2026-03-11 23:40:02
It’s Monday morning and I’m ready for the start of NFL free agency. The window to sign players doesn’t officially open for another two days, but Monday represents the start of the league’s open tampering period, which comes on the heels of the league’s actual tampering period, which begins sometime over scotch and sodas at Prime 47 during the NFL combine. There are deals already locked and loaded, ready to be formally announced the second the tampering window cracks open. And I am ready for them. In fact, I’m so hyped for free agency that I slept poorly the night before, which means that my wife slept poorly too. She’s not happy about that. But you have to understand, my darling … no reasonable person can get a good night’s rest if they don’t know which midlevel center will be playing for their team next season.
Today I’ll finally get some answers. Or at least, vaguely worded dispatches from Josina Anderson that may or may not ramp up the process of guiding me toward an answer. The wheeling and dealing already began in earnest days earlier. The Rams decided to fuck them picks in order to get stud Chiefs CB Trent McDuffie. The Bills fucked them picks by trading for Bears WR D.J. Moore, whose contract runs through the year 2046. And the Ravens SUPER fucked them picks in order to snag Raiders edge Maxx Crosby, a move certain to shift the balance of power in the AFC so long as there are no snags with Crosby’s impending physical (OOP-DEE!!!). That’s all the hot stove action I need to get my nipples poking out.
I have to work today, but my head isn’t in my work. It’s in my phone, where I’m already swiping down constantly to refresh my Bluesky feed for news. I’m also toggling over to our company Slack’s football channel (named #clumpdogs) to see if one of my co-workers has dropped in a nugget that I would have otherwise missed. I do a little work, then I check again. I do a little more work, and then I check another time. When I refresh my Bluesky feed, nothing has changed, same as when I last refreshed less than a minute earlier. I’m still seeing the same post about Trump doing evil Trump shit. I hate this single micropost now. It’s holding back the impending flow of NFL information, and in the rudest possible manner. I think about muting that account just so that I have something new to get pissed at on the next refresh.
2026-03-11 23:09:47
A little over three months from today, on June 13, the Boston metropolitan area is set to host the first of its seven 2026 World Cup matches, a group-stage clash between Scotland and Haiti. Despite kickoff being that close, local officials face an alarming number of unanswered logistics and funding questions, the sort no city should still be dealing with this close to such a big event. The case of Boston—well, Boston and Foxborough—is extreme, though not unique, making it a useful window into the busted logistics of the 2026 World Cup.
The trouble first came to light last week after a meeting of the Foxborough Select Board, the city council representing the town where the games will be played. At the heart of the issue is a missing $7.8 million needed to cover security, and the town's withholding of permits for hosting the games over that money. Foxborough heard out a proposal from lawyers representing the Boston 2026 host committee, Boston Soccer 26, asking the town to cover the bill in exchange for a promise that it would be reimbursed by the host committee later. The committee lawyers also said that the Kraft Sports Group, which owns the stadium slated to host Boston's World Cup matches, would backstop any extra costs. Yet Foxborough officials were not happy: They want the issue sorted now, without having to either front the cost or wait forever for things to be resolved. Local cops and firefighters were annoyed with a June 1 procurement deadline—less than two weeks from that first match—which they said was way too late.
"We do not wait 'til the week before and then force the board and public safety to cancel an event because we can't settle the matters … when we should be settling now," Foxborough PD chief Michael Grace told the Boston Globe. "We are 99 or 100 days away from hosting the largest sporting event in the world, and we're deciding, or can't seem to find, necessary funding for necessary equipment that's been identified in over a year-and-a-half of planning with thousands of hours in 14 working groups throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The solution is very simple: Fund what we need funded and this issue is over tomorrow."
2026-03-11 22:01:18
Look at it this way: Now Maxx Crosby doesn't have to write one of those treacly letters to Las Vegas Raiders fans thanking them for their love and devotion and swearing eternal fealty to them, before heading off to work for another fan base that he will learn to love just as much. Now he can just saunter back into the house and act to the neighbors like he never intended to go anywhere at all, no matter what that moving van in front seemed to indicate.
In one of the great "How can I miss you when you won't go away" moments of the modern NFL, the Baltimore Ravens backed away from the blockbuster deal they made two days ago to acquire the Raiders' defensive game-wrecker, ostensibly because Crosby's post-surgical knee wasn't healed enough to pass the team's physical, but maybe because the Ravens rethought the loss of the two first-round draft choices they had committed to sending Las Vegas in exchange. Because these are the Raiders, we are treated to a fresh round of "Well, of course it's the Raiders. Did you expect it to be normal?"
That isn't entirely fair in this case, to be honest, but the circular logic of failure based on past failures is also very much part of the Raider ethos. They have been intrepid, bold, and free-spending in the free agency period which technically starts later this afternoon. The last bit is a mockery of verb tenses that only makes sense in a world in which deadlines are mostly suggestions, but commitments are definitely commitments, and while the contracts aren't official yet, the Raiders will now have to fit them into cap space that Crosby's return has tightened significantly.
2026-03-11 21:29:18
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. And yet there is no timeline long enough that could have prepared me for Bam Adebayo scoring 83 points in an honest-to-goodness NBA game before I, personally, died.
So where were you when Adebayo scored 31 points in the first quarter of the Miami Heat's home game against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night? I was at my computer, playing Slay the Spire II and following the game on my phone when I got a couple of texts: "Bam is going crazy," one read. "Bam has 20 points in the first," read another. In what would become the theme of the night, the third just read: "What the fuck?" I tuned in just at the tail end of Adebayo's 31-point first, which was already historic and the fourth-highest quarter total in the last 30 years. I figured, with the Heat up 11 and the Wizards actively looking to lose, that Adebayo might score something like 40 points then rest the whole fourth quarter. When the game went to half with him at 43 and the Heat up 76-62, I smiled and prepared myself for a boring second half that I would only sort of bother to watch. I was so fucking wrong.
2026-03-11 21:01:08
The crack of the bat. The smell of the grass. Hasty, scrawled attempts to understand and calculate a run-quotient formula. The romance of baseball is rarely felt as keenly as when it requires math. But those are the Wednesday night plans for Team USA, which after losing to Italy in a massive upset will be counting on help to decide whether it advances to the World Baseball Classic's elimination rounds, or whether it goes home in shock and disgrace.
More to the point, because recrimination is America's true pastime: Did manager Mark DeRosa think Team USA had already qualified? And did he construct his lineup accordingly, benching some of the U.S.'s best hitters in a game he didn't realize he needed to win? It is extremely not clear.
First, the baseball. The Espresso Boys knocked around Nolan McLean and Ryan Yarbrough to take an 8-0 lead by the sixth inning on the back of home runs from Kyle Teel, Sam Antonacci, and Jac Caglianone. Michael Lorenzen pitched four and two-thirds innings of two-hit ball. Team USA clawed back six runs and sent Aaron Judge to the plate as the tying run, but closer Greg Weissert got him swinging.
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 lineup 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:
