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Delete The Mets Don't stop me if you've heard this one before: The New York Mets are a real disappointment. This was true last year, when they missed the playoffs, and this was true last week, when the team followed a sweep at the hands of the Athletics with one by the Dodgers. It's somehow even more true today, as the Chicago Cubs spent the weekend stretching the Mets' losing streak to 11 games, putting them at 7-15 and dead last in the National League. A common theme in these losses is that New York has failed to plate runs, but on Sunday in Wrigley, they almost got away with it. Riding a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth, they entrusted newly acquired bullpen arm Devin Williams with the save situation, then watched as he fumbled it by allowing a base hit and an RBI double by former Met Michael Conforto. In the 10th, after the butt end of the Mets' order failed to bring around their guy on second, it was another new-to-them reliever, Craig Kimbrel, who let the winning man score on a wild pitch and a sac fly. https://youtu.be/_kIo33I6nbQ?si=iZIZOq6sXT0OM3MV&t=997

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Munetaka Murakami Watch: Big Homers, Wacky Numbers Forget what the scouting report said about Munetaka Murakami before he came over to MLB from NPB. As we all know, foreign scouting is not real. Big bombs are real, and Murakami has, in his three most recent games with the Chicago White Sox, delivered three big bombs. One of them even had the additional oomph of being his first career grand slam. 114.1 mph exit velocity, 431 feet to dead center field 103.9 mph exit velocity, 415 feet to center field

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Manchester City Helpfully Extends Arsenal’s Freefall Last week, I wrote that Manchester City had to intervene and stop the Arsenal title march, mainly for my own personal enjoyment. While some of you rightfully didn't appreciate that, you can't argue with the results. Arsenal came out on Sunday at City's stadium ready to play and still lost, 2-1, ceding control of the title race with just five matches left in its season. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFeAiDvFww The stats won't back the argument that Arsenal did anything particularly exciting yesterday, at least at face value. City dominated possession, 59-41, and had 15 shots to Arsenal's nine (five to three on target differential). Arsenal's only goal came from a Gianluigi Donnarumma mistake:

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The Crossword, April 20: Haute Cuisine Our Monday crossword is pretty dope. This week's puzzle was constructed **by**Zachary Edward-Brown**** **and** **Mishkin Filstrup** , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Zach and Mishkin are high school friends from Chicago. Zach enjoys soccer and basketball and rooting for the Bears. Mishkin enjoys playing golf with his family and running track with his friends. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1.

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The Block, As Remembered By The Guy Who Called It And The Guy Who Let It Be Monty McCutchen remembers the play unfolding in front of him. With just under two minutes left in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, the game tied at 89, Golden State's Andre Iguodala grabbed a rebound and dribbled up the floor. He was coming right at McCutchen, who was backpedaling and would end up as the "lead" official positioned underneath the basket Iguodala was sprinting toward. Iguodala and teammate Steph Curry bore down on J.R. Smith, the only Cleveland Cavalier back on defense; Iguodala passed it off to Curry, who skipped it straight back. As the closest referee, McCutchen prepared for a contested attempt at the rim. "I was refereeing J.R. Smith," said McCutchen, one of three officials on the game and now the NBA's senior VP of referee development and training. "I remember thinking, 'You got J.R. Get J.R. Get J.R.'"

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The Decline Of Pro Football Focus Is Bad News For Football Fans Talk about regression candidates. Just over a month ago, football journalist Arif Hasan broke the news that analytics giant Pro Football Focus was purchased by Teamworks, an even larger analytics giant, for somewhere north of $130 million. According to Hasan, many employees working on the consumer side of PFF weren’t informed of the news by the company itself. It didn't take those poor souls very long to discover why that was. Shortly after the deal was consummated, many of those same employees were laid off. HOORAY FOR EFFICIENCY! From Front Office Sports: > PFF called employees to an all-hands meeting on Monday, during which it was announced that about half of them would be moving to the new company. PFF possessed both a content side and a data team—all 32 NFL teams subscribe to the company’s enterprise data set—and most of those who survived the layoffs were on the data side, a source said. According to Hasan, many of those laid off weren’t informed of the news by the company itself. They found out through secondhand sources on the internet, which is a bit ruthless even for a company founded on cold-blooded football data.

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This Phone Video From Artemis Is So Damn Cool In the 10 days since Artemis II splashed down safely, NASA has continued to release new imagery from the mission. A personal favorite is the one atop this post, taken from a camera mounted on one of the Orion capsule's solar array wings. It captures Orion, the Moon, and the Earth, helping to add some framing to a perspective that humans were never meant to quite wrap their brains around. The photographs from Artemis have been magnificent. They are meant to be. Part of this test flight's mission was to sell itself: NASA's budget is never secure from year to year, and the administration is responsible for stirring up its own public support. What better way to do that among a visually oriented species like ours than with pictures? They may not all have strictly scientific value, but they carry real worth nonetheless. The vast majority of those images have understandably been captured on top-of-the-line equipment. Shooting in space presents unique challenges, and the Artemis crew trained for 20 hours on photography alone, with professional instructors. But the astronauts were also issued iPhones. Why iPhones? They're compact, easy to use, and offer perfectly decent photo and video quality for personal use. More personal-seeming photos were the whole idea—part of selling Artemis is selling the crew as regular people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Imagery that's a little less polished and processed helps convey life inside Orion.

22 hours ago 0 1 0 0

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It Ain’t Over Till It’s Buffalover The problem with mythmaking is that the myth needs constant feeding, and each dish must be spicier and more exotic than the last. Fortunately for the Buffalo Sabres, they seem to get how it’s supposed to be done. It is no longer enough to cite the 15 years in which they haven't mattered, or how they worst-to-firsted between December and April, or that the man who built the roster, general manager Kevyn Adams, had to be fired for that roster to finally get the idea that suck is not a permanent state. Buffalo is now the representative of cool kids everywhere because narratives have to eat, too. But until Sunday, the enduring truth of the Cup was always lingering in the background—that cool only gets you past the national anthem, and then you get serious, one crosscheck at a time. Buffalo was a team with an excellent record, a revivified fan base and a roster full of playoff neophytes playing against the Boston Bruins, who always seem like a tough postseason out even when they don't make the postseason at all.

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Victor Wembanyama’s Playoff Debut Was Worth The Wait From the moment his team defeated the previous undefeatable Oklahoma City Thunder in December, you could start to hear the whispers: _Yes, Victor Wembanyama is the future but is he, could he be, I know it's so soon but maybe is he already, you know, the best player in, well, the NBA_? The whispers grew to a din by the end of the season, with Wembanyama playing such a dominant final four months of the season that he credibly mounted an MVP campaign. The nebulous title of Best Player is, if not Wemby's, then up for grabs in these playoffs for whoever makes it out of the Western Conference. San Antonio is not only a trendy pick to win the title among wised-up NBA observers, oddsmakers have them as the second-most likely winner behind a team they beat four times. That optimism is tempered by a long history of teams like this needing to bleed a little before they hoist a trophy. That's how it works. Breaking the constraints of basketball and physics is cool in February against the Utah Jazz, but the playoffs are different. Other teams face more unforgiving sets of expectations, feel more pressure, and have more at stake this year having incinerated more of their future than the Spurs. But no other team or player presents as large and compelling a mystery than Victor Wembanyama. Now that the games matter, what will happen? We saw the start of the answer on Sunday night in Wembanyama's playoff debut.

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Allow Arthur Fils To Reintroduce Himself It's been a long road back to the top for Arthur Fils. In the second round of last year's French Open, hometown hero Arthur Fils sent the gathered Parisians into hysterics when he downed Jaume Munar in a thrilling fifth set. At this moment, anyone observing a screaming, shirtless Fils—just 20 years old and ranked 14th in the world—would have seen a player who seemed likely to continue rising up the ranks of men's tennis, and right on time. The Changeover thesis was about to be proved almost stultifyingly correct. What more coherent way could there be to balance men's tennis out than to have a volcanic, expressive Frenchman join the laconic Italian and the puppydog-exuberant Spaniard currently dominating the sport? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci_6gKogYlI

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LeBron James Still Has It When Austin Reaves and Luka Doncic were smote out of the first round of the NBA Playoffs (barring pathbreaking Spanish advances in hamstring science) with muscle injuries, it felt like a death sentence for the Los Angeles Lakers. The injuries occurred right as the team was beginning to look like A Problem, making them instead a wounded quarry to be hunted. They were able to limp into the relative safety of playing a team coached by the offensively befuddled Ime Udoka and anchored on the court by the generally befuddling Kevin Durant-Alperen Sengun duo, though even with home court advantage, they were clearly up against it. Only LeBron James stood healthy for a Lakers team otherwise completely bereft of offensive creation, and only weeks after advancing the Lakers' title chances by finally accepting a downshift in his role, the now-venerable graybeard of the league would have to wind back the clock and be the best player on the court in order for his team to have any chance. Ask any expert, consult any betting market, watch any Amen Thompson highlight reel: that did not feel likely going into Saturday's Game 1 matchup in L.A. But unc was not crucified. Despite the predictably glaring disparity in athleticism, the Lakers put forth an impressive team performance to win Game 1, 107-98. Luke Kennard led the way with 27, Kevin Durant was a surprise scratch, and the Lakers' bench was so thin that JJ Redick was forced to play Bronny James for a spell in the first half. That stretch was an unmitigated disaster, but it ultimately did not matter, as LeBron James Sr. was masterful in his 38 minutes.

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The Sweeties And Enemies Of The NHL Playoffs Defector is proud of its sweeties and enemies binary. In athletic competition, there are sweeties, who cause a feeling of butterflies in tummies, and there are enemies, who are shitheels. Nobody denies this. This year's NHL playoff bracket looks a little weird. Some teams seem like they've innocently stumbled into a place they don't belong. Other franchises are truly despicable embarrassments to ice. To make sense of the first round, I have divided every series into a sweetie and an enemy. Here they are, without further comment. **NHL Playoff Sweeties**

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Mason Miller Is Blowing Everyone Away I have always found the starter-into-closer pipeline to be demoralizing. Per baseball truisms, even the best reliever would be a starter if they were only, by certain definitions, better. Moving a starter to the pipeline is so often the last-ditch move of teams that do not know how to develop their pitchers. I hope Roki Sasaki finds his groove; I hope that closer-into-starter conversion or reconversion projects go well. That said: Mason Miller, who was traded from the Athletics to the San Diego Padres last year for a whopping four prospects, was practically engineered in a lab to be the exception. The closer is a position in baseball where the best players are, value and contracts and whatever bullshit aside, composed of pure, distilled coolness. It is a different skillset from that of the starter. A closer—who does not have to worry about pitch count, or keeping the arm going through five-plus innings, or the third time through the batting order—is more concerned with quality, delivering more concentrated nastiness on the pitch-to-pitch level than starters can. For Miller, this is best exemplified by his average four-seamer speed going up a full three miles per hour after he moved to the bullpen. Also, now he gets a cool walk-out ritual (depending on one's definition of cool). It is fine, even appealing, that Miller's arsenal is composed of only an absurd fastball, an absurd slider, and an occasional changeup to lefties, thrown so infrequently that the pitch's heat map so far this season resembles six little bullseye targets. A closer with Miller's stuff does not need more pitches than that. His fastball sits at 101.4 mph and touches 103, which does legitimately make his 95.8-mph change-up a change-up. So far this season, 24 pitches have been thrown above 102 mph. One was thrown by Baltimore Orioles reliever Ryan Helsley; six have been thrown by Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Edgardo Henriquez (rocking, despite the stuff, a 5.40 ERA). Miller threw the other 17.

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Hark! Follow The Sounding Of The Horns To The 2026 NBA Playoff Preview Whoaaaa, get a load of this! The NBA playoffs are starting tomorrow. Yes yes, there are more play-in tournament games tonight, but we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about the _real_ playoffs, and get you caught up to speed so that you may witness these contests with all the basketball knowledge one could possibly need filling your skull. Before we get to the previews, however, we wanted to talk about some other important issues facing the NBA. Below you will find a roundtable discussion between Defector's biggest basketball nerds about tanking, uncompetitive regular-season games, and the NBA's popularity crisis. There's a lot to discuss on those topics, so be sure to check that out. Just kidding! God, that would be awful. OK, here are the previews.

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LaMelo Ball Gets Let Off The Hook On Wednesday night, the NBA fined LaMelo Ball for his "unnecessary and reckless contact" with Bam Adebayo during Charlotte's victory over Miami in their play-in game Tuesday. It made for a deflating end to what had become a whole media saga over Ball's intentions, or lack thereof, and whether or not the league should suspend him for the next game to make up for the ejection he avoided because the referees missed the incident. Ultimately, the NBA decided not to suspend Ball, hitting him instead with a $35,000 fine for the trip, an additional $25,000 for cursing during his postgame interview, and a retroactive flagrant 2 foul. He is therefore available to play in Friday's game against the Orlando Magic for the No. 8 seed and the right to get stomped by Detroit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C29Pudky5AA Was this the right decision? As always, "... eh." Ball's swipe of Adebayo's leg looked a lot worse in slow motion than in real time, where it just seemed like a typically goofy player prone to losing control of his body, which, if you've ever watched LaMelo Ball play basketball, you know that's exactly what he is. Should the refs have stopped the game to take a further look at the trip? Probably, but 1) the game was moving a hundred miles a minute, so the refs missed their window for it, and 2) the refs tend to lean toward not affecting the outcome of games the later we get into a season, which is the right instinct.

3 days ago 0 1 0 0

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I Have Now Perfected My Blondie Recipe Something about blondies really gets my motor humming. I love brownies, and I _really_ love chocolate chip cookies. But put a thick-cut blondie in front me and suddenly I go as wild as an ape. A blondie is like a chocolate chip cookie but, like, more of it. That’s my kind of 500-calorie snack. With that in mind, it only makes sense that I would try to bake my own blondies, so that I might gorge on them whenever I see fit. I started off on my blondie journey by just using regular chocolate chip cookie dough, spreading it evenly inside a Pyrex dish. Then I moved onto Smitten Kitchen’s blondie recipe. Smitten Kitchen recipes are almost always money in the bank, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results of this one. They were a little too dense to scratch my blondie itch. But Smitten Kitchen author Deb Perelman said to tinker with her recipe, so I did. A lot. Because we lack a JUMP TO RECIPE button here at Defector, I’ll blow past the rest of my thinking process so that you don’t get all pissy. Let’s get right to the good shit. This makes 24 bars. **INGREDIENTS:**

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The Avs Have Won Nothing If there is a stronger verity in hockey than "Trust nothing in the playoffs," it is surely, "And whatever else you do, trust nothing you saw before the playoffs." The fetish of the team with the best record rarely proving it when everyone is watching is as secure a bet as past-posting, to the point where the Presidents’ Trophy, which is what the team with the best regular-season record receives, is now aligned with the American president in plain undesirability. But every year, someone wins it anyway, the morons. Either a star goes dim, or a reliable goalie goes bad, or the exertions of the past six months pile up, or a lesser team goes on a heater, or as is often the case, something stupid simply happens. Thus, the most interesting questions about the Western Conference this year were (a) just how bad is the Pacific? and (b) when are the Colorado Avalanche going to figure out that it's time to start tanking for the good of their Cup run? The answers are (a) abominable, and (b) they tried a bit in March but didn't have the stomach to finish the job.

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Steven Soderbergh And Ed Solomon Talk About Their Best Collaboration Yet In _The Christophers_ , Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a painter hired by a pair of bumbling siblings for an odd sort of job. They want her to go work for their father, a renowned artist named Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), who has largely shunned the art world, spending his waning days being the Simon Cowell on an obscene reality show called _Art Fight_ and recording Cameo messages to fans for lunch money. What Julian’s kids really want, though, is for Lori to put her skills to work secretly forging a set of paintings to complete their father’s great masterwork, a long-running series of portraits called “the Christophers.” Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon, what starts as a con movie quickly morphs into something far more delicate and layered. Staged as a kind of a two-hander, and largely confined to the narrow spaces of Julian’s multi-level London home, the flamboyant, witty painter quickly susses out that the young forger has more to her than mere interest in a job, though her plan eludes him. Testing and prodding her, the two begin a contentious dialogue about pouring themselves into art and having their relationship to it transformed by the public’s—sometimes harsh—reaction. Solomon’s funny, lively, florid, and moving script wrestles directly with what it means to lose touch with the reasons people make art in the first place. The film examines how the artist persona can distract from a real sense of purpose, embittering artists in the process. It’s a film about the painful realities that often stop artists in their tracks. It’s also a film about legacies, both positive and negative, and the complicated give-and-take of artistic inspiration. All of it anchored by unfussy, clear-eyed direction from Soderbergh, and a pair of incredible performances from Coel and McKellen, whose interplay feels like watching an acting masterclass.

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Bayern Munich Did Not Believe In Magic By any objective reckoning, Bayern Munich should've been considered enormous favorites to beat Real Madrid in their Champions League quarterfinal matchup. Bayern has been one of the two best teams in Europe all season long, while Real has been consistently bad. Bayern's star-studded attack has been firing on all cylinders, cranking out flatly outrageous stats in both domestic and continental play, while Real still hasn't figured out how to build an engine out of its assortment of top-of-the-line parts that unfortunately seem to each belong to completely different car makes. In the first leg of this tie, Bayern took home a hard-fought and well-earned 2-1 win, and had the benefit of playing the second leg at home, inside the cauldron that is the Allianz Arena. Coming into Wednesday's decisive game, there was really no logical reason to think we'd see any other result than Bayern going through. And yet, if there is one team and one competition where objectivity and logic hold no sway, it's Real Madrid in the Champions League. History, especially of the recent sort, is littered with examples of Real having no rational basis for winning a tie that they inevitably win. Call it black magic, the _Twilight Zone_ , the Spirit of Juanito, or whatever you want—there is real evidence to support the longstanding, widespread belief that some kind of mysterious force allows this particular club to pull off preposterous upsets and comebacks in this particular tournament. Real or not, the belief in this power can itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy, emboldening _Blancos_ to keep pushing despite long odds, and heaping anxiety on opponents who might see in a single unlucky bounce an omen of impending, predestined doom. Indeed, Wednesday's match in Munich opened with one such unlucky bounce that seemed to indicate that the old black magic was once again in the air. But, fortunately for fans of the German club, the Bayern players are not so superstitious. https://twitter.com/CBSSportsGolazo/status/2044493658200719363

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Jarringly Red New York Radio Yutz Continues His Anti-Mets Tantrum In Yankees President’s Suite It's the story that has captivated America: a large screaming man roughly the color of a Fruit Roll-Up, who goes on AM radio every day to get upset about minorities, announced last week that he could no longer in good faith be a New York Mets fan. Dial down the volume and ambient bigotry and referring to himself in the third person, and long-tenured New York radio dingus Sid Rosenberg's decision to drop the Mets could seem reasonable. The team has lost eight straight, miserably, while playing a brand of baseball that suggests dangerously high levels of codeine in their Powerade. To consciously uncouple, temporarily or even permanently, with a team like this would be something like self-care. Not really sure why I'm going on about this part at such length. Ha ha. Anyway, Rosenberg did not do this in a considered way. He did it, as he mentioned in a series of posts and filmed video statements, because he thought the "Mamdani Mets" were woke. He was upset that Mr. and Mrs. Met had been "hugging and kissing" the city's Democratic Socialist mayor earlier this season, and by way of contrast and as an illustration of the organization's values, Rosenberg shared an image of himself "being IGNORED" by the team's mascots at a game last year.

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A Year After The Corrections Officer Strike, New York Is Still Failing Its Incarcerated Population In February of 2025, New York State correctional staff began an illegal work stoppage to challenge recent changes to the state’s carceral system. Their primary objective was to force the repeal of the Humane Alternatives to Longterm Solitary Confinement Act (also known as the HALT Act), a bill that is part of a larger initiative prioritizing the health of the imprisoned and our successful reentry into society. This bill mandates prisoners receive seven hours of congregate time outside our cells each day and otherwise limits “excessive” use of solitary confinement. In response to the strike, Governor Kathy Hochul suspended the HALT Act for 90 days and pursued a mediation, which ultimately ended with many officers returning to work and those who refused being fired—some 2,000 officers. The HALT Act’s policies should have been reinstated by May 21, 2025. However, it has been over 13 months since the work stoppage ended, and prisoners like myself are still living without access to recreation, programs, and the visits we are entitled to. I currently reside at Elmira Correctional Facility, which in my experience did not adhere to most of the rules that benefited the imprisoned population even prior to the work stoppage. The administration has gone months at a time without operating most programs, including ones that must be completed before our release, even though we are entitled to consistent program access. Local visiting practices prevented spouses from sitting near their incarcerated partners, despite directives explicitly stating that our visitors should be permitted to rest their heads on our shoulders. Our mail, packages, and electronic mail content were almost never processed in a timely manner, and the systems in place to remedy these institutional failures have always been inherently flawed. Since the work stoppage, things have gotten even worse. Recreation has been reduced to less than an hour per day. Most prisoners have not been afforded the opportunity to participate in any programs in over a year. Prisoners aren’t even permitted to walk to the cafeteria for lunch. Instead, our lunch—usually a bag with sandwiches—is brought to our cells every afternoon, denying us both the brief respite from the isolation of our cells and whatever warm food we would have been given for lunch that day. With less than an hour of recreation, no opportunity to program, and only two opportunities to go to the cafeteria, prisoners are forced to stay in our cells more than 22 hours each day.

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A New Space In Which To Be Stupid, With Michael Schur It was not so long ago that the return of baseball had me in my feelings in a positive way. Kelsey McKinney and I talked about it on the podcast just two weeks ago, but while the bump in my emotional wellbeing that accompanied the mere presence of baseball games on my television was real, it was not enduring. Which, beyond the fact that he is a delightful guest and has a new book coming out, is part of why we asked Michael Schur back onto the pod this week. We needed someone who knows how to get upset at a seasonally appropriate level. A great deal of this is on the Mets, who are in midseason form re: soft groundouts to second base but otherwise playing as if there were a gas leak in the dugout. As Drew noted, some portion of it is absolutely on me as well, but that's just how baseball is. Stuff phases in and out of significance over the course of a long season, players slump and surge, and generally the outcomes even out over time. Knowing all this is nice but does very little to make the bad stuff more bearable in the moment. From a podcasting perspective, it is better to get upset—as both Mike and I did about our respective sleepwalking teams of choice—than it is to maunder through some cope about regression to the mean. Although we did that, too.

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The Warriors’ Old Guys Showed Up When It Mattered Most As the Warriors bathed in the luminous joy of ending the Los Angeles Clippers' cursed season, Golden State head coach Steve Kerr offered five perfect words. "For one night," he grinned, "we're us." The 10th-seeded Warriors truly were their old selves, and not in the pejorative sense, turning around what had been a frustratingly out-of-reach play-in game against the ninth-seeded Clippers with some of the purest Warriorball anyone has seen all season, for a 126-121 win. I write the final score out there for emphasis, as the Warriors had been tracking to hit around 100 until the last 9:35 of the game, in which they scored 41 points. The Clippers held a 13-point lead at that 9:35 mark, and the Warriors did not seem to have the juice. They'd cobbled together some mildly functional offense, especially in the third quarter, as Steph Curry and Draymond Green piloted their two-man screen-and-dive hivemind over to interact with Kristaps Porzingis, though the effort it took them to get good shots was visibly taxing. All game, they would cut double-digit Clippers leads down to three or so, upon which they would get exhausted, LA would instantly start trying, and the lead would quickly balloon back up to double digits. Derrick Jones Jr. was mostly great defending Curry, especially one-on-one in space, Bennedict Mathurin was particularly good, and LA shot well from three on the night. Golden State, meanwhile, was playing an eight-man rotation that had scarcely played together all season. The Warriors had a really tough year, first finding themselves embroiled in a Jonathan Kuminga saga of their own making, then losing Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody to catastrophic knee injuries, then limping into the 10th seed as both Curry and Porzingis sustained injuries of their own. Watching the Warriors in March and April was a brutal experience, with Pat Spencer running the show, Charles Bassey anchoring the frontline, and Malevy Leons playing a big role. They had all the aesthetic bustedness of a tanking team, but not the incentives.

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The Robberies Have Begun Again One cannot simply leave behind a life of crime. Your body craves the adrenaline for years afterward. It begs for it. The desire for just one more job, one more hit, one more simple robbery will never really go away, because a normal life is just so boring when compared with the thrill of disobedience. Who will stop you? Let them try. No one knows this better than the San Diego Padres, who after a long dormant winter without crimes have returned to their roguish ways and begun robbing again. On Wednesday night, they left some evidence of their misdeeds. It was the top of the third against the Seattle Mariners, and Julio Rodriguez stood in the batter's box with one ball against him. The victim spotted a beautiful meatball of a pitch: an 89-mph cutter that didn't cut at all and instead sat prettily in the middle of the strike zone. He swung quick and smooth, and the ball soared way, way out toward the deepest part of center field.

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New York Islanders Raise Money For A Convicted Killer Because He’s A Cop The New York Islanders took a moment during their final game of the season to promote a fundraiser for a former NYPD sergeant who was recently convicted of manslaughter. Yeah, sounds about right. During Tuesday's 2-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes, the Islanders' jumbotron displayed a big QR code directing to a fundraiser put together with the Sergeants Benevolent Association, "in its fight for justice" for Erik Duran, a former cop sentenced to three to nine years for manslaughter for killing a suspect in 2023. There were no details provided by the team about what caused him to be convicted in the first place, because if those were made available, one might have concluded that he got off with a light sentence. In August of 2023, Duran was part of an undercover drug sting in the Bronx, intended to target 30-year-old Eric Duprey. When Duprey tried to flee on a motorized scooter, Duran picked up a bystander's cooler and threw it at Duprey, who crashed into a tree and was killed almost instantly. Duran was found guilty by a judge this past February and sentenced earlier this month.

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It Is The Spring Of The Downtrodden The first thing you notice about the right side of the Stanley Cup playoff map is the almost complete absence of continuity—that is, if you're the sort of person who nerds out on that sort of thing, in which case you've got deeper personality flaws than we are equipped to tackle. But it does have that weird strangers-on-a-train feel that the NHL tends to brag about a bit more than it should. The two teams with the best-looking recent history are located in Tampa and Raleigh, which took you at least five years to get used to, but the rest of this year's field is very much the island of misfit toys. For starters, the four worst teams in the Eastern Conference last year are in the playoffs this time. There are no New York City–ish teams for the first since the Colorado Rockies moved to New Jersey 44 years ago. The two-time champion Panthers had everybody get hurt in unison and were out of contention by Valentine's Day. The never-not-smug Toronto Maple Leafs are in an abyss that the management thinks can be escaped through the use of ChatGPT instead of draft choices, and the Washington Ovechkinii are off this spring for only the third time in 18 years. There are Cup droughts to contend with, like Philadelphia (51 years), Montreal (33), Carolina (20), Boston (15), and, sure, what the hell, Pittsburgh (9). But if you want to boil the East down (an appealing idea), it's about two teams who not only have _never_ won a Cup, but were considered roadside carcasses four short months ago: the Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators.

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Behold! The ‘Nothing But Respect’ NBA Playoffs Mega-Preview For the second straight year, Harry and I have assembled a mega-sized playoff preview podcast. Just like last year, it features shortish interviews with people we like who follow as many of the teams in the playoffs and play-in as possible. Unlike last year, it was way too long to cram into one episode, let alone two. So this year, we bring you previews of the Western Conference, the Eastern Conference, and the Denver Nuggets. In the West, we brought on: * Tyler Parker to talk Oklahoma City Thunder * Eamon Whalen to talk Minnesota Timberwolves * Billy Haisley's brother to talk Los Angeles Lakers * Isaac Chotiner to talk Houston Rockets * Sean Highkin to talk Portland Trail Blazers

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The Killing That Won’t Let Go Grief has no expiration date, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder. Twenty-one years ago this summer, Steve Cornejo was shot in the back and died in the courtyard of an apartment complex in Fairfax, Va. Cornejo was unarmed. Brandon Gotwalt, who shot him in the back, initially told police he wasn't on the scene, then**** claimed self-defense, then admitted to flushing the spent shell and his shirt down the toilet, then admitted to carrying an illegally concealed .38 caliber handgun, then said the shooting was accidental. The shooter was never arrested or charged with any crimes. “They treated him like, ‘Oh, just another dead Latino,’” said Isabelle Janus-Clark, Cornejo’s high school classmate and childhood friend. “The police just acted like he wasn’t worth the trouble. He was worth the trouble.”

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Please End This Cursed Liverpool Season It's a tough task to make anyone reading this blog to feel bad for the reigning Premier League champions, a team still solidly in contention for Champions League qualification for next season, and an organization that spent a fortune, perhaps badly, this past summer. (This task becomes infinitely tougher if you are yourself a fan of the presumptive next champions of the league.) But dammit, I'm going to try anyway, because the 2025-26 Liverpool season has been a complete disaster on and off the field, from before the season even started through Tuesday's double whammy of Champions League elimination at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain (3-0 on aggregate) and Hugo Ekitike's ruptured Achilles, which will keep the Frenchman out of the World Cup and most of next season as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=296_fFXt6pE Before I go further, I have to be clear that nothing that has happened to Liverpool during this season, not even Ekitike's horrible and horribly timed injury, compares to what happened right before. Diogo Jota's death on July 3 was one of the rare sports-related events that counts as tragic in the proper sense. The sadness of it has hung over the entire Liverpool season. In many ways, the players and staff are all still grieving, which has surely affected the results on the field. Even if Liverpool had gone on to have a totally normal season in terms of results, this campaign was always going to be remembered first and foremost for Diogo Jota.

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You Can Never Let Them Think They Have A Chance I don't remember the first time someone hit on me as a reporter. I believe this is because my brain has come to treat these events as unremarkable. For any woman in journalism, they pile up over the years. What I can recall are the worst examples. Like the guy my friends nicknamed Mr. Creepy. We called him Mr. Creepy (I have changed his nickname somewhat to make it less identifying, but it did include the word "creepy") because he _constantly_ asked me out for drinks. He could do this because he was one of the officials on my beat—covering several small cities for the _Miami Herald_ , a typical job for an early-career reporter—and "asking a young reporter out for drinks over and over, no matter how many times she says no, even though you're married, and she can't choose not to be around you" wasn't against any city code. It did, however, run against the code of journalists: the very good and obvious rule that getting romantically involved with sources, or even appearing to, is off limits. I don't recall saying anything to any of my supervisors at the time about it. Even if I had told someone, there was nothing the paper could do about it. They had no control over him. If anything, saying something would get me moved off my beat, possibly onto one I did not want, and potentially flagged as a complainer. Every other female reporter dealt with it, right? So I dealt with it too.

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