Vladimir Guerrero Jr. went 0-for-7 across the first two games of the ALCS, as his Blue Jays fell into an 0-2 hole at home against the Seattle Mariners. He reached base only once in those two games, an eighth-inning walk in Game 2 with Toronto already down by seven runs; he ended the inning on third. That is not going to do it.

Vladito was the hottest bat of the divisional round, bashing the Yankees to the tune of a 1.609 OPS and three homers in four games. Toronto may not need quite that level of cartoonish production from him to stay afloat against the Mariners, but the job is certainly easier if the team's best hitter is, well, hitting. To wit: The beefy lad seems to have awakened on the cross-continental flight before Wednesday night's Game 3, and now the Blue Jays have a pulse.

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me." This is from Psalms 23:4, a classic prayer about God's blessed navigating a world full of sin and evil at every turn. Growing u...

"She's a runner, you a stone." That's a weird thing to say to Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Pat Calhoun, in One Battle After Another, given that the first time we see him in the film, he is in motion, chasing after his fellow members of the left-wing revolutionary group Fre...

In the latest move to consolidate the entirety of human expression onto a single screen, Netflix and Spotify have announced a partnership that will bring 16 of The Ringer’s video podcasts to the platform, barring them from publishing to YouTube. 

Netflix has been sweating YouTube’s increasing share of television screentime, and clearly sees poaching 16 popular video podcasts and prohibiting them from streaming to YouTube as a way to encroach on its rival’s core business. But this bizarre deal fundamentally misunderstands why people use these platforms, because rewatching a sitcom is not the same as playing an ambient music video, Netflix is not YouTube, and podcasts are not television. 

Brandy: Giri, one of the first things you note in your lovely introductory essay yesterday about this book is Portis’s absolute control and precision. This was my third time reading it and I am always struck by how this book can be so full of little details, so bursting with asides and minor characters and theories and surprising phrases, but still feel restrained. 

Kelsey: This was my first time reading this book, and I looked at how thick it is and thought I would read it really quickly. But I found myself reading a little bit of it every day instead of gulping it down. I think that’s because of the precision. Even the tiniest details (the orange pills, the professor’s lecture on tape, the silver, etc.) come back at some point, and that is so satisfying as a reader.  

In recent weeks, a steady stream of reports claimed that UEFA, the body that governs European soccer, was seriously considering banning Israel from international play. Off the heels of September's UN commission report that described the death and destruction Israel has wroug...

On Monday afternoon, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman took to Twitter to announce...well, something, anyway, about the direction of the ChatGPT product: We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made i...

Tyra Banks's eyes are wild. Or maybe they were just always that way, her piercing green-gray irises one of many reminders that right, before she was a TV host and an MLM kingpin and a meme, she was a supermodel. They're darting, they're blinking way too much, they're smizing...

It can be hard to maintain friendships as an adult. People move to new cities, start families, and experience all sorts of other life events that make it difficult to keep in touch. Sometimes, you end up losing all of your friends because you can't stop writing pro-genocide ...

Dave Roberts, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has taken great care in these past few years not to act smug or entitled about being the man who guides the best-paid team in American sporting history. That Roberts has more or less pulled it off is one of the great achi...

Jaron “Boots” Ennis did exactly what he needed to do, only faster. In his first fight since moving up to 154 pounds, Ennis knocked out somebody named Uisma Lima just two minutes after the opening bell on Saturday night in front of a hometown Philadelphia crowd to take the WBO interim super welterweight title.  

So I think I’m speaking for Ennis’s fans and, hell, anybody who gives a damn about boxing when I say, with all due respect: Nicely done, Boots … NOW GO FIGHT SOMEBODY WE’VE HEARD OF, FOR CRISSAKES!

As a woman about town who loves baseball, I have followed a good deal of these playoffs with my trusty wired headphones, moving from place to place while listening to the games' radio streams on the MLB app. This is fine while there's action on the field, because I appreciat...

No pass attempts. Punting on third down. Cleveland had a point to prove.

I am more likely to laugh at a movie than a book. I’m sure this is true of many people, and I’m sure there are a host of social-emotional reasons for this disparity, but I can think of at least one craft-based reason, too. In a movie, the moment of comic release comes and g...

Fantasy football is dying, and here's the proof. The hottest new way to spend the day after a game is to see which team is firing their coach, with the tiebreaker being how much of a buyout the fired coach will be paid. Well, that's the college tiebreaker. The pro tiebreaker...

In the top of the sixth inning of Game 2 of the ALCS, FS1 ran a surreal segment of play-by-play broadcaster Joe Davis demonstrating how to carve up a turkey live on air, in honor of Canadian Thanksgiving, which took place that day. Bird carving had already established itself...

Defector's newest podcast arrives next week: Only If You Get Caught is our latest show and it's all about breaking the rules. The first episode is out October 21.

Over the course of our first season, we will tell the stories of eight cheating scandals, both in and outside of sports. That is the first task of each episode anyway; the more interesting part of the show, the thing that makes it special and makes me feel especially proud of our work, is that each cheating scandal is also a window into something larger. The operating theory of OIYGC is that if you want to answer the questions that really matter about any given competitive framework—Who has power? Where are the lines of tension?—you have to understand why people break the rules, and how.

A baseball can be a weapon. It's harder than you might think. Held in your hand, there is a little give to it. But there's no give when you're hit by one, except from your body. It feels like a punch from a tiny hand, like a baby Mike Tyson that's chosen to hurt you. The po...

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 fake dead husbands, garnishes, athletic athletes, and more.

Your letters:

Actresses are often tasked with doing a lot with just a little. There is no way around the fact that most movies are written by men, for men, about men, and as a result women usually figure into them in tertiary roles, as objects more than subjects in themselves. It's often ...

By now the rhythms of a typical Dodgers season are familiar: An offseason spending spree induces hysterics; a rash of longterm injuries and poor individual seasons puts a bit of a damper on the 162; they arrive in the playoffs, imperious as ever, ready to do damage. During t...

Some might say Mike Lucido peaked early. But, by god, what a peak. No high school player in the D.C. area got more attention in the 1970s than Lucido, a running back for the Annandale Atoms from 1970 to 1973. Lucido's heyday coincided with halcyon times for high school football in the area, filled with intense rivalries for Beltway supremacy. But with Lucido, Annandale (Va.) was the cream of the crop.

"Even if you didn’t really know the guy, if you were around here then, you felt like you did," recalled Dale Eaton, who’s been a part of the Northern Virginia high school football scene as a player, coach, and administrator since the late 1960s. "There was so much written about him."

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe.

This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Oct. 10.

Put your thinking cap on. It’s time for the Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Sala Wanetick, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Sala is a former advertising professional turned cheesemonger living just outside of Detroit. Her first book of crosswords is coming out this November; it is 40 Detroit-themed puzzles for all levels. Follow along on their Instagram page for the launch date.

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. Note that we're pausing open submissions from Oct. 15 to Dec. 1.

A few years ago, when the conversation over the racist nickname and racist iconography of the NFL team that maintained racist hiring policies longer than any other NFL team was a sad constant in the sports media discourse, I was embedding with the dictionary publisher Merria...

Yes that’s a clickbait headline, but I wouldn’t go vintage Buzzfeed on you if I wasn’t being earnest. So let me tell you about this coffee I had the other night. I’m eating out at a fancy Vietnamese joint in downtown DC. Since I don’t drink alcohol, I have to scan the back ...

Before I get to America’s leading football moron, here is a quick assessment of the college football landscape after Saturday's games. Every team is horrible except for Ohio State, which crushed 17th-ranked Illinois in Champaign yesterday. Unless Ryan Day manages to outdumb himself somehow, the Buckeyes are gonna bulldoze their way to a repeat. Every quarterback is ALSO horrible. Yes, that includes Arch Manning, who is now at the “get lavish praise merely for winning a game in which you failed to crack 200 yards” stage of bustdom that Bryce Young is currently enjoying. And Penn State has gone from merely disappointing to outright bad, which is good news for those of us (everyone) who’d like to see James Franklin shot out of a cannon.

I think that covers everything. Now let’s talk about North Carolina eating shit.

October is the time when baseball becomes a test of fan endurance. It's easy to spend a lazy July afternoon at your team’s ballpark with all of your worst drinking buddies. That’s entry-level baseball fandom. But are you willing to suffer the emotional trials of October, when your team’s games run into the wee hours and every pitch may as well be aimed directly at your left ventricle? What if you root for a team that NEVER wins in October? What if that team needed to win a decisive Game 5 in the LDS just for the chance to disappoint you on a grander stage?

Most importantly: What if the deciding game in question NEVER FUCKING ENDED?

PHOENIX — Now they were just showing off, treating the crowd to an encore. Jackie Young zigged and zagged to the rim. Chelsea Gray’s strange-looking heaves swished in. NaLyssa Smith pulled down all the right boards. Jewell Loyd popped into open threes from screens. The universe can sometimes be indelicate with its symbolism: A’ja Wilson slid across the paint to block DeWanna Bonner. The ball spun in the air and fell on Bonner’s head. Through it all, the Las Vegas Aces led, and led, and led, and led.

With a 97-86 Game 4 win over the Mercury in Phoenix on Friday night, the Aces won their third WNBA championship in four years to finish a Finals sweep and an unthinkable in-season turnaround. After beginning the regular season 14-14, they finished it on a 16-game win streak. Including the postseason, they won 25 of their last 28 games. 

For the second game in a row, the Milwaukee Brewers allowed a handful of first-inning runs en route to a loss. Unlike in Wednesday's close and competitive 4-3 defeat in Game 3, the Brewers in Game 4 would not have fared too much worse had they hired out their jobs to a squad...