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2024-09-19 03:35:09

How long can one man orient his life around the unbelievably demanding but ultimately vacuous race to tweet out transactional NBA news a few seconds faster than the competition? ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski has found his personal answer.

2024-09-19 00:25:20

Welcome to Perfectly Fine Dinner Party Club, a cooking and hosting column from Libby Watson, who likes to throw dinner parties but is normal about it.

You have surely noticed that a few months have passed without a Perfectly Fine Dinner Party Club Post From Libby Watson At Defector. Your friends have been waiting for you to host your next event, and wondering what the holdup is. I will admit to you that I did throw a Fourth of July dinner party that was meant to be the next edition of this column, but here’s the deal: It was not quite "perfectly fine" enough. It was inadequately fine.

2024-09-19 00:02:05

There is a time and place to unsheathe five to ten of your toes out in front of your coworkers. Perhaps in a group swimming situation, or something like that. The general rule, however, is: If in public you be, your feet they shan't see. Jose Altuve failed to obey this maxim, and he was summarily ejected from a wild Astros win against the Padres for podiatric crimes.

Altuve ended the top of the ninth inning by grounding out to third, stranding the go-ahead runner on second with the score tied at three runs apiece and giving San Diego a chance to walk it off. Houston's tiny second baseman did not even try to run to first, however, as he claimed he'd fouled the pitch off of his left foot. The video of the play (7:43 in the below highlight reel) shows pretty clearly that Altuve did bonk his own foot, though home plate umpire Brennan Miller wasn't having it. Despite the protestations of Altuve and his manager Joe Espada, the play was not reviewable and the initial ruling therefore stood—which did not stop Altuve from unsocking himself to present evidence. Miller drew the line at toe reveal, and ejected Altuve.

2024-09-18 23:46:38

QUEENS, N.Y. — It's funny how a packed tunnel of New Yorkers exiting a train station at rush hour can dissipate into such an underwhelming baseball crowd.

Normally, this is not how I would lead off a story about a breezy 10-1 win for the Mets over the Nationals on a balmy night in the final days before autumn, but I entered and exited the ballpark on Tuesday with crowd size on my mind. It's been a point of anxiety for those around the Mets, enough that it was mentioned on both the radio and TV broadcast during Monday's walk-off triumph: The team's fighting with Atlanta to get into the playoffs with only a handful of games remaining, so where are the fans?

2024-09-18 23:01:04

NXT opened on a sour note last night. Ethan Page is scheduled to defend his championship against Trick Williams next month, but the two could not complete a contract signing. It seemed the two wouldn’t be fighting next month, despite the pleas of NXT GM Ava, who is also The Rock’s daughter.

Then I remembered that I’d seen a little pro wrestling before, and had a strong feeling they would eventually sign the contact. I did not expect that the man who got them to sign the contract would be two time NBA All-Star from the Indiana Pacers, Tyrese Haliburton—he’s also an Olympics gold medalist!

2024-09-18 22:12:25

Every team has its own Dave, in one form or another: a superfan whose name you know against your will. These guys are varying levels of bearable—around here, the late Freddy Sez was a nice old man; I hope Dancin' Larry falls in a manhole—but one thing they all have in common is a belief that fans came to see them. Where McCovey Cove Dave stands out is that he has actual beef with the team he purports to root for.

2024-09-18 21:09:39

I’m not so naive as to reduce all athletic careers to one battle between the corrosive force of capitalism and the pure feelings of goalscoring, or hucking a baseball where the two colors meet. But Cloepfil recognizes the apparent insensibility of these feelings just as well as she grasps their basic logic. Her writing helps readers understand why certain athletes, their brains and marriages falling apart, won't just retire.

2024-09-18 03:04:18

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking naps, Saturday morning cartoons of yore, John Madden, and more.

Your letters:

2024-09-18 02:42:07

Six episodes in, Industry Season 3 is rounding into the homestretch, and as a result, there's a lot going on. Too much to catalogue here. But that doesn't mean we can't try. It's time to check back in on our beloved characters and bask in their various manias and journeys into delirium.

Harper Stern: Going Down As She Goes Up! Over the last three weeks, we've gotten the full Harper experience. Particularly on the most recent episode, where she is twisted by the arm to go along with using her only friend to pull a fast one on Pierpoint. Harper becoming the monster she was always born to be is a consistent theme of the series. Her revenge against Pierpoint, and specifically Eric, has been inevitable since the end of the second season. And both of her confrontations to end the episode, first with Eric, and then with Yasmin (more on that later), were excruciating to watch. It's hard to say she doesn't deserve it, but nobody on this show deserves anything good. They are soulless husks, obsessed with money and the power/exaltation of the sell above their own humanity. Nevertheless, Harper makes her big bet and for the time being it looks good, and that's what these people live for, at the expense of whatever personal relationships they claim to want.

2024-09-18 01:51:14

A good indicator that a friend group won’t and maybe shouldn’t stay together is when they have divided themselves into “saints” and “sinners.” That is, however, an excellent pitch for a reality television show, which is perhaps part of how we ended up with The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which premiered on Hulu on Sept. 6. The show follows eight women who are part of a weird TikTok group they call MomTok, which is basically just them posting videos of themselves dancing in different configurations and maybe also proselytizing? 

The three of us have been messaging constantly about the Mormon Mommies. Their hair is so strange. They are always driving in the car. They are so mild for a reality television show, and yet it is that mildness that perhaps makes them so difficult to turn off. It is less like watching any of the Real Housewives franchises than it is like watching a middle school sleepover without any parents around.