The Kansas City Royals advised minor-leaguer Jac Caglianone, their first pick in the 2024 draft and top overall prospect, that he could accelerate his path to the majors by focusing his development on mastery of the art of socking huge dingers. I realize that this is pretty ...

I thought the game I attended last Tuesday was just about the smoothest basketball any team could play, when the reigning champion New York Liberty jumped out to a 22-3 lead on the Golden State Valkyries and cruised to a 95-67 victory. But I was embarrassingly, humiliatingly...

Block off some time for our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Mat Holmes and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Mat lives in Maine with his amazing wife, Hazel. He is a part-time volleyball coach, thrilled to be making his Defector debut with this puzzle. He is a lucky guy with two strong daughters, fun friends, several motivated students, and a kick-ass trivia squad (shoutout to Gloria!)

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.

MLB's replay era has brought many annoying developments to the game, perhaps none more so than infielders keeping their glove pinned to every baserunner in their vicinity, knowing there's a chance that an infinitesimal separation between foot/hand and base can lead to an out...

Mamta Patel Nagaraja grew up in a small town in West Texas, where her parents ran a motel. Nagaraja and her older sister were both fascinated by space, which felt like a portal into the unknown. "There wasn't much grass, but I would lie down on the concrete and just look up and wonder," she said. Nagaraja said she remembers looking up to her dad—who, at 5-foot-8, was not particularly tall—and thinking, "When I am as big as my dad, I'll be able to touch a star and grab it."

While Nagaraja's sister eventually pursued other dreams, Nagaraja's never wavered. Soon after starting college, she secured an ongoing internship at NASA, which, in the early 2000s, was the only choice for aspiring astronauts. "It was kind of the Everest," Nagaraja said. "If you could get it there, then you had really made something of yourself."

Swings and roundabouts: Max Verstappen's meltdown in the closing laps of the Barcelona Grand Prix resulted in a catastrophic failure of race stewarding, but at least it was entertaining. Before that, Formula 1's historical European triple-header was turning out to be a bit of a dud. Emilia Romagna featured one astonishing overtake and little else; in spite of hacky changes to pit-stop regulations, Monaco was so grotesquely unraceable that it nearly horseshoed around into good entertainment, if one enjoys receiving early access previews of hell. If races can't even be salvaged by a close title fight between teammates, then who gives a damn about sporting fairness?

It's a bad sign for the prevailing discourse cycle to be about how to make the sport less boring. At that point, why not end with a bang? At least Verstappen is always willing to deliver on that front.

Jurupa Valley High School’s AB Hernandez won first place in girls high jump and triple jump on Saturday night at the California Interscholastic Federation's State Track & Field Championships. She also took second place in girls long jump, making it, overall, a great perf...

Playoff basketball is intense and complicated, full of minuscule decisions that can swing a possession, a game, a series, a season. But, at its core, it can be, and often is, quite simple: The better team tends to win more often than not. In the case of the Eastern Conference Finals, after some twists and turns, this axiom proved to be true, as the Indiana Pacers bounced back following a lackluster Game 5 to close out the New York Knicks on home court in dominant fashion, 125-108.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ScmGeaPIs

After coming close in the 2020 final, as well as plenty of other knockout exits over the last decade and a half, Paris Saint-Germain finally won the club's first Champions League trophy, thanks to a 5-0 stomp of Internazionale that, somehow, wasn't even as close as that record scoreline—the biggest in a Champions League final ever—would suggest. On a Saturday night in Munich, PSG shed off its demons, sure, but it also demonstrated what had been clear once it got over a rather desperate start to the Champions League: The French league and cup winners were the best team in Europe this season, the most dominant force en route to its long-awaited glory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAbl7ZAy1dY

A woman sued Pelicans power forward Zion Williamson on Thursday, saying Williamson raped her multiple times. She also said in the complaint that he physically hurt her, stalked her, and threatened to kill her and her family. The woman filed as Jane Doe in Los Angeles County Superior Court and said the violence occurred while she and Williamson were dating for several years.

The lawsuit listed nine causes of action: assault, battery, sexual battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, domestic violence, stalking, burglary, false imprisonment, and conversion. A lawyer for Williamson responded by issuing a statement saying the allegations were "categorically false and reckless" and calling the lawsuit "an attempt to exploit a professional athlete driven by a financial motive rather than any legitimate grievance."

I’m about to spoil the ending of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning for you, but that’s fine. You don’t go to an M:I movie for things like “a coherent plot” or “fully realized characters.” You go for the stunts, for Tom Cruise breaking into a dead sprint, and for shit to blow up real good. Going by those metrics, The Final Reckoning delivers. I got my money’s worth, and then some.

But there was one extra draw to The Final Reckoning, which was that it was presumably the final movie Cruise would do for the franchise. After all, “The Final Reckoning” is right there in the title. Also, Cruise is 62 years old and surely hellbent on finally getting himself a Best Actor statuette before he goes to Scientology heaven. So it made perfect sense for him to bow out of this series while his limbs were still intact.

Talk about HIGH seas! Here’s a video of Patriots wideout Stefon Diggs pulling an offseason Odell Beckham to pARRRRGHty with some lovely ladies (and girlfriend Cardi B) on a luxury yacht:

https://twitter.com/imabout2tweetu/status/1927326121688756522

In quiet moments, you can almost hear the faint sizzling sound of AI corroding humanity's capacity for inquiry and sustained, focused thought. The arguments against this—that the technology itself does not work very well, or at all; that the ability to reason things out on o...

The topic, in Defector's internal chat, on Friday, was a ban, in the nation of France, on smoking in most outdoor spaces. How can the French—the French!—ban smoking? David Roth observed that "this feels like one of those things that leads to a bunch of guys in day-glow vests overturning a police van"; Kelsey McKinney said "they're gonna light the streets on fire"; Barry Petchesky quipped that it is "time for le vape."

The discussion then drifted onto the topic of which world populations smoke the most cigarettes (the Balkans, apparently?). But suddenly, Slack warned: Dave McKenna is typing. This is the Slack equivalent of hearing the hiss of a burning fuse. Here, lightly edited to remove various lols and feeble attempts at returning to the subject of world smoking habits, is what ensued.

There was a time not that long ago when the West Sacramento Athletics were positioning themselves to replace The Hunny Club as the pride of Yolo County, which would have been a true festival of inner conflict for the region. By "not that long ago," we mean May 5.

Since then, the A’s have clarified their position. And by "clarified their position," we mean "challenged the Colorado Rockies for the title of worst baseball team on earth." The A’s are back in their customary spot as a readily visible example of an organization loathing everything it inadvertently represents, and The Hunny Club has solidified its hold on Yolo’s hearts, if only because of the acronym.

John Laurinaitis has pulled off a twist worthy of his time as on-screen GM of WWE Monday Night Raw. That is, it was very obviously coming well before it happened. WWE’s former head of talent relations has been dropped as a co-defendant in Janel Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit accusing Vince McMahon of gross sexual acts. Representatives for Grant and Laurinaitis announced a settlement-cooperation deal earlier this week; a statement said Laurinaitis will provide “evidence” against McMahon.

“His agreement to a confidential settlement is a pivotal next step toward holding McMahon and WWE accountable and bringing justice to Ms. Grant after years of sexual abuse and trafficking,” representatives for Grant and Laurinaitis said in the joint statement. “Mr. Laurinaitis looks forward to moving on with his life.”

Late in the New York Knickerbockers' conprehensive but semi-drab 111–94 beating of the Indiana Pacers, TNT analyst Stan Van Gundy took his inner grump for one final walk around the broadcast by saying something along the lines of, After Game 4, people were asking why Jalen B...

Welcome to Ask The Book Doctor, a new recurring series about books and reading them.

My home is full of books. Because I am able to justify it as “supporting the local bookstore” and “keeping my own career afloat,” I am constantly buying books. I have four full bookshelves of fiction and three of non-fiction. There are two individual shelves of poetry and a shelf just for the collected works of Shakespeare. There is a half a shelf of books in my office that I have not read yet but might want to read one day. But sometimes, I pick through them all, and I do not want them. I want to read something, but what?

My first favorite search engine was Lycos. Why? There’s no single explanation. I know it had a dog logo, which very possibly made a positive impression on my younger self. It had an exotic sounding name, so that was a point in its favor. But I just felt like it fit my vibe. ...

Drew and I agreed before Memorial Day weekend that it was time for a Just The Two Of Us episode of The Distraction, but it wasn't until much closer to recording it that we decided what kind of episode that would be. There is more than one kind of those, and while we were probably due for one of the loopy, pre-vacation, Oops! All Digressions episodes, there is a whole long summer ahead of us to fill with those, and still some really good playoff basketball happening. Between the fact of that dwindling season and Drew's latter-day return to NBA fandom, the decision was decently easy. It's a just-us episode, but this one is also About Sports.

Late in the second set of his matchup with French doubles specialist Pierre-Hugues Herbert, 18-year-old Brazilian player João Fonseca scored a point to even the tenth game of the set at 30–all. "Scored" is the most active verb I can use there, as the exchange only ended when...

Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, is yet another remake that was released in 2020, and the third such game to appear in this column. The lesson it provides is that sometimes the best way to remake a game is also the simplest.

Every March, I get an email from Joan Lanigan at City Hall: The Binder has arrived.

The Spelling Bee words are in The Binder. I need The Binder because I'm the Pronouncer. 

Becca Beckham grew up around the South in a military family. Beckham's family moved every two to four years, and she grew up, she says, with public service in her heart. "The military really shaped my family, and I appreciate everything that it's done," she said. "But I knew...

The following excerpt is from Victoria Zeller's debut novel One of the Boys, released from Levine Querido on May 13. The book follows 17-year old Grace, a D-I bound kicker who left the world of football behind (or so she thought) when she came out as trans. 

---

I'd say it had to be Carter Verhaeghe, and in fact it was, but to give him the full credit for yet another heartbreaking playoff goal would obscure the effort of Aleksander Barkov, who deserves the majority of the applause for the late game-winner in the Panthers' series cli...

Rick Derringer, a rock and roll lifer, a force behind the “rock 'n wrestling” melding of the 1980s and other sporting and music nexuses, is dead.

Derringer died Monday in Ormond Beach, Fla. No official cause of death was released, but a family member said he'd been suffering from complications from heart surgery earlier this year. He was 77.

"NBA people will tell you the toughest game to win in the playoffs is the close-out game," explained Mike Breen, minutes before the opening tip of Game 5 of the Western Conference final, by way of laying down the stakes. "And that's OKC's challenge tonight, because Minnesota...

The other day, bemoaning the state of his WNBA fantasy team bench, my colleague Jasper mentioned that he’d just picked up a player he’d never heard of: someone named "K. Westbeld," with no photo. This was more or less how the real Phoenix Mercury conducted their offseas...

When the nervous peloton began their long, slow ascent up out of the Adda River valley to Bormio to finish Stage 17 of the Giro d'Italia, I thought Isaac Del Toro was cooked. The 21-year-old Mexican rider had put up an admirable fight for the first 16 stages of the Giro, and...