2026-04-29 01:47:50
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 chopsticks, dated nicknames, robots, and more.
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Joe:
2026-04-29 00:40:32
With the institution of replay review and ABS, it can sometimes feel like baseball is a little too normal these days, that it lacks whimsy or esoterica, or that games can no longer be decided by vestigial rules that were codified during the Hayes administration. This impression, I am happy to report, is false. The sheer number of permutations of bat and ball and player requires a robust rulebook that nevertheless still must on occasion come down to human judgment. What happened Monday night in San Diego is proof that there is still some mystery in the world.
Matt Shaw led off the Chicago Cubs' ninth against Mason Miller with a little squibber down the third-base line, and it appeared to be trickling foul as it ran out of momentum. Just as it came to a stop—just!—Ty France picked it up ever so daintily, perhaps trying a bit of a frame job to make it look even more foul than it appeared on first glance. But it did appear foul.
2026-04-29 00:15:25
On their very first offensive possession of Game 4 on Monday night, the Detroit Pistons did what every big man–turned-commentator suggests every team do on its first possession: They ran a play to get their center a post-up. In this case, Duncan Robinson backscreened Wendell Carter Jr., forcing Desmond Bane to switch onto Jalen Duren. Duren had borne the lion's share of blame for the Pistons' embarrassing performance through the first three games of the series, a stretch spent not only getting outschemed and outclassed by a team that had seemed incapable of doing either against anyone all season, but also getting out-banged and out-hustled. The entire value proposition of the Pistons is that with their collective physicality, particularly the explosive muscularity of Duren, nobody can bully them. Best to get him rolling early.
But no. The Magic knew exactly what Detroit's plan was, and Bane snuffed it out for a steal. They then marched down the court, and Carter Jr. splashed a wide-open three. This sequence was the series in miniature: The Pistons straining to complete the simplest of actions while Orlando bludgeoned them into easy submission; Detroit playing neolithic offense while the Magic showed an understanding of the modern game, where centers space the floor instead of cosplaying paint-bound bigs of old. Orlando won Game 4, 94-88, to take a totally deserved 3-1 lead over the East's No. 1 seed.
2026-04-28 22:07:01
Michael is a bad movie. Let’s just get that out of the way now. It is a movie designed less to tell a story than to recreate moments, ones you are probably already familiar with. It is a movie designed to give you a karaoke experience in a theater setting with other like-minded Michael Jackson fans. It is a movie designed to make the estate of a dead pop star a great deal of money, in line with other milquetoast biopics about other stars, like Bohemian Rhapsody or Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (more like deliver me from this theater). It is a movie not at all designed to tell a history, least of all the history of Michael Jackson.
"Directed," in the scariest of scare quotes, by Antoine Fuqua, Michael tells a very abridged version of Jackson's ascendence, from child superstar (played by Juliano Valdi) to king of pop (played by Jackson's nephew, Jaafar Jackson). Much of the Motown and Jackson 5 era is told in montage, only stopping intermittently to highlight how sensitive of a person Michael is and how disconnected he is from other people due to his demanding father and being in a big pop group with his brothers. Later, as Jackson moves into adulthood, the movie aims to recreate the magic behind the making of the albums Off The Wall and Thriller, while stopping intermittently to highlight how sensitive of a person Michael is and how disconnected he is from other people: watching cartoons with his mom, wanting to play Twister with his big brothers, adopting a monkey named Bubbles, who shows up in this movie like he was one of the Avengers.
There are many moral problems with this movie, which we will get into, but just from a filmmaking perspective, so much of this is unbelievably cynical. It's one thing to watch a superhero movie and know that its primary job is to sell toys and merchandise; it's quite another to watch a biopic with more or less the same objective. The movie treats Jackson as if he were some sort of Marvel character, with subtle references to his many cosmetic surgeries, his addiction to painkillers, and his fixation with Peter Pan sprinkled in like Easter eggs for his biggest fans to go seek out. Even if a movie produced in collaboration with Jackson's infamously protective estate was never going to seriously confront Jackson's child sexual abuse cases, there is presumably a lot that could be said about even a sanitized version of one of the greatest, most fascinating artists of all time. And yet, Jackson is barely a person in his own movie. He is at best an idea, one vaguely though carefully sketched to undermine the bad things you know about him.
2026-04-28 21:49:15
Smart money says that sports gambling scandals will be more dog-licks-man than man-bites-dog real soon. But for now, this rates as big college football news: Texas Tech announced on Monday that quarterback Brendan Sorsby has left the program to get treated for a gambling addiction.
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported that Sorsby, who transferred to the Red Raiders in January after two years at Cincinnati, will enter a residential rehab facility. According to the school, the length of his stay at the treatment center is “indefinite.”
“We love Brendan and support his decision to seek professional help,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire said, in a statement released by the school. “Taking this step requires courage, and our primary focus is on him as a person.”
2026-04-28 21:00:03
Steve Javie can’t recall much from the actual game itself, but he’ll always remember what happened later that night.
It was Javie’s first NBA Finals game in 1995, always a huge deal for an up-and-coming referee. Several of his family members were in the crowd. Finals games back then started at 9:00 p.m. Eastern; Javie and his fellow refs didn’t leave the arena until the wee hours of the morning. When they returned to their hotel, crew chief Joey Crawford had a room set up with food and drinks for the crew and their families to enjoy.
After a couple hours of celebrating his achievement, Javie couldn’t sleep. He was wired from the rush of his first time on the NBA’s biggest stage. A 7:00 a.m. flight the next morning loomed large. He mentioned it to Crawford, his longtime mentor.
