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If you know only one thing about Drew Magary, it is that he went on the Food Network show Chopped and won. If you know just two things, that additional knowledge probably involves one of his many acclaimed books or his long and successful writing career. But if you know a third thing about Drew it is that Bob Mould is his favorite musician. It's a good choice, and in my opinion one that tells you something about a person. Mould is a one-of-one, a trailblazer and a punk rock legend who has continued to make ambitious, socially conscious, and extremely loud music over the course of five decades in a business with a short memory and narrow margins. I like his music a lot, too, but the person I just described is someone that I would, just given my own deep-seated sense of suburban uncoolness, be inclined to admire from afar. Drew, who is different, has not just set out to Meet His Hero but to have him on the podcast. And so, for a second time, we welcomed back one of the coolest and most admirable Americans of his era onto the podcast where we otherwise say "pee pee" and "poo poo" back and forth to each other.

The damn bats are about to start cracking any second, closely followed by the gloves popping. Now is the time to settle in and ask the Defector staff whatever baseball-related questions you have. Let's get to it.

LeBron James went on ESPN Sunburn Lord Pat McAfee's show on Wednesday; while there, he said some mostly anodyne stuff about Michael Jordan and talked a little about his sons Bronny and Bryce. The parts of the interview that achieved escape velocity, though, were comments James made about two other ESPN personalities: Stephen A. Smith and Brian Windhorst. Smith and James have been feuding for a couple months now, with Smith identifying that the concerned uncle angle is the most likely to provoke a reaction and being proven broadly correct, as James confronted him on the court after beating the Knicks on Mar. 6. "If it's one person that couldn't wait until the video had dropped so you could address it, it's your ass. Like, seriously," James said, to McAfee, of his courtside confrontation. He allowed that criticism was fine up to a point, "But when you take it and you get personal with it, it's my job to not only protect my damn household but protect the players."

It's not always easy to determine if and when a team has quit on their coach. Observers of the Philadelphia Flyers have no such uncertainty. After allowing six unanswered goals in Toronto on Tuesday, Philly's 7-2 defeat was their 11th in the past 12, and only a couple of those losses featured anything positive to build on. This is rock bottom. https://youtu.be/kKMnmRjnZos?si=sWvoxuYpbUi5rMtW&t=322

When Veronica Correa started college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she knew she wanted to pursue some kind of science, but traditional paths—such as medicine or research—didn't feel right to her. She sampled different classes, at one point signing up for a class about water management and human rights to fulfill a philosophy requirement. This class helped Correa realize she wanted to enter the environmental field, which combined many disciplines. Correa's interest in science was both personal and familial. Her parents are originally from Venezuela, where her grandmother worked as a biologist studying tropical disease and teaching at a university. "I always thought it was really admirable what she was doing, especially starting her career in the '60s and '70s in a time in culture when there weren't a lot of women pursuing her particular field," Correa said.

On Tuesday night, a Tufts University graduate student named Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by agents from the Department Of Homeland Security while walking down the sidewalk outside an off-campus apartment building. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, is attending Tufts on a student visa. Ozturk, who according to records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now being held in a detention facility in Louisiana, is now threatened with deportation despite not having been charged with any crime. When asked to explain why Ozturk was arrested and renditioned to another state, the DHS circulated the following statement:

When I baseball in the morning, loveAnd the baseball hurts my eyes. And something baseball baseball, loveBears baseball on my mind Then I look at baseballAnd the baseball’s alright with me.Just one look at baseballAnd I know it’s gonna be

Well look at that! It's time for baseball. I'm looking at my watch right now and it says "baseball." That means that you, the baseball-enjoyer, are in desperate need of facts and information about baseball. Specifically, you hunger to learn everything there is to know about the teams and players who will be competing for glory in the 2025 MLB season. Hunger no more, my friend. You are about to be fed.

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics, coverage, and consequences of Campaign 2024. Where was the harm in the Houthi PC small group scandal? This was, within a certain set of limits, the dispute as the story accelerated into its third day: Yes, a set of high Trump administration officials had, apparently by accident, looped Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, into a Signal chat that discussed the planning and carrying out of the United States's Mar. 15 attack on Yemen—but did the security breach really matter? 

It is Opening Day tomorrow, which means the peak of Fantasy Draft Season is today. We mention this not because we want to know anything about your experience of any of that, or about your fantasy team, or about you, to be clear. We mention it only because we had our annual draft Tuesday, and because our reckless mention of the fact that this is the league’s 54th season led to us being hectored into writing about it by several members of Defector's Baseball Bastardy Brigade (and they know who they are). And that is probably all the detail you need, because Rule The First of fantasy drafts remains in force, and that rule stipulates that you must keep your fantasy team to yourself. Your designated typist has been assured (and when we say "assured," we mean "threatened") that there is an exemption for fantasy leagues that predate the first appearance of a high-five on television.