, or they want a shared activity to help stay in touch with friends or family. Whatever the reason, the fun is in picking your guys and managing your little team and hoping you win more often than you lose. Some people have a healthier relationship to this endeavor than others. Still, if none of it appeals to you, then you can always not do it.

Then there's this guy:

Defector
08 Oct 18:45 • Meghan Racklin

A Novel About California’s Pluckiest Virgin Is Getting A Second Chance

Names, the heroine of Cynthia Buchanan’s 1972 debut novel, Maiden, thinks to herself, “are so vital.” And with a name like Fortune, you’d have to try your luck in California. Although she prefers Fortunée: she calls this a “higher-type pronunciation,” though this also marks ...

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08 Oct 18:45 • Sabrina Imbler

Everything We Know And Don’t Know About The Possible Plague Death At The Anti-Plague Institute

You might have heard by now of the scientist in Russia, 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, who died on Oct. 2 of an unknown illness. Shipilova worked in a lab at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, an institution founded in the 1930s to control ...

Defector
08 Oct 17:54 • Drew Magary

A Blue Wave Won’t Mean Shit If The Chumps Get Their Way

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. You mig...

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08 Oct 17:27 • David Roth

What Process Are The Orioles Trusting?

Not a lot of owners would have let Mike Elias do what he has done with the Baltimore Orioles. This was true in a negative, how-dare-you-sir sense when the team's John Angelos–led ownership entrusted Elias with overseeing a more strategic approach to bottoming all the way out...

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08 Oct 16:06 • Kathryn Xu

What Is Wrong With Yankees Fans?

The Tampa Bay Rays–New York Yankees ALDS matchup revealed some intriguing eccentricities of each team's respective ballpark. For example, the Tropicana Field ground rules contain a section entitled "Catwalks, Lights and Suspended Objects" with particulars on if a ball should...

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08 Oct 16:06 • Israel Daramola

Jay-Z Doesn’t Have Much To Give You

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. For the longest time I complained that rap music wasn't getting the Hollywood documentary treatment it deserved. While I've enjoyed experimental, in-dep...

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08 Oct 16:06 • Tom Ley

An Antitrust Expert Makes The Comprehensive Case Against The Protect College Sports Act

Marc Edelman has spent much of the last two decades fighting to help college athletes get fairly compensated for their labor. A lawyer who is currently a tenured professor at Baruch College, Edelman has been writing about the NCAA's violations of antitrust law since 2002. In 2023, he advised both the states of Ohio and New York in their antitrust cases against the NCAA.

As an antitrust expert who has dedicated so much time to thinking about college sports and how athletes should be properly compensated, Edelman felt like the perfect guy to talk to about the Protect College Sports Act, which was recently passed by the Senate and is expected to be voted on in the House after the midterm elections. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

Defector
08 Oct 14:06 • Tom Ley

Somebody Fucked Up

We are zooming ahead to the very end of Wednesday night's semifinal game between the New York Liberty and Atlanta Dream, which the Dream won in overtime, 101-98, to take a 2-0 series lead. After Angel Reese hit two free throws to put the Dream up by three, the Liberty had on...

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07 Oct 18:00 • Chris Thompson

Did I Ruin My Child’s Imagination By Being Such An Involved Parent?

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.

This week, Chris answers a question about a child who simply will not play alone.

Defector
07 Oct 17:03 • Felix Kent

A Uniquely Clunky Sentence Is A Joy Forever

I have tried over the past year and change to find a succinct way to tell this story and instead only keep coming up with longer and more elaborate versions. So: way back in law school I read a lot of John Buchan novels. If you are not familiar with John Buchan, know that he...

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07 Oct 16:48 • Lauren Theisen

Dylan Larkin And The Red Wings Are Having Agonizing Breakup Sex On Live TV

Dylan Larkin is still a Red Wing, even though he doesn't want to be. His offseason trade request, arriving after 11 seasons with the club and a mere five playoff games (all as a rookie), symbolized the franchise's inability to shift out of neutral and forced fans to stare th...

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07 Oct 16:48 • Drew Magary

The TV People Are Talking About Deshaun Watson All Wrong

If you missed last week’s Thursday Night Football tilt between the Steelers and Browns, don’t grieve. The game itself was inessential, and Amazon Prime’s coverage of the game all but incentivized the audience to do anything else with its evening. That’s because Amazon’s broa...

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07 Oct 16:48 • Madeline Lane-McKinley

‘Content Machines’ Asks The Right Questions About Publishing In The Platform Era

Every season, there’s a particular sort of novel that elicits its own genre of disdain. It’s somehow “too personal” and also lacking in “depth.” It’s called things like indulgent, trashy, lazy, artless, frivolous, embarrassing, or perhaps just very online. This is the mauvai...

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07 Oct 16:48 • Ray Ratto

Padres-Brewers Has Been The Best Of October Baseball

The single discordant note in the otherwise effervescent National League Divisional Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres so far was a brief shot of new Padres owners Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones watching Game 3. It was easy to imagine them, less th...