Time to drop a little summer recipe. Take some lesbian 20-somethings—like at least 60 of them—and drop them in a group chat. At the center of it all you’ll need a leader, someone who commands attention or fear, and could be the object of everyone's affection under the right ...

How many runs did the Seattle Mariners lose by in Tuesday night's game against Brewers in Milwaukee? And how many runs did the Mariners themselves score? Don't concern yourself with these matters, this silly fixation on who won the game, and by how much. The true connoisseur...

The 2026 LIV Golf season will end this weekend at LIV Golf Indianapolis. The 4 Aces GC fellows have a narrow lead over Ripper GC in the team championship, which I guess they will uhh look to maintain or whatever. Don't worry about it. That team title was supposed to be decid...

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 being summarily rejected by one's own flesh-and-blood.

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The bases are loaded in the bottom of the second. Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, with his beautiful hair and crisp terrifying swing, is at the plate. The pitch from the Padres' Robbie Ray is a 92 mph sinker that he leaves up on the outer edge of the zone. Lindor stings it to the opposite field, and the ball towers up and out toward the right-field corner, where he is waiting. He is always waiting.

Fernando Tatis Jr., the king of the Robbin' Padres, with his flowing hair and his big face, does not fear the long ball. He is its god. Already, in this game, he has hit a home run, but that does not mean he will allow others the pleasure. No, he is the home run's master. He sees the ball off Lindor's bat threatening to become a grand slam, and he tracks it.

His legs race, his head craned toward the ball, his eyes on it. That is his ball. He knows it.

On the cover of Slam magazine's October 1998 issue, Chamique Holdsclaw wore a New York Knicks jersey, NBA basketball in hand. Right next to the forward from Queens was a sneaky inversion of the more common question: "Is The NBA Ready For Chamique Holdsclaw?" She was the firs...

For most women who play baseball in the United States, playing America's pastime in a professional league has been little more than a dream. Yet for a select group of women, that dream is becoming a reality. 

The Women's Pro Baseball League began its inaugural season on Aug. 1, with the four-team league playing all of its games in Springfield, Ill., where dozens of the 120 women who were selected in the league's draft play pro ball. It is the most anticipated women's pro baseball league since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League disbanded in 1954. 

But for many players who were selected in the draft, which took place in November, the dream of getting paid to play baseball in the United States remains deferred.

When Lakers majority owner Jerry Buss died in 2013, he left his 66 percent stake to six of his children, with daughter Jeanie Buss acting as the team's governor. Jerry hoped his family would hold on to the franchise, and toward the end of his life, he took financial and cont...

The Arizona Diamondbacks either have an injured cleanup hitter, a truancy problem, a communications dysfunction, some mysterious and possibly sinister fourth thing, or all of the above.

Well, there's a sixth possibility. They don't mind taking a beat writer for a ride now and then to preserve clubhouse tranquility. But let's take that as a given because that's what a beat writer is for: to toss under the bus when you want the driver to stop.

Anyway, one of their best players, second baseman and designated hitter Ketel Marte, skipped Monday night's 11-1 loss in Boston after going through the bother of flying there from Atlanta with his teammates. This led Arizona Republic beat writer Nick Piecoro, a responsible sort with two decades of said responsibility in the job to prove it, to X this:

In Okinawa's coastal forests, brown puffballs protrude from roots of trees like unwanted warts. Although they might appear to be mushrooms, the balls are plants. To be more specific, they are fruits. To be even more specific, they are clusters of up to a million fruits that ...

Some people are fans of the Carolina Panthers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Carolina Panthers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your Team: The Carolina Panthers

Your 2025 record: 8-9, but not just any old 8-9. This the best 8-9 in the whole NFC South, making the Panthers division champs despite having a losing record—the bad smell that comes with its own deodorizer. Only five teams have ever achieved such a feat, and the Panthers are two of them. They also had the third-worst point difference of any division winner ever (minus-69), so the only luck they could claim as their own was their location.

This week's episode was a really fun one. We set out to make a Broke Jumper Tip Line–focused episode, but only got to the BJTL about 50 minutes in because we had too much other good stuff to talk about with frequent guest Ock Sportello. As to that other stuff: We chatted abo...

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 about reunions, the extinction of the hard T, dinosaurs, and more.

Your letters:

Dusty:

Some transphobic dickheads were again wearing XX-XY shirts at Sunday's game between the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream. Everyone knows what the XX-XY shirt—a truly ugly piece of merchandise made by a brand that raises money for organizations that seek to strip trans people ...

In November 2018, 29-year-old Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined a group of 200 youth activists associated with the Sunrise Movement as they staged a protest at the office of then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. They were there to urge Democratic leader...

According to a report from ESPN, the NBA hasn't found any evidence that Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer arranged to pay Kawhi Leonard in excess of salary-cap rules via the fraudulent green-banking company Aspiration. Just under a year ago, after a series of reports ...

It is difficult to wrap the human mind around the fact that, in the grand old year of 2026, the Milwaukee Brewers are really, truly good. Or maybe that is a personal problem, as someone generally disconnected from the ongoings of the NL Central. What happens over there? None...

Social media is a terrible place to learn about anything, but there is perhaps no phrase more ill-suited for the Twitter or YouTube search bar than "Angel Reese." The reasons for this are obvious and not worth getting into here—there are a bunch of racist losers on there who...

Several times a week, I sit myself down in front of a baseball game either in person or on television, I retrieve my book and my pen, and I keep score. I feel my brain relax, my mind soften, my attention fully focus on one thing in a world where that rarely happens. It is a ...

Pittsburgh had a hell of a winter storm in January, with more than a foot of snow, and freezing temperatures that created towering walls of ice and annoyed locals whose parking situations wouldn’t return to normal for a month. Some of the city's oldest buildings suffered the...

There's no 'I' in crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Matthew Stock, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Matthew is a crossword constructor and stay-at-home dad from Dallas. His work can be found at happylittlepuzzles.com.

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. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

Some people are fans of the Vikings. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Vikings. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

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Your team: Minnesota Vikings, the winningest team to never win a Super Bowl. What an honor! King of the paupers! The widely respected Bills and Bengals have tried their best, but have failed in their quest to lose more Super Bowls than the mighty Vikings. The Lions and Jaguars WISH they had Minnesota's history of being moderately competitive! Bow down, O Titans and Browns! The Vikings are here to teach ye the ways of modest regular season success and embarrassing playoff implosion.

[PHONE RINGING]

"Mr. Walter's office. Can I help you?"

"Yes you can. Is Mark in?"

The story gods have been good to me in my decades of typing for a living. But never better than with the Mayo football tale, which has consumed all of Ireland and me since the final 45 seconds or so of the historically downtrodden team's July 26 All-Ireland championship win ...

Reacher is back, and in the first few episodes of Season 4 our enormous friend seems to be in fine form. He's smooshing guys in libraries, escaping a CIA blacksite, and making sure a tiny kitten finds a good home.

While Reacher may be our current moment's most beloved answer to the question "What if a guy was really big?" he is by no means the only one. Plenty of authors have explored the possibilities inherent in hugeness. Fantasy writers in particular are enamored of this device. So, if you are interested in meeting a few more fictional hulking men, here are some of my favorites. Please note, I'm generally ignoring Romantasy protagonists (with one exception) as that list would be very long. There are so many big men ravishing small women. Honestly, it's better to just leave that whole dynamic alone.

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Mama probably never said there’d be days like this. Newest St. Louis Cardinal Joshua Baez hit three homers in his first three plate appearances as a big leaguer yesterday in Chicago. According to Baseball Almanac, there have been 22,800 other MLBers since the National League’s founding in 1876. None had a debut to match Baez’s. 

In the top of the first inning against the Cubs, the Cards’ outfielder hit the first big league pitch he ever saw 449 feet to center, almost leaving Wrigley Field. He faced Cubs’ left-hander Matthew Boyd again in the third, and put a 3-2 pitch into the left field bleachers for his second HR. And he three-peated with a bomb to right in the top of the sixth. He finished the day 3-4, with 5 RBIs, in the Cards' 8-4 win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QJdGWANMdU

The WNBA doesn’t have an award for “clutch-ness” the way the NBA does, so it figures that they also do not have an award for “unclutch-ness.” Allow us to fill the vacuum: Defector’s inaugural Unclutchy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choking and Tanking goes to the Seat...

Cal Raleigh got off to a slow start to the year, which was to be expected. It is impossible to follow up a 60-homer season with another of the same caliber, and between instigating teammate beef on the global stage and dealing with an early-season oblique strain that eventua...

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best interior design advice column. Today we have fancy track shelving, a moody bedroom makeover, and, my favorite, does a non-ugly dog crate exist? Our first “question” comes from recent conversations I had with a few friends who ha...

It is hard to keep track of the number of free-agent signings and trades made by the Dodgers that have allegedly broken baseball. When Tarik Skubal lands in the dugout at the trade deadline and starts the freakout all over again, it's easy to move on from the last set of acq...