Aryna Sabalenka eked out an ugly win in her Wimbledon quarterfinal Tuesday, 4-6, 6-2, 6-4. The top player on the WTA was taken to her limit by an unlikely figure: Laura Siegemund, the 37-year-old veteran known for a confounding style of play that proceeds at a lumbering pace...

This article was originally published on Flaming Hydra on July 2. If you like it, we encourage you to visit their site and subscribe.

Six-foot-five, 245 pounds, a slugger from the age of behemoths and big-swingers, the real-deal furniture movers and bouncer-shaped designated hitters, the plodding old oafs running out of breath on stand-up doubles. But Dave Parker could move, was the thing; he could hit it all over, he could be pesky and patient and he could demolish you too, and all of this together was the great bounty that he gave to baseball. When he died last month he was 74 years old. 

The Fourth of July is always there to remind us that we aren't the country we fancy ourselves being, but this year's national try-not-to-blow-your-hand-off munitions festival was even grimmer given that the current season of Taskmaster's final episode aired on Friday as well...

What an unforgettably accursed end for Grigor Dimitrov at Wimbledon. His injury on Monday will haunt me not because of its visible gore, but its timing. Few players in men's tennis find themselves holding a 2-0 set lead over the top-ranked player in the world, Jannik Sinner, at a major tournament. In fact, it's been 17 months since anyone held such an advantage on Sinner, and he came back to win that one, anyway. But the No. 19 seed Dimitrov was in that rarefied position, fully in control of this fourth-round match, until he wasn't.

While serving at 1-2 in the third set, Dimitrov missed a low backhand volley and touched the right side of his chest. It looked innocuous enough. On the very next point he hit an ace to win the game, then sat down on the grass, clutching his chest, gasping, and repeating, "My pec."

It's easy to forget that God's covenant is limited. God makes a solemn promise to Noah that He will never flood the whole Earth again ... however. "Never again will I let floodwaters destroy all life," the Bible says He said. But He never promised that He wouldn't let the fl...

Paige Lakovic heard the meow first. She'd headed over to Section 103 before the Toledo Mud Hens' game last Thursday. Staffers had been alerted: There was a cat in the seating area. Lakovic was out to find it, but the frightened kitty had already moved. But a little mew was all she needed to suss out his location.

"He was so small," she says. "He really looked like a bunny … I was trying to get a look at him first before I just grabbed him. But I waited a little too long and he ran down the entire row. So I had to chase him down, and then I just kind of grabbed a scruff." Lakovic, the media production coordinator for the Mud Hens, brought him back to the press box and put him in a corrugated box.

BROOKLYN — The first year, they wrestled in a tub of lube. The second year, it was crushed tomatoes and cooked noodles. The third? Baked beans. But the first I saw of the Twinks vs. Dolls Olympics was that one Instagram story screenshot: a couple dozen people crowded into the backyard of the Brooklyn bar Singers surrounding a smaller circle of smoke-clouded contestants huffing back those darts as fast as they could. “Twinks vs dolls cigarette race,” the text read. That image’s Twitter virality catapulted the first annual Twinks vs. Dolls Olympics, a decidedly offline affair, into something much grander.

Scientists aren't sure whether Earth will be fully swallowed by the Sun, or merely burned to a crisp. Which sounds better to you?

With last week's sale of Kotaku, the project that was G/O Media is effectively dead. Its media portfolio is now something of a media one-pager: The only website it still owns is The Root, another publication that deserved better. The Nosferatus in Oxford blue shirts at Great...

That C.J. Abrams fly ball to end yesterday's Red Sox–Nationals game must have pissed someone off, because the game itself didn't warrant the Nationals firing GM Mike Rizzo and manager Davey Martinez any more than any of the other 52 losses that came before it. It was just an...

Our Monday crossword, at your service. This week's puzzle was constructed by Erica Hsiung Wojcik and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Erica is a psychology professor at Skidmore College.

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. 

With Wimbledon, the Tour de France, and the 2025 British Grand Prix, the long Fourth of July weekend for Americans has unpatriotically delivered a frantic mishmash of sports and European time zones. Some athletes are referencing the crossover. After easily winning his third-...

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

On the way to Independence Day weekend, the United States Department of Education announced that, "thanks to the leadership of President Trump," the University of Pennsylvania had agreed to retroactively change the results of 100-, 200-, and 500-meter women's freestyle swimming races from the 2021–2022 season. Penn removed Lia Thomas, the trans swimmer who had set school records in those events, from the university's record books—and, according to the announcement, agreed to "send a personalized letter of apology" to each swimmer who had competed against Thomas.

Bring in the big fella, manager Ozzie Guillen pantomimed on his way to the mound in Game 1 of the 2005 World Series, because the big fella was a phenomenon. It was a miracle he'd even made the show; his first team had cut him before reaching the majors because of problems with alcohol, with his weight, and with injuries caused by his mighty fastball. The White Sox had claimed him on waivers, and finally called him up on July 5, and here it was—the biggest moment in franchise history in nearly a century, and Guillen went to the rookie. He'd call for the big fella in each and every game of that Chicago sweep, and Jenks was on the mound as the Sox won their first title since 1917.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpF-Pg8kN5k&ab_channel=MLB

In theory, or, at least, from the perspective of someone who does not gamble on sports, I figured an MLB pitcher has limited options for manipulating individual player prop bets bets. For all that a pitcher can control a game with their stuff, so much of the mechanics of hits and strikeouts and home runs allowed are dependent on the batter. The statistic the pitcher seemingly has the most control over, walks, still requires some level of cooperation by the hitter—try as you might, you will only walk Javy Báez if he agrees to be walked.

But this thinking, I now see, revolved around my false perception of "normal gambling maneuvers." Normal gambling maneuvers now contain a much broader and more granular variety of prop bets, down to ball/strike calls on individual pitches. That particular bet would be easy to manipulate—but also easier to flag.

"It's been a terrible week," said Yankees manager Aaron Boone, a short time after announcing starting pitcher Clarke Schmidt needs Tommy John surgery and will be out until 2027, and an even shorter time after his 1.202 OPS right fielder was thwacked in the face by a ball thrown by his .703 OPS shortstop. When it rains, it pours: After losing 12-6 to the Mets on Saturday in a game about as sloppy as they come, the Yankees have now dropped six straight for the second time in under a month, and have seen their once-solid divisional lead sublime into vapor, leaving behind a fumbling team for which the only good news is that Aaron Judge only bled a little.

https://twitter.com/MLBONFOX/status/1941618624936149392

Solar systems mostly keep to themselves. What's ours is ours and what's not is not. Stars are simply too far from each other—four light years and change to our nearest neighbor—and too big and strong to allow things to escape their gravity well. But we know some things do ma...

We're off today. Consider this your place to blab about sports, food, antiquing, or anything else that floats your boat.

Bonjour et bienvenue! The 2025 Tour de France begins Saturday in Lille. If you want to about read the rhythms of the sport, you're in luck, because we have a two-part series on that for you. If you want a preview of the three weeks of racing, you have come to the right place...

The vote looked like a funeral. Residents showed up to the council meeting dressed in black, carrying prop tombstones. One carried drooping flowers. "I feel that what the council has just done has sentenced us to a long, agonizing death," she said. "We're disgusted," said an...

In yesterday's story, How To Watch Cycling, I wrote offhand that the Tour de France was "poker on two wheels." That poker game is an important element of tactics, but it's not the only one. With the Tour so close and so much more coverage to come, it seemed worth addressing ...

That Joan Didion line, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," is ubiquitous because, like so much of her work, it gets at an essential truth. But the thing about that quote—the idea that we form narratives out of the things that happen to us—is that it suggests we do ...

It is probably enough to note that this week's episode of The Distraction, which was recorded last week, is A Vacation Episode. Regular listeners have encountered these before, and even those readers that have never listened to the podcast but have some understanding of words can probably guess at what this means. If you want to parse it even more finely, this is a Double Vacation Episode, given that Drew was on vacation when we recorded it—was, quite literally, slathered in sunblock and headed to the beach when I reminded him that we were scheduled to talk—and that I am on vacation now as the episode finds you wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to go in fully prepared, you should bear that in mind. Think about what a Double Vacation Episode might be like. OK, here you go:

F1: The Movie is not a good sports movie, but it also doesn't try very hard to be. Instead, it is a superhero flick dressed in a sports movie livery. Like a superhero movie, F1: The Movie primarily rewards nerds—in this case, fans who know too much about Formula 1—with oppor...

“Eight hours per day, we’re not allowed to do more,” FIA World Rally Championship safety delegate Nicolas Klinger jokes. “Eight hours in the morning, eight hours in the afternoon.” 

I’m sitting with Klinger in the WRC’s race control room at the Rally de Portugal, which took place in May. Klinger has been here since 6:00 a.m. and won’t leave until 9:00 p.m. or later. He’s doing important work, scanning video feeds of the 337-kilometer course for what he calls “mushrooms.” Before every stage, the WRC sends out a car to move spectators standing in unsafe locations. But some spectators wander back after the safety car is gone, or hide as it goes by, popping up like a mushroom after it passes.

So after all that windmill-tilting the New York Knicks are about to spear Mike Brown as their new head coach, and there will be some laughter because of all the time they wasted to get a guy they could have gotten 15 minutes after firing Tom Thibodeau.

Which matters exactly not at all in the long run. It's just us enjoying the shambolic Knicks for not receiving permission to bother all the coaches with all the reputations, just because they're the Knicks and should never not enjoy all the illusory benefits of habitual label shopping—especially if the shopping is done with an eye toward taking something someone else has.

The history of mainstream filmmaking is prone to whiggish readings. The story is that Hollywood, an industry of entertainment and representation, has moved forward in a pleasing, gradually liberal-minded direction with every decade, enfranchising more audiences, capturing mo...

The 112th edition of the Tour de France starts this weekend. La Grand Boucle is the biggest deal in cycling by a considerable margin, which means that a mass audience of non-enthusiasts will tune in for their first and only taste of road racing of the year, watch the beautiful scenery fly for five-plus hours, and shrug their shoulders, not quite having understood the appeal.

It seems simple. One rider crosses the line before the others. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the skeptic's position here, not because it is correct, but rather because the visual and technical language of cycling is remarkably distinct from every other major sport. Cycling is a nested suite of sophisticated maneuvers masquerading as a straightforward fitness contest. The Tour de France, more than any other race, typifies this.

Defector’s growth committee is hard at work preparing for all-company meetings in August, where we’ll set strategy for Year 6 and beyond. Our biennial reader survey is probably the most important single input to that process. You should take the survey! It’ll take you about five minutes, and you’ll gain entry into a drawing for […]

NBA free agent Malik Beasley is currently the subject of a federal investigation into gambling, prop bets, and wire fraud. As a result, the Detroit Pistons have reportedly withdrawn a three-year, $42 million contract offer to their top three-point shooter. Beasley could have really used the money, judging by the grim financial picture painted by The Detroit News in a report published Tuesday.

Court records accessed by the News show that Beasley has been sued by a variety of parties. In order of severity: