2026-10-28 21:46:09
This World Series felt like it was in danger of losing its steam, as they all do when one team begins forcefully applying a throw pillow to the face of the other. The Milwaukee Brewers had kept the Tampa Bay Devil (yeah, we said it) Rays at arm's length through each of the first three games, and even though those had been interesting and even occasionally wacky games, they all ended the same way. The specter of a cold winter and uncertain spring loomed larger with each evening's parade of invincible Brewers relievers.
Thus, the desperate need for a complete and utter piefight in Game 4, with extra innings, bonfires in both bullpens, a hilarious ending followed by a more hilarious ending to that ending, and, best of all, an additional game of baseball. Game 5 is tonight, and will be played between two teams that now seem just a bit better matched than they had four-and-a-half hours earlier.
The basic cadaver of the story is this: Tampa won Game 4 by the score of 4-3, in 12 innings. In so doing they extended the Series at least another day and put off the moment when everyone who cares about baseball will have to start thinking about the impending lockout. But the autopsy is always about the details, and it is the way in which the Rays went about the business of desperate flailing that breathed new life and interest into what had become a slightly too clinical clash of champions.
2026-10-28 03:18:02
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 sex, tiny shrimp, doinks, and more.
Before we get to today’s proceedings, let's all give a warm round of applesauce to Lauren Theisen for guest-hosting this column last week so that I had more time to work on a big feature that I still have yet to finish. Cheers to Lo, jeers to yours truly.
Also, I've yet to plug our new NFL podcast in the Funbag, so let me correct that right now. Arif Hasan and I have a new podcast called All Ball! It's all about NFL football, with no gambling or fantasy shit getting in the way! So email us all of your serious NFL questions right here, and get in on that shit. Got it? Nice. Let's get down to business then.
2026-10-28 03:09:50
There’s a Terry Pratchett quote I love, about how all contemporary fantasy is written under the influence of The Lord of the Rings. “Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints,” Pratchett wrote. “Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”
I think this holds true for all genre fiction; there are giants of the genre, who introduced basically all of the tropes, fully formed, and anyone working in that genre is constantly in conversation with those tropes. Every ghost story is in communion with Henry James; every haunted house owes a debt to Shirley Jackson. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Cliches become cliches for a reason, and it can be rewarding as a reader to spot the influences.
We are primed to expect the expected, just by picking up a ghost story in the first place. “Ghost stories might not all use the same words,” Malerman has one of his characters observe, “but they all sound like the same words because it’s the ghost we think about, not the words.”
2026-10-28 02:52:30
What was your favorite video review controversy at this past summer's World Cup? Was it when Egypt had the best goal in their history disallowed for a foul committed by an unrelated guy 15 seconds before the big moment, when Iran lost to that same Egypt side over a totally fake offsides call, when the mouth-covering red card rule was applied against a Paraguayan player but not against an England player, or when Donald Trump personally lobbied FIFA to get a red card against Folarin Balogun rescinded? It's hard to choose from such a bounty of options.
The 2026 World Cup represented a nadir in the evolution of soccer as theatrical product, with interminable replay reviews bringing the action to a halt in the name of adjudicating decisions that a referee couldn't possibly make. The world has been told that the death of theater is the price of fairness.
I hate this stuff, especially because VAR is wrong all the time. The counterargument would be that without VAR, referees would miss even more stuff and that the world would see big, consequential calls get blown without the ability to review them. On this week's episode of Only If You Get Caught, we examine the most famous missed call in the history of soccer as a way of making the argument against VAR. Our show is often accused of being pro-cheating, which is usually mistaking curiosity for endorsement. But in this case the charges are correct: We absolutely love the Hand of God.
2026-10-28 01:57:32
Paul Pierce claims he's having trouble making ends meet. The extraordinarily divorced Celtic great and occasional television bomb-out is paying a cumulative $48,000 per month in child and spousal support to at least two women, per court documents obtained and reported by TMZ. That is a lot of money. His ex-girlfriend Princess Santiago, with whom Pierce engaged in a public and nasty paternity dispute, is reportedly asking a court to award her another $40,000 in legal fees, and for $10,000 to hire a forensic accountant. She suspects that Pierce has been dishonest about his resources. Per TMZ, Pierce filed paperwork in response to this request, claiming that he is broke and "drowning" under his financial obligations.
Some of Pierce's trouble comes from job instability. Pierce lost a well-paid ESPN gig in 2021 after posting selfie videos to social media from a profoundly grim house party. Pierce later insisted that he did not regret the tragic scene, or regret posting the video of it, and didn't really even regret losing his job at ESPN, a situation that he said had already become strained. It took him three years to land another network gig, but Pierce filled some of the time filming grim livestreams with Kevin Garnett in a deal with sports gambling outfit BetMGM. In March 2024, Pierce was brought on at Fox Sports 1 as a basketball analyst; per TMZ, his contract with FS1 paid him $1.5 million annually. He started as a contributor on Skip Bayless's Undisputed; when Bayless departed and Undisputed folded, Pierce joined Joy Taylor and Keyshawn Johnson as co-hosts of the show Speak. That also blew up, in July 2025, when Taylor was jettisoned and Speak was cancelled.
It seems like Pierce was still collecting some of this sweet FS1 income into this year, per documents from his latest divorce, reported by TMZ back in July. According to those documents, Pierce was hauling in about $165,000 per month for the first half of 2026, although some of this income was from various side deals; you know damn well Pierce was being paid by an online sportsbook.
2026-10-28 01:29:00
It's bad enough that Pat McAfee is so omnipresent and obnoxious, but does he also have to be so thin-skinned?
ESPN's prize hog used Monday's episode of his daily talk show to complain about what a bad experience he had at the University of Utah when he was there for College GameDay this past weekend. More specifically, McAfee was aggravated because the school had posted a video (now deleted) in which a couple of students were prompted to do an impression of him. "He's gonna say a corny line," said one student who was predicting McAfee's GameDay pick. "He's gonna be like, 'Houston, we got a problem. Gimme the Utah Utes.'" For the record, McAfee picked the visiting Cougars in Saturday's game, but Utah won, 21-13.
Another student mocked McAfee for his well-worn bit of taking off his shirt on set. "Bro, Pat, we love you, bro, but keep the shirt on. No one's trying to see that. We don't care. These are college kids, bro. Keep your shirt on, homie." I have to admit: These youthful Utes had him dead to rights.
