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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 about China Gardens, paper clips, Robert Duvall, itchy assholes, and more. Your letters: Don:

The 2026 baseball season is either a week old or still weeks away, depending upon whether you count its beginning from the first grainy and distant social media photos of pitchers stretching on back fields or the first games that count. Either way, the positional jockeying for a potential 2027 owner lockout has already begun, because how else would the league follow its most entertaining World Series of the century? You can only cruise on the comedy stylings of Nick Castellanos for so long, right? Tuesday morning's news that MLB players union head Tony Clark is about to resign, though, brings the doomsigning to the front of the church for the first time this season. Up until now, the pre-lockout sniping was coded and qualified, and mostly confined to "The Dodgers Are Ruining Baseball" chants from ownership-side people who see the Pittsburgh Pirates as a model franchise. Since the six people who believe that never gather in the same place at the same time, we cannot herd them together and nail-gun them to outfield seats at LoanDepot Park for the season. The news from camps, for the most part, was not yet or not really news, mostly about Castellanos's problematic Bluetooth speaker usage and the Emmanuel Clase pitch-throwing case. And Clark's pending resignation, while surely news in a way all that isn't, has not yet been fully explained. It may well have connections to the apparently disastrous eight-figure investment the union made in a for-profit youth baseball company, and a federal investigation in the Eastern District of New York into Clark specifically for self-dealing, misuse of resources, and abuse of power at the union. It certainly is abrupt; Clark's scheduled meeting with the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday was canceled at the last minute. There were denials all around, but regardless of factual roots, the timing of Clark's resignation suggests that the union's strategy for beating back the owners' salary cap demands needs a different front man. Either way, it will have one.

There's all kinds of stuff happening in this here second week of the Olympics, from Norwegians Scandinavianly wandering into the forest, to various Olympians cozymaxxing, to this Italian short track speed skater I saw finish two races backward, once on accident and once on purpose. But despite the glut, I am mostly looking forward to the forthcoming Olympic debut of one of the most painful sports imaginable: ski mountaineering, or skimo. The competitive premise of ski mountaineering is essentially that cross-country skiing, already one of the most lung-intensive sports on the planet, presents an insufficient test of its athletes cardiovascular limits. It is as if organizers looked at the otherworldly abilities of Johannes Klæbo (and the howling misery of Jessie Diggins), and conceived of a way to introduce more suffering. "I think they are the athletes who have the highest pain threshold and can really suffer," German skimo physician Dr. Volker Schöffl told NBC. "They sprint, they run and then, you know, gradually everybody is dying around you until one man is standing and finishing first." You can think of skimo as a sort of triathlon that combines cross-country skiing, regular-style skiing, and trail running. Competitors first ski uphill with the help of adhesive climbing skins on the front of their skis, then peel the skins from their skis and descend back to the bottom again. Now the competitors repeat the climb, but in a more difficult way: For the second climb, the athletes stow their skis in their backpacks and run up the hill in their boots. They then descend again.

Two conflicting thoughts from Canada’s Olympic semifinal win over Switzerland on Monday: There is no shame in Marie-Philip Poulin being the best player on your team; there is some shame in needing a one-legged 34-year-old in order to score a single goal. Team Canada is used to being led by their "Captain Clutch," and in most international tournaments, that says flattering things about Poulin, the greatest player in the history of her sport. In Milan, though, it seems to say more unflattering things about the way Team Canada has been playing that Poulin was the team’s only scorer in a 2-1 game. When they face a rolling Team USA in Thursday’s gold-medal game, Canada will probably need a little more. Poulin left Canada’s preliminary round game against Czechia last Monday after taking a bad hit into the boards. Though she would miss the rest of Canada’s round-robin games (including their shutout loss to Team USA), head coach Troy Ryan told reporters the team was optimistic she would return for the elimination rounds, and she was indeed back in the lineup against Germany in the quarterfinals, where she scored her 18th career goal at the Olympics, tying Hayley Wickenheiser’s record for most career Olympic women’s hockey goals. But she was far from healed: The Canadian broadcast of the Switzerland game showed Poulin being carted to the ice before puck drop—in too much discomfort to walk. 

I’m sure I’m telling on myself by revealing this, but Western astrological readings are a staple of my social feeds. (To tell on myself further: Scorpio sun, Gemini rising, Cancer moon.) I don't necessarily believe in it, but I don’t not believe in it either, and when I’m served a video that begins with a person saying, “Stop scrolling! This week is important,” I will stop scrolling and pay attention to find out how and why this week is important. Please tell me how the stars have foretold the argument I’ll have with a family member this week. Yes, I will take a warm bath with herbs and essential oils to cleanse my system before eclipse season. Thank you so much for the recommendation.  Every January and February, I’m served a sprinkling of Chinese Zodiac astrology in the weeks leading up to Lunar New Year; this is because my algorithms all know I’m Korean. It’s never as ubiquitous in my feed as Western astrology content, but there’s reliably a steady trickle of videos explaining the energy of the new year.  This year is completely different, though. The trickle is a flood, because it seems the whites have discovered Lunar New Year, big time. 

NBA All-Star weekend has come and gone, and though the game itself was surprisingly spirited, the most intriguing development of the weekend was the strange story of some leaked DMs from a pair of anonymous Twitter accounts that people connected to those accounts say belong to Kevin Durant. You will hopefully forgive the vagueness there, as we don't really know if Durant is behind the accounts. But also, including proper nouns doesn't make the story much easier to follow: A Twitter user named Pranav Sriraman made a post about how much he disliked the design of the Larry O'Brien trophy, which drew a counter-complaint about the posture of complaining itself from Durant, which Sriraman countered by asking Durant about his investment in Skydio, which sells drones to the IDF, which Durant dodged, only for user @basedfrog23 to make their only post detailing what they say are the DMs of "KDF." Other users eventually posted more DMs, in which the accounts talked all kinds of crazy shit. My co-host Harry Krinsky spent the past 24 hours feverishly DMing as many people connected to the saga as possible, and though none of them agreed to come on Nothing But Respect with the protection of a voice distorter, he learned a lot. Additionally, we were able to wrangle Eamon Whalen to talk through all angles of the saga, most notably the way Durant's Skydio investment has mostly not been talked about, leaving it to disgruntled Twitter anons to do the work of calling him out.

After a league phase in which only Arsenal and Bayern Munich looked truly excellent, the Champions League has arrived at the knockout playoff round. A quick refresher of what that means: In the new format, introduced last season, the top eight teams in the league-stage table advance directly to the round of 16; the next 16 teams face each other in a two-leg playoff to get into the round of 16. Of the new format's changes, this one is my least favorite. It gives underperforming big teams a chance to back their way into the knockouts, and though it gives smaller sides an extra shot at glory, most of the ties don't look very competitive. Still, the format does introduce 16 more elimination matches, and strange things can always happen in knockout rounds. These playoffs look better than last year's in terms of matchup quality as well, so that's a nice bonus. There's only really one completely one-sided tie, and even in that one, the favored team isn't particularly strong; the opposition is just that weak. With that in mind, let's break down each matchup one by one to pick out just why you should watch each of them, and who stands to make it at least one round further at the end of this fortnight's barrage of soccer. Hit my music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb1iGDchKYs

Knitting is the perfect activity to calm the body and soothe the mind during a high-pressure event like the Winter Olympics. Once you internalize your stitch pattern, you can just zone out and focus on how the yarn feels between your fingers, and for those EMDR girlies among us, knitting also counts as bilateral stimulation. Since diver Tom Daley went viral in 2021 for knitting between events at the Tokyo Olympics, he’s become something of a knitbassador for the craft, and perhaps also an inspiration for this year's Olympians. This year, several athletes are posting their WIPs (works-in-progress) to social media, and as Defector's resident fiber freak, I am going to take this opportunity to review their projects. Breezy Johnson, American Skiier

Doug Gottlieb’s a seasoned heel. He was a dependable ass on sports talk airwaves for years, then brought his ass act to the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay bench in 2024 when he got a coaching job—while still keeping his radio gig—and mentored his inaugural squad to a 4-28 record with an astounding 21-game losing streak.  But following a viral chair-toss episode after an early-season loss to Horizon League rival Robert Morris, Gottlieb made himself less interesting by giving up the shock-jock post and actually winning some games. His Phoenix took a 15-12 mark into Sunday's game with Milwaukee, a pretty good record at a school he himself would dub “Nobody U” if he wasn’t on the payroll.   Alas, Gottlieb put his ass hat back on and returned to the spotlight following his team’s 75-72 home loss. Gottlieb, whose team blew a six-point second-half lead, spent the postgame press conference profanely whining about officiating, conference leadership, and even schedulers. The peeved coach climaxed his tirade by attacking the table on the dais with the same venom he’d shown the chair in December. Why do you hate furniture, Doug? 

The various skeleton events wrapped up on Sunday, the Brits winning two of the three golds, Austria making away with the other, and the Germans sweeping the silvers and bronzes. However, fixating on the medal count obscures the most important contest of all: Who had the best helmet? As the controversy involving Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych suggests, skeleton helmets, like hockey goalie masks or Formula 1 helmets, are a part of the sport's aesthetic—and thus, political—culture. This is something to consider when you are choosing your sliding sport: Lugers may get to go feet-first, but they do not get painted helmets because, for whatever reason, they refuse to paint over the visors. What lugers gain in perceived safety, they lose in their ability to look sick as shit. Imagine foregoing the opportunity to look like this: Jung Seung-gi of South Korea