The Los Angeles Dodgers had a parade Thursday to celebrate their second straight World Series victory. The Colorado Rockies, working the other end of the baseball alley, knew that they had to respond, if not in kind then in volume. And so they did.

Yes, the Rockies acknowledged the Dodgers' place at the cutting edge of the new baseball with a nod to a 14-year-old movie about a 23-year-old season that ended in a first-round playoff loss. It did not take the worst team in baseball a full week to trump the best team in baseball with an equally jaw-dropping and equally on-brand moment, but you avert your eyes from Rockyball at your own peril. You watch them at your own peril, too, which tells you the strength of their weakness.

As the parent of an 18-month-old, I’ve been reading a lot lately. That is, if your definition of reading includes thumbing through sheets of increasingly careworn and spittle-soaked cardboard, reciting the 30 or 40 words that compose each tale from memory, and pausing innume...

While the man inarguably does his research, we must assume that Al Michaels did not read this story when it ran two and a half weeks ago. If he had, he would have called in sick for Thursday night's Raiders-Broncos game, and so might have spared himself having to c...

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.

Israel: We got our first edition of the college football playoff standings and hoo boy, it’s time to get MAD ONLINE. The main takeaways from the first bracket are that the SEC and the Big Ten are swallowing up all the real estate, the Big 12 makes a decent show of it, and literally no one has any respect for the ACC, which is a huge blow to Miami’s chances. 

Earlier this summer, ESPN made the confounding and ultimately disastrous choice to build its NBA Finals broadcasts around the stentorian yowling of Stephen A. Smith, a man who neither knows ball nor cares for it. You could have deduced that from watching him work the desk or, even more starkly, plug away at a solitaire app on his phone during the best game of the series. One might consider Smith's omnipresence on ESPN's broadcast alongside his naked disinterest in the thing being broadcast, and wonder whether this was as cynical as he could get.

No. It could get worse, as shown by this grotesque new AI ad Smith cut for Solitaire Cash, a solitaire-branded app that belongs as a notable new entry in mobile game hell:

I'm writing specifically about the Edmonton Oilers at the St. Louis Blues on Sportsnet on Monday night, but in broad strokes that will apply to any game you're watching.

First Period

A jury in Washington, D.C. today found a local resident not guilty of misdemeanor assault, a charge he earned by spectacularly and hilariously chucking a large sandwich into the chest of a Border Patrol officer in August.

The state attempted to charge Sean Charles Dunn, the heroic chucker of the hoagie, with more serious crimes, but was forced to settle for a single misdemeanor charge after a grand jury refused to indict him. Dunn's victim, a Border Patrol agent named Greg Lairmore, was struck by the sub after being dispatched to Washington D.C. to help carry out the Trump administration's pointless and fascistic crackdown of the city. After confronting Lairmore and giving him a little of the old business, Dunn whipped an entire Subway sandwich into the officer's chest before leading him on a foot chase.

Late in this week's episode of The Distraction, after Drew, returning champion guest Rohan Nadkarni, and I talked about local politics, lamentable trends in sushi roll naming, and the Miami Dolphins, I explain "gooning" to Drew. A Funbag question started it, Drew repeatedly asked for more elaboration, and a sprawling and excellent new Harper's story on the subject had armed me with plenty of unpleasant information to share on the topic. I would have bet that we'd get through the lifespan of this podcast, even if it had gone on for another few decades, without having done any of that. I would have lost that bet.

When Zohran Mamdani upset Andrew Cuomo to win the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, it led to a lot of histrionics. The usual fear tactics against a young Muslim democratic socialist had failed to torpedo his campaign, and the rich were getting desperate. In ...

Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland died by suicide on Thursday in Texas, according to law enforcement. He was 24 years old.

Frisco Police said they got a call late Wednesday night from the Texas Department of Public Safety, asking them for help finding a vehicle they had been pursuing that had entered the city. Per the police statement, state troopers found the crashed vehicle, on southbound Dallas Parkway near Warren Parkway, but Kneeland wasn't inside. While officers looked for him, police said they learned that Kneeland had "expressed suicidal ideations."

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.

The exact midpoint of the NFL regular season has always been annoying to pin down. The bye weeks make it so that teams haven’t all played the same number of games this time of year. And the advent of 17-game season means that an individual team’s season can never be cleanly divided in half. And then the average content grinder jumps the gun and files a “midseason report” right after Week 6. Get the fuck out of here with that, Mr. Timelord. We know that a proper midway point for the NFL season doesn’t exist. If it did, there’d be a shitty, Pro Bowl-themed event dropped into it.

Have you watched the Miami Heat this season? They're doing weird stuff, and it's mostly working. Weeks after the Grizzlies fired Taylor Jenkins, they also let go of several staffers, including first-year assistant Noah LaRoche, who then joined Miami. LaRoche was the architec...

Of all of the top teams in Europe, Barcelona under manager Hansi Flick is the most addicted to the offside trap. The high-risk, high-reward defense has been Flick's trademark as a manager, and Barcelona has, by both design and necessity, adopted it with striking intensity. F...

Disney is bouncing out of its gambling partnership with Penn Entertainment, the operator behind the crummy ESPN Bet sportsbook platform. The unholy partnership, forged in 2023 between the wheezing multinational entertainment conglomerate and the trumped-up regional racetrack...

To say Deliver Me From Nowhere isn’t for everybody is to exaggerate its actual appeal. The Bruce Springsteen biopic isn't even for all Springsteen fans. But aging dudes with daddy issues, which could be a redundancy: have I got an admirably boring portrait of the mega-artist as a younger man for you! And me! 

Deliver Me is adapted from Warren Zanes's 2023 nonfiction bestseller about the recording of Nebraska. The movie opens in 1981, as Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White, is onstage in Cincinnati with the E Street Band. He's finishing up The River tour, the 11-month, 140-show journey that hit 13 countries and made him a global superstar. The movie seeks to show how fame and Freudian foibles almost crushed him.

New York City has Mamdani fever! Our new mayor-elect made it official on Tuesday, after a savvy final push where Zohran spent the last month frequenting every bake sale and garden club and hip restaurant and Washington Square Park content creator. He even spent Halloween weekend club-hopping to every cool nightlife spot in the city, or as we New Yorkers call it, an Eric Adams Wednesday.

As we celebrate Mamdani week, it's important to remember that he is the hip-hop candidate. Not just because of his former rap career, though we'll get to that. It's the way he has used rap in interesting ways to establish his candidacy. From going to Wu-Tang shows to shouting out Dipset, he has the taste of, well, your typical Brooklyn hipster, which is yet another bit of smart politicking. With that in mind, let's toast to Mamdani with the songs that represented his run.

Earlier this year, on a cold Sunday in January, I walked into an antique store in a Washington D.C. suburb. When I go to a shop like this one, I'm not looking for chairs or lamps. My interests are a little more specialized: a collectible whiskey decanter shaped like the Superdome, for instance, or a 1976 tabloid spread about Watergate witnesses who died under strange circumstances.

Now I was on the lookout for other important historical artifacts. And this place, West Howard Antiques in Kensington, Maryland, had a ton of them: sports yearbooks, posters, and all kinds of political ephemera, stuff with slogans like "Youth for Kennedy" and "Jimmy Carter 76."

In July, the Guardian reported that the NWSL had quietly allowed its policy on the participation of transgender players, established in 2021, to expire. The scrapped policy used the testosterone levels of transgender players to determine their eligibility to play in the leag...

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 on the show.

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I wasn't ready for how much it loved trans people.

A New York City mayoral election is, definitionally, not anyone outside of the city's business. That this year's campaign, which ended in Zohran Mamdani's victory on Tuesday night, became everybody's business, and a big stupid national story, speaks to the effectiveness of M...

SAN FRANCISCO — "I don't think this will be an only good story," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said after being asked a question about whether his company, valued around $1 trillion, might bring some bad into the world. In other words: yes. His defense was that people should think i...

Tom Brady's post-playing career transition to "Weird Rich Guy" appears nearly complete. He announced on Tuesday that he had his old dead dog cloned.

Lua, a pit bull mix, died in 2023. Brady's new dog Junie, he revealed, is an exact genetic clone of Lua, whose DNA was preserved before her death. Like all normal pet owners, Brady announced his new dog via a press release to People magazine:

Recently, I have been watching a lot of tennis, and thus trying to learn about tennis. This, as it turns out, is very difficult, because tennis is not a sport that wants to teach you about itself.

If you do not have knowledgeable colleagues whom you can pester with technical questions, the best way to learn about a new sport should be through a well-executed broadcast that enables a correlation between time spent watching and things learned. This broadcast would ideally have an enthusiastic primary commentator who seems to like the sport and can explain both narrative context and what is happening; an analyst who can explain why things are happening with more knowledge than the average viewer; and, for the calculator casuals, some statistics that help the viewer contextualize all of the above.

Ja Morant and the Grizzlies were up 14 points on the Lakers at halftime of Friday's NBA Cup game. After halftime, Morant effectively stopped trying, and the Grizzlies went on to lose, 117-112. Morant ended with 8 points and 7 assists on 3-of-14 shooting.

After the game, a grumpy Morant spoke as if he'd been wronged by Grizzlies coaches, according to The Memphian's Chris Herrington:

Thousands entered Boise State’s arena on Monday night for the first day of the college basketball season. They arrived, I must assume, with high hopes. The Broncos are generally pretty good. They’ve won at least 19 games a year since the 2019-2020 season, and went 26-11 last...

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 Led Zeppelin, baseball grief, breaking into journalism, moving into college, and more.

Oh wow, it’s Election Day! Hooray for democracy, vote early and often, all of that shit. Election Day before sunset is always the slowest news day of the year, so let’s burn some clock off with your letters:

A little over three years ago, the greatest chess player of all-time lost to a swaggering young American grandmaster, self-ejected from an important tournament, and kicked off the biggest and strangest cheating scandal chess has ever seen. The story of Magnus Carlsen's quixo...

For three decades now, the director Kelly Reichardt has been making films about American escape artists: drifters and dreamers, rough sleepers and revolutionaries, full-of-it swindlers and disillusioned soldiers, plus more than a few ostensibly honest people caught up in the...

La Liga’s recent announcement that it was abandoning its long-in-the-works plan to hold a regular season match between Villarreal and Barcelona in Miami this December seemed to represent a victory of common sense over greed. The brainchild of league president Javier Tebas an...