blogged my first bylined blog for defector dot com

the family Pistons groupchat has never been so harmonious. HA HAs and heart reacts every night, countless messages concerning Daniss Jenkins

shohei ohtani makes me want to have children so I can have grandchildren so I can tell them about him

Even though they're a functional team now, I have been so battered by so many bad years of Pistons basketball that merely seeing Cade in the NBA on NBC intro video felt amazing...second guy they showed 😭 representation matters

Only If You Get Caught S1E1 is about the most infamous basketball conspiracy theory: Did the NBA fix Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals? Our guest is the great @tcraggs22.bsky.social. Subscribe now, Or Else!!! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...

Work continues to develop a comprehensive and trustworthy historical archive for... the WNBA: acrossthetimeline.com/wnba/ Unrivaled: unrivaled.acrossthetimeline.com AU: acrossthetimeline.com/auprosports/ Consider supporting continued development financially: acrossthetimeline.com/support.html

thank you Aces for sweeping so I can go home and pick up my library holds before the deadline 🙏 such a neat team to watch and cover this postseason! defector.com/the-aces-mad...

as per tradition, I am rereading my Notes app Tigers season diary today (you can see me get increasingly panicked as we choke away the division) and there is really no other sport with this emotional rhythm, baseball owns

that's the greatest player ever man defector.com/who-can-stop...

you can keep your little Etsy witch. this is a union town, we don’t fuck with the gig economy

For the WNBPA and the NWSLPA, solidarity is an ethos as well as a strategy. I spoke with leaders from both unions to learn more about the organizations' strong relationship:

There's a delicious irony in WNBA sources complaining about Unrivaled's role in CBA negotiations when the league exists in no small part because of the prioritization rules the WNBA insisted on during the current CBA. Be careful what you wish for ...

excited to cover these desert Finals for Defector! a dispatch from the most crowded and eagerly awaited WNBA press conference I've ever been to... defector.com/the-hottest-...

to beat the guardians, we first had to become them.

They're calling it the longest day in WNBA history

tying run on third, no outs and couldn't score. just bad fundamentals. the guardians have to learn how to play small ball and do the little things right.

lmao i am the biggest fool in america

Bulletin board material for the Mercury: I have been so confident in a Lynx series win that weeks ago I got tickets to Lorde in Minneapolis for the night before Finals Game 5. (though I'm increasingly worried there won't be a Game 5 to cover? this can be bulletin board material for the Lynx too)

With Sandy Brondello out, Cheryl Reeve has officially been on the job longer than every other WNBA coach combined. Cheryl Reeve's tenure: 5768 days Every other WNBA coach combined: 4529 days

it’s still so crazy to me that the lions have this much talent, for the first ~20 years of my fandom, there were pretty much three total jersey options, and now there are like eight jersey-worthy guys playing in this game

Defector, along with five other news outlets, is going to court for documents in the Tyreek Hill case. This blog (paywall down) explains why:

Patrick on A'ja and last night's Storm-Aces game is great. also your screen will turn off at the precise second you stop reading. many thanks to our web developers for adding that new feature

"An astonishing 95 percent of the 7,130 eligible MLB players were remembered at least once. Judging by bWAR accumulated in the 2000s, the most productive MLB player who went unremembered was Reese Olson, who has 4.4 bWAR at time of writing."

Today is the FINAL DAY of Defector's subscription sale. Get three months for just $5! defector.com/products

when I think of the 2020 WNBA season I think of these gals

double-dose of @defector.com in here!

btw! WNBA fans, you can also Remember Some Gals! rumor has it that I will be posting my grid of memorable Wubble season gals later this week...

I have elected to remember the most depressing late Al Avila-era Tigers for our Immaculate Grid x Defector collab. seven years of my life I’ll never get back btw www.immaculategrid.com/remember

celebrating the holiday with militant trade unionist Bryce Harper

The website that I co-own Defector.com is hosting a RARE sale where you get three months of blogs for just $5! That’s something like 600 blogs for FIVE AMERICAN DOLLARS. Pretty good deal imo and you get to support worker-owned media.

The NWSL quietly updated its public-facing extreme heat policy since the Aug 16 delay in KC. The league says the edits aligned the external doc with a change that was implemented internally in 2023; the NWSLPA says it was not aware of the removal of a key clause. My report for the Guardian‬:

i’m going to burn tyler soderstrom’s house down

10:05 p.m. skubal start in sacramento, most obvious walk-off loss of all time incoming tn 😔

My two-strike approach is actually using the small part of the field and trying to do too much, but maybe I’m just built different… 😤

Was trying to figure out why I was so heartbroken after last night’s Wings game and finally realized it was all my repressed early-career Cade Cunningham trauma

the first Defector-era episode of Nothing But Respect is here! this episode, with @maitreyiaa.bsky.social and @davidjroth.bsky.social was really fun, hope you enjoy: defector.com/the-defector...

Not surprisingly, @girinathan.bsky.social's new book about Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz is so rich, observant, and filled with pitch-perfect sentences. I love interviewing my coworkers when their books come out 🥲 and loved this chat about sportswriting with the best in the biz

you can read an excerpt of CHANGEOVER over at @nymag.com today a nice appetizer for this afternoon's Sinner-Alcaraz match nymag.com/intelligence...

(aside from the one I co-founded and co-own) FanGraphs is probably my favorite website. I highly recommend a membership. In general, it’s nice to pay for writing you like!

I find the dildo thing pretty appalling so I wrote a bit about why

Baseball fans love gravely declaring that “it’s time to have a conversation about” something.

We talked to Maitreyi about the present and future of the WNBA, best practices in lying to children, and how to identify Detroit Tigers relievers in the coffee shop: defector.com/a-huge-w-wit...

New talking about stuff and things! I was very hyped for this one and we packed a lot into it. Big thank you to @maitreyiaa.bsky.social for joining us. If you don't have a @defector.com subscription, you're missing out.

If the WNBA in fact provides no value to its owners and can't work as a business, why don't they just shut the league down?

interesting weekend! anyway! I’m really excited to work on this book about all the ways women’s basketball players are valued and devalued

It’s pretty impressive that the Tigers have the best record in baseball since I hear they’re the worst team with runners in scoring position, the worst with the bases loaded, the worst with a runner on 3rd/one out, the worst in extras AND have the worst bullpen, owner, and third base coach in MLB

all I'm saying is that books should be well-written and teach me something new. defector.com/christine-br...

😭

satisfying update four years after I wrote this: the apple weather app actually shows the dew point now! we won!!!