2026-04-01 05:47:24
Tiger Woods was “sweating profusely” and appeared “lethargic and slow” after his crash last weekend, according to an arrest affidavit released Tuesday. The golfer told investigators with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office that he had taken “a few” prescription drugs earlier in the day, and a deputy later found two hydrocodone pills in Woods’s left pocket. Wood was…
2026-04-01 02:43:16
In the first of the recent rambling Instagram Live sermons that got him fired by the Chicago Bulls, Jaden Ivey hunts through a Bible for passages to share with his followers. He evidently did not do the prep work to place sticky tabs or bookmarks in there, so there are awkward moments of silence while Ivey flips back and forth and sniffs and mutters. It's a lot of very tedious work for almost no payoff: Every passage Ivey selects is a threat of damnation, and the most he ever wrings out of his selections, by way of translating them into plain language, is a superficial and increasingly whiney exhortation. You guys, don't you see how this further goes to show that you are going to go to hell?
He winds himself up like this, so that by the end of the video his voice has risen half an octave or more, as if he has been waiting for some tangible sign of breakthrough and feels his audience is to blame for not having produced one, perhaps due to their inner hypocrisy. But it's a pretty friendly audience, judging by the comments: If recent studies about sycophancy in AI chatbots reveal anything broader about online psychosis, Ivey is absorbing a dangerously potent wallop of behavioral reinforcement. He spent several hours over the weekend preaching to this crowd, much of it from the interior of his car, hammering the same talking points about how to avoid eternal damnation, not refining his message too well but certainly gaining steam through repetition.
It's not surprising then that some of the confessions Ivey struggled to articulate in the making of his first video are shouted with authority in the most recent one, which came after his employers decided they'd seen enough of this shit. "God saved me from a life of fornication," Ivey professes early in the first video, in an affectless bass, looking away from the camera. "He saved me from a life of drunkenness, he saved me from a life of, um," and here there is a pregnant pause before Ivey completes the sentence with "pornography." Later in the session, repeating the same point, Ivey record-scratches on that pornography bit, stares blankly, and then moves to another thought. By Monday's video, he'd gotten the hang of it. "I was a fornicator! I was a pornography addict! And I used to get drunk! That's all I knew!"
2026-04-01 00:58:09
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, guest host Dave McKenna is talking about cowboy hats, music, high-risk eating, and catch phrases.
What an honor this is! Other than initials I have nothing in common with Drew, the legendary Funbag founder and a real man of letters. But now somebody messed up and let me have the keys to his column. I’m reminded of the time the Exxon Valdez was commandeered by Captain Hazelwood. Let’s commence this voyage.
Your letters:
2026-04-01 00:44:45
He looked a little bigger, and a little greyer. But Justin Verlander in a Tigers jersey is still 2011 AL MVP Justin Verlander in a Detroit Tigers jersey. Nine years, two World Series wins, and two Cy Youngs since he last pitched for the club that drafted him, the 43-year-old took the mound for his new old team's fourth game of the 2026 season. I had to snap a picture to capture the moment.
I'm searching for a more interesting word than "surreal" and coming up short. Seeing "VERLANDER" and 35 on that specific road uniform takes me back to a completely different version of myself—a confused student who has yet to learn basically any lesson she'll consider important by the time she gets to age 30. An athlete's life advances at the same pace as your own, but Verlander's career has taken such a strange loop back around that it's left me a little dizzy. He's been to Houston, and then the operating room, then Queens, then Houston again, and then San Francisco before signing this one-year deal. It kind of feels a little arrogant, after what's become such a long and varied career, to even make the claim that JV has returned "home." Detroit isn't the only city that can claim him.
2026-03-31 23:52:00
A half-decade ago in the early days of this website, long before ABS or "The Big Dumper," I became obsessed with a very rare and unexciting way to play baseball. Frustrated by the prevalence of the long ball over small ball in MLB, I imagined a different world: one where players chose to sacrifice themselves for their team. I wished for a way to honor those selfless players who worried not about their own stats, but instead about the good of the club.
To hit for the Saint Cycle (which I made up), a player must only sacrifice themselves in every plate appearance. They cannot be glorified with a hit, and in each trip to the plate, they must be saintly in a new way. Specifically, they must get four of these five outcomes: hit by pitch, walk, sacrifice bunt, sacrifice fly, and productive out. A productive out, in case you forgot, is when the batter gets out, but the other players on the bases move into scoring position.
When I conducted my initial research in 2021, only three men had ever managed to hit for the saint cycle in all of baseball history: Tim Flannery, Jose Morales, and Biff Pocoroba. At the end of the 2021 season, I checked to see if there were any new saints. There weren't, and I promptly forgot about my obsession entirely.
2026-03-31 23:30:22
Hockey fights always feel a little absurd when their performativeness is laid bare. We know how it works, and why it's done, but crave permission to suspend disbelief. Just give us the smallest fig leaf of interpersonal dislike, and we'll buy it. But a move toward a safer and more peaceful version of the sport has, to the larger benefit, made those moments fewer and further between. We recently celebrated the anniversary of one of the big Red Wings–Avs brawls, and the genuine venom and intent to injure in those clips is jarring when compared with most modern-day fights, the most famous recent example of which was arranged on a group text.
But rituals can matter for their own sake, and for the social cohesion they provide. The original philosophical principle of performativity referred not to insincerity trumping intent—virtue signaling, in other words—but to the use of words or acts that actually bring something into being. How being pronounced man and wife makes them married, for example. Or how fighting an opponent who injured your teammate might tangibly strengthen the bond of your team. Not because you hate that other guy or because you want him to feel physical pain as punishment, but because that's what teammates are supposed to do.
Does the heavy "supposed to" of Monday's delayed Maple Leafs vs. Radko Gudas throwdown render it less genuine? I don't know! It's all very fraught and on some level not really measurable from the outside, because if the bond is the thing rather than revenge, it's not something I can see or measure. But the epistemology of a hockey fight becomes even more confusing when one party doesn't bother fighting back, and just stands there and eats the punches due.
