2026-03-11 02:56:00
Part of the charm of the World Baseball Classic is that it takes your favorite athletes and places them in different arrangements. It answers fantastical questions: What if all the members of the Los Angeles Dodgers played on different teams? What would it look like if you put together a line-up containing Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Juan Soto, Julio Rodríguez, and Fernando Tatis Jr., on a team managed by a glassed-up Albert Pujols? Sure, why not.
If the WBC has the same vibes as taking your dolls and making them kiss, Cal Raleigh and Randy Arozarena are enacting the equivalent of when you take your dolls to the courthouse and have them stage a messy and public divorce. When Arozarena first stepped up to bat during the United States–Mexico game Monday night, he offered a handshake to the catcher, his Seattle Mariners teammate Cal Raleigh, who refused it and instead said something to Arozarena, who bent down to listen. It was not the first time that a catcher has declined to shake an opponent's hand this tournament: Australian catcher Robbie Perkins previously declined to shake the hand of Czech hitter Milan Prokop. It was also not the first time Arozarena has been snubbed by a team USA catcher during the WBC, though in 2023, the snubber was not his own teammate.
Back when Will Smith declined Arozarena's handshake, Arozarena brushed off the matter straightforwardly, saying, "He left me hanging, but I'm not going to cry. I kept going and hit two doubles." Arozarena was less blithe about Raleigh's snubbing, leaving an extended comment to Mexican journalist Luis Gilbert, helpfully translated in full by Twitter user Master Flip:
2026-03-11 02:35:51
In what could very well go down as the biggest upset of the season, San Antonio Spur and intermittent blogger Luke Kornet somehow has successfully blocked the Atlanta Hawks' attempt to honor an iconic local institution, the Magic City strip club. In response to the handwringing engendered by Kornet's completely random Medium post against the event, the NBA announced on Monday that it has canceled the Hawks' planned Magic City night.
In his post, Kornet called out the partnership and the league, stating: "The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love."
In response to the NBA's cancelation, the Hawks released their own statement, saying “While we are very disappointed in the NBA’s decision to cancel our Magic City Night promotion, we fully respect its decision. As a franchise, we remain committed to celebrating the best of Atlanta – with authenticity – in ways that continue to unite and bring us all together.”
2026-03-11 02:02:16
If your workplace has Slack, you know that it is designed to make remote office communications easier and more convivial, which is all well and good as long as you don't actually use it. The wise Slack user will have the discipline to read rather than contribute, and understand that their contributions are optional at best, a work-creation scam at worst, and that the middle ground is mostly sighs and eyerolls. The truth is that anything you say on there can, will, and should be held against you, possibly by someone with the power to assign stories. A case in point is a recent conversation that led to your itinerant typist drinking James Harden's J Harden-label red wine, watching a terrible game which featured the J. Harden in question, and thinking about the NBA commissioner's first truly forceful act of the season, which was to come out against the Atlanta Hawks entering a promotional partnership with a local strip club.
Let us begin at the beginning, though, which in this case is last Wednesday. One of our number found an image of a promotional flyer of James Harden holding an autograph session in suburban Cleveland (he is a Cavalier for the moment) at which the one rule was that he would only sign bottles of his wine. Why this was important to our enterprise's news gathering process is a matter between that comrade and their version of God, so we won't speculate. Since few people walk around carrying wine bottles (they normally are found sitting in a park, with the bottle in a bag), this was clearly a work designed to get people to buy his stuff. Harden had gotten into wine several years earlier as part of sizable number of players dabbling in oenology, a movement that was almost certainly inspired by longtime San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich, whose affinity for the grape was devout and refined, and who would always select the wine at any dinner as long as it met three criteria—devotion to craft, taste, and a cost per glass equivalent to a mid-size car payment.
Harden joined with an Australian company called J Shed and lent his name to three varieties—two reds and a prosecco which, like most proseccos, is kidding itself by even worming its way into a bottle. Your author knew a deeply committed Harden apologist and decided to buy a bottle of each to gift to said friend at an appropriate future date, but when that date came, said friend declined because he was "celebrating" Dry January, the sap. We were stuck with three bottles that we couldn't give away, didn't have any burning desire to open ourselves or the impetus to find another Hardenophile upon which to foist the goods.
2026-03-11 00:59:51
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 brackets, bartenders, hot people with shitty taste, and more.
Your letters:
Chuck:
2026-03-11 00:17:29
Scrub kosher salt into the surface of your stainless steel pan, says Wirecutter, citing the French Culinary Institute: This is "a hack to create a slippery surface," by filling in all the little microscopic cracks and ridges in the surface of the pan, so that you can cook eggs in the pan and they will not stick.
This method is truly a boon for frying and scrambling eggs, though mastering it requires a bit of patience. Nailing it took me three tries, but once I got it down, I was shocked by the results.
Three tries! To master the technique of buffing kosher salt onto a pan! So that you can cook some eggs! This is lunacy.
2026-03-10 23:41:56
Madison Booker is a perfectly polite, charismatic young woman, but there is no other player in her sport for whom the word "rude" comes to mind as often. In basketball, rudeness is a two-pronged trait: It's being good enough to make a hard game look easy, but more than that, it’s being good enough to make your opponent’s hard work seem like a waste. It's strutting into a department store, knocking over a stack of neatly folded sweaters, and heading home. What you feel when you watch a defender stay in front of Booker, only for her to rise up and nail a midrange jumper over their head, is overwhelming pity.
If Texas was likely to be a one-seed in the NCAA tournament anyway, the SEC Tournament championship Booker led them to this past weekend should ensure that the Longhorns end up with the third overall seed, in the Fort Worth regional not far from home. In three tournament games—a quarterfinal against Alabama, a semifinal against Ole Miss, and a final against South Carolina on Sunday—the junior Booker averaged 20 points and 8.3 rebounds, shooting 61.4 percent from the field and earning tournament MVP honors in her very rude way.
