Nobody does self-loathing quite like baseball, so it comes as little surprise that its governing body has yet again veered away fearfully yet violently from its essential product, so it can avoid doing more of the thing it purports to celebrate. There is nothing sacred about the All-Star Game, and nothing really to mourn about the fact that a game that was tied after nine innings didn’t proceed to the tenth. But the fact remains that the Most Valuable Player in Tuesday night's exhibition officially went 0-for-2 with a walk during that game, and that the box score does not in any way reflect the only thing about that game that people are discussing today.

Indeed, that very box score reflects the historical, artistic and essentially pastoral nature of the same with these famous and memory-invoking stars:

Here at Defector we are laser focused on serving readers Bill and everything related to Bill. At first I had a hard time with this mandate—I could not think of anything "newsy" related to Bill—until I remembered that in the 1979 television miniseries Salem's Lot there is a scene in which a guy yells "Bill!" a bunch of times. What could be more salient to the interests of Defector readers than that, I ask you—nothing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc_mUIkiDX4

The Buffalo Bills open training camp a week from today and running back James Cook isn’t happy. A year ago, Cook flourished when new offensive coordinator Joe Brady introduced the team to the concept of handing the ball off. Now Cook would like to be compensated for his serv...

We are forced once again to interrupt Bills Week in order to bring an important matter to your attention: Defector is adding the Nothing But Respect basketball podcast to its robust and ever-growing portfolio of media offerings. For those of you who are not familiar with Nothing But Respect, it is a weekly basketball podcast […]

For a series with little by way of story, it's impressive how many iconic non-player characters Pokémon has spawned. There is of course Professor Oak, who sets the player on their path to be a master trainer in the original games, as well as Brock and Misty, gym leaders who ...

We interrupt Bills Week to bring you some good news: Defector is launching two new podcasts in partnership with Radiotopia!  When Kelsey and I handed off Normal Gossip to Rachelle and Se’era in December, people asked what was next, and we said “:) I don’t know yet :)” but that was a lie—at least on […]

Let's rank bird bills, from best bill to least-best bill.

1 (TIED): Toucan

When Major League Baseball announced the roster for the 2025 All-Star Game, it was no surprise to see William "Will" "Bill" Smith listed as the starting catcher for the National League. The backstop has been tremendous for the Dodgers since he debuted in 2019, and this season is on track to be his own personal best. Showing sturdy power, savvy plate discipline, and a sweet swing, Bill was apparently tired of hearing people say he "hits well for a catcher." Among NL batters, Bill is leading the field in average and on-base percentage, and his OPS is second only to his L.A. teammate Shohei Ohtani.

Said fellow Dodger Freddie Freeman, “People are gonna tune into the All-Star Game, they’ll throw his numbers up on the TV, and they’re gonna be like, ‘Whoa, that’s a really good season.’”

It's been a few weeks since we heard anything salacious, greedy, stupid or just plain time-wasting from Bill Belichick, which is a surprise as well as a blessing given that he is one of those sports figures who producers and station managers never tire of churning. In short,...

Financier Bill Ackman has been widely shamed for his appearance in a professional tennis tournament last week. Since shame is no longer operative in American culture, he's continued to explain every painstaking detail of the experience in his tweets, which read like a transc...

When I was growing up, my mother kept notebooks where she meticulously recorded every dollar our family spent. She never talked about them with me, she just left the notebooks on the kitchen table where I could see them. I would flip through the lines of expenses, horrified ...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about the national anthem, Kevin Costner, desert island actors, action film musicals, and more.

Final reminder: Why Your Team Sucks returns to these fine servers next week, so get your submission in here before I go turning off the spigot. We’ve got a lot of NFL teams to preview and a lot of sucking to cover, so don’t fuck around. Get me that hate and get it to me fast.

One advantage I have always held in the literary arts is speed. I am a fast reader and an even faster scanner. I can draft quickly, churning out hundreds of words as if turning on a spigot. It's an advantage in the age of quantity, and the ability to write a lot all the time...

There is no shortage of entrepreneurial Bills in New York City. A trip around town can bring you to such businesses as the diner Bill's in Ridgewood, the bike shop Bill's Cyclery in Woodside, the jazz club Bill's Place in Harlem, or Bill's Supper Club in Midtown. (There is also a Brooklyn bar called Post No Bills—a command we are vehemently disregarding this week.) But out of all the Bills in my city, I selected Bill's Wines & Liquors in Long Island City, Queens.

I've lived in Brooklyn for the last eight years, but I've recently been spending a lot of time in Astoria, at the northwest tip of Queens, because that's where my boyfriend lives. I can't claim that there's any grander reason why I chose Bill's Wines & Liquors over the other Bills than "it was the closest." So: High marks for Bill's in convenience.

On Monday night, Major League Baseball gathered together all the big boys with their big bats from around the league to show off for us. And they did! Cal "Big Dumper" Raleigh showed off the most, and so he won.

Every year, MLB gets all these big boys with their big bats, and they line them up on national television and ask them to hit baseballs one million miles. This is cool. I like to watch this! I am in no way a home-run derby hater, because I think it's fun when guys who play games for a living get to play games for fun.

Kathryn Xu: This weekend, my family and I went up to Lake Placid, where I saw several loons. As is the case when I see birds of note, I informed Barry Petchesky of this fact, only to discover that I was not the only Defector staffer to recently see loons and subsequently inform Barry Petchesky of the fact. What are the odds!

Sabrina Imbler: I am no statistician, but I imagine they are quite low! I spent the past month in the Adirondacks, and had no idea Kathryn also came up to the beautiful North, and the land of loons. I too saw loons on a lake and informed Barry Petchesky, because this is simply how things are done here. Barry then told me that Kathryn had also seen loons, and this is all the context you need to understand how we arrived here, in this blog. Kathryn, was this your first loon sighting? What did you know of loons before this weekend?

The MLB All-Star Game has unfortunately been handed over to Pat McAfee, who spent Monday kicking off the week's festivities on ESPN. What better way to get baseball fans excited about the Home Run Derby than by subjecting them to a few hours of a poached ex-punter bellowing about a sport he barely follows while he embellishes his yinzer accent?

McAfee had a few lowlights today. While emceeing a press conference with Tarik Skubal, Paul Skenes, Dave Roberts, and Aaron Boone, he stammered his way through an answer to some pointed questioning by Jen Ramos Eisen. He also duffed an interview with Shohei Ohtani, at one point instructing Ohtani's interpreter to provide some "energy on the delivery" of his question. But McAfee's most embarrassing moment was probably donning a sleeveless jersey while sucking up to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred by stumping for a salary cap:

Bill Simmons has been a part of my life for about 20 years now. As with any relationship that lasts that long, my feelings about him have evolved. At various points I've been a fan, a hater, a critic, a detached observer, and a begrudging admirer, sometimes all at once. I'...

It must be said that the 2024–25 European soccer season belonged to Paris Saint-Germain. After a shaky start, which saw them come within a whisker of failing to even make it out of the forgiving league stage of the new Champions League format, the Parisiens bought a new star...

Whatever the Thrilla in Manila was, this wasn't that. Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, who previously gave the world two of the greatest fights in recent memory, delivered a comparative stinker while capping off their trilogy atop the bill of the first all-women’s professional boxing card on Friday at the sweet science's holiest room, Madison Square Garden.

Taylor, in what could be the final bout of her incredible career, took a majority decision over Serrano after 10 mostly lackluster two-minute rounds. Judge Mark Lyson scored the fight a 95-95 draw, while Steve Weisfeld and Nicolas Esnault both had Taylor winning easily, 97-93. With the win, Taylor holds onto her undisputed super-lightweight championship.

For all its miracles, the internet has had some drawbacks. Before the internet, people generally had more friends, and more lasting relationships; they went outside more, and were more physically active; the fighting weight of the average cultural product was a little higher...

The Space Shuttle drips romance. Representing nearly a half-century of human spaceflight—from its conception in 1968, even before the Moon landing, until its retirement in 2011—its design and even its name capture a hope that space travel would one day be commonplace. That b...

This week's puzzle was constructed by Maddy Ziegler and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Maddy is an attorney in Madison, Wisconsin. She enjoys watching many sports and playing none. You can find more of her puzzles at poppypuzzles.blogspot.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. Note that our submissions are closed through July 31. 

An old boxing coach of mine became an avid tennis player after he retired from pro fighting. He always said that boxing and tennis were very similar. This never struck me as completely convincing. Yes, both are one-on-one sports, and both require strategic choices about how ...

The VHS/DVD championship season recap is a lost art in the era of Youtube, but I'm old enough to remember when it was the only game in town. I'd see ads for them in the immediate aftermath of a title win—a chance to relive a great run through a curated collection of clips an...

The choice of Bills Week for this year's What Defector Does When It Needs To Skive Off For A Week Week had an unforeseen deficiency when it was being spitballed by the Phlegm Committee. Specifically, we are historically low on Bills.

Between 1950 and 2008, the name Bill (or more specifically William), became gradually and increasingly uncool in the United States, according to data from the Social Security Administration. Even by 1980 a kid might as well have been named Jehoshaphat, Algonquin, or Xythron The Enfeebled. Most likely, Bill is the name of your last living relative, and if it isn't, may he rest in peace. If you have a Bill in your family, cherish the old coot. Water him regularly, and keep the air in front of his easy chair free of things he can trip over. You need him mobile and independent, at least from you.

Defector will be turning five years old in September. What better way to squander whatever warm feelings our upcoming birthday will elicit from our dedicated readers and subscribers than subjecting them to yet another inscrutable theme week? Hopefully you did not assume that Senators Week, Rays Week, and Wings Week had exhausted us of all […]

How does a person recover from this: holding three championship points in a Roland-Garros final, only to let them slip, fight for two more hours, and lose the whole thing in the fifth-set super-tiebreak, against your internationally beloved arch rival, who was spurred on by ...

This seems like a pretty embarrassing time to be a member of the NFLPA. Not only has a series of reports revealed that executive director Lloyd Howell Jr. is at best a pushover for the owners and at worst someone whose own interests are actively aligned against those of the players, but now the union has demonstrated itself incapable of releasing a legible statement.

Last week, ESPN dropped a pair of stories that seemed to herald Howell's resignation. The first reported that NFLPA senior leaders struck a deal with NFL owners, in which they agreed to keep the bombshell results of an arbitration case about collusion a secret from the players. The second report revealed that Howell works as a part-time consultant for the Carlyle Group, which is attempting to buy ownership stakes throughout the league.

It's been a little over a month since a judge approved the settlement terms agreed to by the NCAA and lawyers representing Division I athletes who brought several antitrust cases against the NCAA and its conferences in federal court. Things are already getting stupid. The p...