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Trea Turner Is A True Two-Way Player
PHILADELPHIA — I thought I would be miserable going to this game, watching two teams I hate (the Phillies and the Dodgers) ride high on their own egos amid overpriced concessions that jam a “ph” everywhere an “f” should be. I did it only so that I would finally get to see Shohei Ohtani play in person. But where was the phantastic two-way player, six-time all-star, and four-time MVP? Certainly not in the City of Brotherly Love. Whatever phacsimile was at the plate went 0-for-4 with two strikeou...
I Demand We Normalize Chewing With Your Mouth Open
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 food hangups, cockroaches in heaven, shitting your pants on the football field, and more. Before I get started, you guys might know that I moonlight as a weekly columnist over at SFGate . I joke that I work for the only two decent news sites left in America, because it's kinda true. Bu...
Tennis.com Lived And Died With The Internet
A day after the French Open ended in May, the website tennis.com shut down its editorial operation. The brand dates back to the founding of Tennis magazine in 1965, and though the mag folded in 2022, the website continued to produce news, analysis, and feature articles. At least, until after the clay season. The new site amounts to a scoreboard for ongoing tournaments with tabs for the upcoming schedule and rankings. Endure a long scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll find a link to the ...
What Messi Means
"Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." As it is in life and love, so it is in soccer. From the outset, the 2026 World Cup was sure to mark an ending for Lionel Messi—not to his career as a whole, and likely not even to his days with the Argentina national team, but to his time on the sport's center stage, the venue which featured the 20-year unfurling of the exciting, hopeful, heartbreaking, agonizing, inspiring, and triumphant story that has defined one of the greatest tales spor...
Dennis Santana To José Caballero: Look Deep Into My Eyes Or I Will Kick Your Ass
This is the fourth MLB season with a pitch clock, so one might think that any beef around the rule change has long ago expired. But José Caballero's got a huge supply of dry-aged steak in the walk-in freezer. The Yankees' base-stealing utilityman, who hits just a tick below league average, has made himself notorious around the league for the way he takes advantage of the pitch clock protocol. The big book of rules says that the batter needs to be ready for the pitch with eight seconds remai...
Can Men Stop Hating Women?
While many of us can agree men are in trouble, few can agree on the exact cause. America has a masculinity crisis . Men are in trouble . The "masculinity crisis" is real . The male loneliness epidemic has received radically different diagnoses from men’s rights activists, religious conservatives, feminists, and heteropessimists. The manosphere, a loose affiliation of men who hold women in low esteem and value “alpha” behavior over weakness, ranges from hardcore redpilled incels and influencers...
Intensified Doping Investigations At Tour de France Threaten Cycling’s Delicate Balance
ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — After several years of lurking in the shadows, the specter of doping once again looms over the Tour de France. Though nobody has tested positive—or no positive test results have been made public—the biggest story at this year's Tour is a renewed aggression from testing authorities and a resultant increasing hostility from the riders. The tactics executed by anti-doping officials and the legal justifications marshaled to support them represent a modernization of anti-d...
Red Alert: Nick Sirianni Has Discovered ChatGPT
Credit to The Athletic for crafting the most haunting lede of 2026. Monday's article about the Eagles head coach begins with a single, chilling sentence: "Nick Sirianni discovered ChatGPT this offseason." The mind reels. More and more of what sucks about modern life is the result of a certain kind of person becoming overly enamored with the capabilities of chatbots. You hear that someone recently "discovered ChatGPT," and you reflexively begin preparing for a near future in which that perso...
For Better Or Worse, ‘The Odyssey’ Is Peak Christopher Nolan
Just as every film is really about filmmaking, isn't every film also an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey ? The hero's journey. The antihero's journey. The road trip movie. The war movie. Movies set in space or at sea, in the middle of a treacherous jungle or a barren desert. The story of Odysseus is a foundational myth, which makes the proposition of an actual movie of The Odyssey seem, among other things, redundant. And that's before you get to the near impossibility of filming it. But te...
FIFA Got What It Came For
A WELL-KNOWN VENUE IN THE MEADOWLANDS THAT FIFA WOULD THANK YOU TO CALL “NEW YORK NEW JERSEY STADIUM” BECAUSE IT DIDN’T GET PAID BY THAT STADIUM’S CORPORATE SPONSOR — The grass told the entire story. If given the opportunity, FIFA would have very happily stripped every seat and beam and light fixture out of the venue that hosted Sunday’s World Cup Final and pawned it all off. In keeping with the organization’s best practices, those prices could have been set dynamically, while also being m...
Lu Dort And Zaccharie Risacher Involved In Depressing Trade
On Sunday, the Oklahoma City Thunder, Atlanta Hawks, and Dallas Mavericks completed a three-team trade that was depressing for at least two big reasons. The first reason: Just two years after being selected first overall in the NBA Draft, Zaccharie Risacher has been kicked to the curb. The 21-year-old Frenchman had already fallen out of Atlanta's wing rotation during the regular season, and saw scant garbage-time minutes in the team's first-round playoff exit. To acquire a former No. 1 pick...
Hey Look, We Redesigned Our Website
Well, well, well, would you look at that. We have a fancy new website. This redesign is the result of a lot of hard work by our esteemed partners at Lede, and they have provided us with a homepage that is much more customizable. We now have the ability to highlight specific stories, coverage areas,…
Is Mercedes Conspiring Against Its Own Driver? (No.)
And let the conspiracy theories begin. George Russell had spent the past three race weekends painstakingly narrowing the gap to his wunderkind Mercedes teammate in the Drivers' Championship standings. Luck, for once, fell in his favor. And then on Sunday at the Belgian Grand Prix, Russell yet again had a hellish day. With luck a tired nemesis, it fell upon spectators to find another cosmic horror to blame. Such as: Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. Here are some factual observations. Russell, who s...
Where Am I Supposed To Look When I Look At Baseball?
One Defector intern explains baseball to another . Sohini : When I used to call it boring, my dad used to tell me that baseball is a game of immense strategy. I didn’t doubt him, exactly, but it did carry the vibe of “Dad saying stuff to fit in with other dads.” I never took the time to familiarize myself with that strategy, and have instead treated the handful of baseball games I’ve been to as loud, fun, kitschy bars. So when it came time to fact-check a baseball blog in the process of obt...
How Cops Consolidated So Much Power Over Local Governments
Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file police officers. He publicly apologized for prior statements describing the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” and for an earlier endorsement of defunding the police. He also signaled his “openness” to keeping Eric Adams’s NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch—a plan which h...
The Crossword, July 20: No Half Measures
Count your blessings: There's a new Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Brian Callahan and Geoffrey Schorkopf , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. This is Brian and Geoffrey’s second collaboration at Defector. The player at 11-Down in their first puzzle went from one of Brian’s teams to one of Geoffrey’s teams this past offseason. Geoffrey is quite pleased. Brian isn’t. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX , run every Monday. If you’re intere...
Jonas Vingegaard Felled Yet Again By The Cruelty Of His Sport
ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — Exactly 84 minutes after Jonas Vingegaard spiked his right collarbone into a curb and limped into an ambulance and out of the Tour de France, the assembled press watched him gingerly wince his way down the steps of the Visma bus and into a waiting team car. A scrambled pack-job followed. A soigneur could barely hold the pile of backpacks and duffel bags he was carrying off the bus. A team doctor stood by, holding two large red and yellow first-aid kits, adopting the t...
A Hater’s Coda To The World Cup
It seems somehow right and proper that the final game of the World Cup was such a screeching drag, if only to remind us that the chief byproduct of a global anything is for most of the participants and supporters to grouse about how it ended. I mean, Spain had a great time, to be sure, as it got to not only write but prove all its best narratives , but every tournament has one winner and a thousand envious and angry losers. When you frame it that way, the vision of the Turnip-in-Chief and his ...
Looking Good, Sir!
The World Cup kicked ass, as it almost always does, but Sunday's final between Spain and Argentina was a well-timed reminder that the game is not always as beautiful as it has been over the last month. And in the immediate aftermath we were served up another reminder, that no matter how capable the World Cup is of redeeming itself through what happens on the field, shameless venality is never far away. For example, it might plant its hideous form squarely in frame for the post-championship pho...
Spain Won As Only Spain Can
It sure looks like Spain has found the formula for winning World Cup finals. All it takes is a truly hideous game, marked by defensive intensity and borderline tackles, and a late goal from a Barcelona player. In the Wario to the 2010 final, Spain beat 10-man Argentina 1-0 thanks to Ferran Torres's emphatic 106th minute winner. But that's not why Spain won the World Cup. Spain won because it played the exact same game it played every knockout match on its way to a second World Cup title: de...
All 10 Goals In That Bonkers Third-Place Match, Ranked
There's probably no reason for the World Cup third-place match to exist. Unlike the Olympics, when a coveted bronze medal is at stake, third place at the World Cup doesn't offer much to teams. By and large, these matches tend to involve mentally checked-out players mainly concerned with avoiding an injury so that they can fully relax once they get to the beaches and/or yachts they will spend the next several weeks sitting on, where they will nurse the pain from the semifinal loss and rest up a...
Quinn Simmons Lets The Bike Speak For Him, For Better And Worse
MULHOUSE, France — Stage 12 of the 2026 Tour de France was supposed to be boring. Maybe it would have been were it not for Quinn Simmons, who did what he does best and made the peloton quake with a thumping attack. The American champion seized the initiative with 35 kilometers left, splintering the bunch and dragging a dozen strong riders with him, turning what would have otherwise been a dull procession into a thrilling finale. Very few riders are strong enough to cleave a charging peloton li...
ICE Brings The Occupation Home
On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the warrant the ICE officers were supposed to be executing that day, and who had his three-year-old daughter in the car with him. Within moments, one or more o...
James Dolan Sues Wired Magazine For Writing A Story About His Shitty Ways
James Dolan keeps pooping on his own parade . The Knicks owner should still be basking in the warmth of his beloved NBA team’s first championship in 53 years, like the rest of New York. Instead, he’s suing journalists. Dolan’s corporation, MSG Entertainment, filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday in New York Supreme Court against Wired magazine, for a story published last week titled " Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities. " The piece went into detail about the owner's feti...
Buster Posey Sucks, But Don’t Take My Word For It
There was a very awkward moment in the July 16 episode of The Executive Show on KNBR in San Francisco. The hosts, Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher, were talking with Giants executive Buster Posey, making his first appearance on the show since May 21. According to SFGate , that May interview was "testy," and Posey subsequently bailed on the episode scheduled for June 25, possibly due to hurt feelings but also possibly because he was too busy making a huge mess of the team's stupid Pride Night me...
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