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As Bryce Harper rounded the bases on his game-tying two-run homer in the eighth inning of Tuesday night's World Baseball Classic final, he exchanged a salute with his commanding officer, third base coach Dino Ebel, then moved to point at the American flag patch on his uniform. He looked at the wrong arm at first, mixing up the Stars and Stripes with the slightly larger Capital One patch on his other sleeve. That was a fairly representative moment of how unpleasant it was to watch Team USA in this tournament, and why it was a small mercy to watch them lose to Venezuela, 3-2. With all due respect to Comrade Ratto, the nationalistic pride on display by the Americans carried a different tenor than the WBC's other contenders. Of course it would. This game featured a nation that had recently bombed and invaded its opponents'. Rather than making an effort to keep that association at arm's length, Team USA embraced it. They saw what the U.S. men's hockey team did at the Olympics and thought to follow that but have even less fun in the process. What did that look like in practice? The Budweiser Clydesdales have stolen less valor than these flag-humping runners-up. It began well before Harper's salute to imaginary service. Inviting the looniest former Navy SEAL around to deliver a pregame speech for the team was one lowlight. Another was Cal Raleigh wearing a "Front Toward Enemy" T-shirt and being a jackass toward his actual Seattle Mariners teammate, whom he is scheduled to see every day for the next six months or so. As other squads like Italy showed it was possible to be American-born and still have fun at an exhibition baseball tournament, Team USA was gripping the bat too tightly, metaphorically and then literally in the final.

For two seasons now, NBA viewers have bemoaned the league-best Oklahoma City Thunder defense. Not because it's physically talented or schematically savvy—it is both—but because it's seemingly built on the premise that officials cannot detect and call every single foul that occurs on a basketball court. No previous team seems to have realized that a defense could simply play this way the entire game; they are angry, swarming, and handsy. As of Tuesday night, they are also shoesy. In the second quarter of a 113-108 win over the Orlando Magic, Alex Caruso, whose defensive chops are as peculiar and savant-like as Steph Curry's shooting, innovated by blocking a Tristan da Silva layup attempt with a foreign object: the shoe that had fallen off Caruso's left foot earlier in the possession. The Thunder guard reached out with his right arm, extended his wingspan by swinging his sneaker, and clipped the ball. It was clean in the sense that Caruso didn't make illegal contact with da Silva's body, but dirty in the sense that he used his shoe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Z9f8qHswc

Afroman, once world famous for his song about being high (though I always preferred "Crazy Rap" myself), has emerged as a new kind of internet folk hero in the aftermath of an incident in 2022 with Cincinnati police, when Adams County sheriff's deputies broke down the door to his home and raided the place under a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. The search turned up nothing incriminating, and Afroman, real name Joseph Foreman, was never arrested or charged with anything. Because he had been unjustly targeted by the police and felt his rights and privacy had been trampled on, as well as now having a broken door, a busted driveway gate, and $400 allegedly missing, Afroman sought vengeance the best way he knew how: releasing lots of funny music videos online. https://youtu.be/9xxK5yyecRo?si=Fc9AaaJtXPFLesfg https://youtu.be/ISe3IVBBbyU?si=2vYyHSVD86iVeA7n

For almost my entire life, Venezuela has been a punching bag, a nasty joke couched in fake concern. I used to participate in some of that punching, to be clear. But as I grew into political consciousness, I struggled to reconcile, both within myself and whenever I was asked about the country where I was born and partly raised, the conflict between my slowly burgeoning leftist beliefs and what I had been told socialism did to Venezuela. I mainly took a "Eh, what can you do?" stance, if not an outright hostile one towards Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. That hostility only felt more correct when Nicolás Maduro took over following Chávez's death in 2013. It was around that time, however, that I began to realize that Venezuela wasn't a rogue state, or some evil dominion in dire need of outside intervention. It wasn't, and still isn't, perfect. No country is, and this one was born of the imperialist context that has threatened to completely subsume Latin America. What I mean by that is that the United States decided to do its best to try to dominate Venezuela, and to make an oil-rich country subservient to the world's biggest oil consumer. The realization that Venezuela serves that purpose for the United States helped me understand why it was in the state it was; it needed to be beaten down by American economic and military pressure, so that it could become both a cautionary tale for the American right and a cog in the broader neoliberal enterprise. Venezuela became less a country in the American collective hivemind than a boogeyman, a place that could be pointed at as a failure whenever someone tried to consider a better way. I was not immune to this framing, which was so common growing up in the United States and away from Venezuela. It has been hard, throughout my life, to feel the pride I should want to feel for my homeland, because I have had such a confused political understanding of both Venezuela and Venezuela's place in the world, and in this hemisphere specifically. Put another way, I was ignorant and unwilling to question the narrative that I had been fed. The slow process of correcting that ignorance only left me more confused on how to feel about Venezuela as a whole. I'm still working on it.

Above you see the fully revamped Tennessee Titans uniforms for the upcoming 2026 season and beyond. The first thing you’ll notice about these uniforms is that they look great. The second thing you’ll notice is that they’re not new at all. They’re just the old Houston Oilers uniforms, but with a lightly updated Titans decal affixed to the helmet. If you were once a fan of the Houston Oilers, or you currently cheer for the Houston Texans (don’t do that), you’re likely annoyed, if not outraged. That’s YOUR blue the Titans just yoinked away: a final middle finger hoisted up by the Adams family after relocating the Oilers from Houston 29 years ago. For the rest of us … whoa hey Tennessee finally got itself a real team! It takes a lot of effort for any NFL franchise to go nearly three decades without making a lasting impression. Even the Jets managed to do a Buttfumble somewhere in there to leave a mark. But the Tennessee Titans, by contrast, have long excelled at the art of not being seen. The only relevant season came in 1999, their first season with that name. For the two seasons prior, they were the Tennessee Oilers and played all of their home games in Memphis for one of those seasons. No one gave a shit, especially people in Memphis. Then they moved to their permanent home stadium in Nashville, formally became the Titans, and immediately went on a playoff run that started with the Music City Miracle and ended a single, infamous yard short of winning the Super Bowl.

While the world's attention has largely been focused on the war the United States and Israel launched on Iran a few weeks ago and the rapidly unfurling series of subsequent, predictable calamities, such as the invasion of Lebanon and the constriction of the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. is simultaneously choking off Cuba in an attempt to topple that nation's government. Don't take my word for it: That's what Donald Trump is saying. "I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba," Trump said on Monday. "Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it." What this looks like in practice is the total enclosure of the island and its 11 million people. Cuba has been contending with American economic warfare and sanctions of varying severity for over six decades. It remains an extremely poor country and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, an increasingly isolated one. But over the past two months, the U.S. has squeezed tighter on Cuba than it has at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The already anoxic conditions have now reached a crisis point. Cubans face crippling food and medicine shortages, and their fuel supply is almost totally exhausted. Per an NBC News report on Tuesday night, there are currently 25 functioning ambulances, which shakes out to one ambulance per 440,000 people. Cuba experienced an islandwide blackout on Monday. It will not be the last one. The Trump administration started hinting that it was planning something like this shortly after the Jan. 3 kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces and the subsequent U.S. takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry. Cuba relied on Venezuela for the majority of its energy, and once Trump's State Department seized control and began capturing oil tankers headed for the island, Havana quickly started going dark. Trump has threatened sanctions against any nation, particularly Mexico, that comes to Cuba's aid. While the State Department scarcely pretends to justify these actions, the clear objective is to exacerbate the suffering of the Cuban population until the government collapses. Noah Kulwin, journalist and host of the Blowback podcast, told Defector he'd been to Havana during the run-up to the blockade and seen a society "functioning under astonishing conditions of deprivation under the strain of the U.S. oil blockade."

And here we see a shining example of the main peril of using sports as a reason to wrap oneself in the flag. When you look down and see that you've lost your pants, the flag makes a poor trouser substitute. But hey, it's the risk you run when you play that game, as Team USA and its main broadcast partner, Fox, learned to their embarrassment during Tuesday's final of the World Baseball Classic. They assumed the best would happen because they were the United States of Baseball and their opponents were just Venezuela, whose government our government just overthrew for no real reason beyond boredom and the capacity to do so, only to find out that in baseball, if you have a choice between patriotism and a nasty bullpen, the wiser choice is to take the bullpen and skip the anthem. Let's explain this in simpler terms. The better team won, 3-2, because its most important players made the most of their moments. Other than one thigh-high changeup that Bryce Harper T-shirt-cannoned beyond the center field wall in the eighth inning to offer the U.S. a 2-2 tie and the escape hatch it had not deserved, the Americans were owned on their own soil before a predominantly hostile crowd. Let that sentence rattle around your brain as needed. The home team was owned by the other guys' fans, and then owned decisively by the other guys. The best you can say about Harper's homer is that it almost led to an injustice. The better team won, and did so on the merits.

For a seventh straight night, the WNBA and players' union left an all-day collective bargaining session Monday without a deal in place. The two sides have spent around 90 hours in in-person meetings since last Tuesday. Union president Nneka Ogwumike told reporters this past weekend that the big issue to resolve remains revenue sharing, namely how to divide the huge sums of money coming into the league from a new $2.2 billion media rights deal, an ongoing slate of expansion, and growing corporate sponsorship interest. Players have consistently sought a salary system tied to gross league revenue, akin to the NBA’s, which grants players 51 percent of all “basketball-related income.” The league’s proposals, meanwhile, have only offered players a share of “net revenue,” revenue after expenses. On Monday afternoon, I spoke with Tamika Tremaglio, who was an advisor to the WNBPA during the 2020 collective bargaining agreement negotiations and later served as executive director of the National Basketball Players Association from 2021 to 2023, leading the negotiation of their seven-year CBA finalized in 2023. We discussed the origins of today’s revenue-sharing fight, the role public opinion plays in labor negotiations, the value of all-day bargaining sessions, and the quirky accounting practices common in sports. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Raw power is winning out these days. While one of the great pleasures of the sport is watching the intersection of sharply contrasting styles of play, I have temporarily set aside all those nuances. The main matchup I want to watch right now involves two players with almost identical agendas: Hit the winner at the soonest opportunity. We're not here for the drawn-out rallies and defensive maneuvering, but the simple race to land a lethal strike. In the 16th installment of this rivalry, Aryna Sabalenka fended off one Elena Rybakina match point in the deciding tiebreak, and went on to claim her first-ever title at Indian Wells. There was plenty of narrative baggage for Sabalenka heading into Sunday's final. Despite being unambiguously the best player on the tour for a while now—she's now held the No. 1 ranking for 81 consecutive weeks, and she is the most consistent performer at the majors—her title haul doesn't quite live up to her reputation. From the start of the 2025 season up to the 2026 Indian Wells final, Sabalenka had played in 11 finals and won just five of them. Two of those losses were weighty ones delivered by Rybakina, who won at the 2025 WTA Finals (one-way traffic) and at the 2026 Australian Open final (constant momentum swings). Rybakina has also been the best player in the world when pitted against top-10 players, having won 12 such matches in a row, a level of invulnerability versus the elite that Sabalenka hadn't managed to reach despite her stranglehold on the No. 1 ranking. Even at its best, Sabalenka's tennis is a volatile compound. Self-implosion is always on the menu. World-beating tennis and abject misery are separated by perhaps two ill-timed unforced errors. Sabalenka has point-ending power, some of the best the WTA has ever seen, but she rather vividly illustrates that this can also be a curse: The onus is almost always on her to finish the rally. Her matchup against Coco Gauff makes this dynamic especially clear, as Gauff sets up her defensive forcefield and asks Sabalenka to hit one more ball, over and over, until the little grain of doubt sets into Sabalenka's mind and unravels her technique. That's when the match reduces to Sabalenka spraying errors on her forehand and periodically slapping herself on the forehead.

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 music books, living on the moon, the NCAAs, and more. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! I’ll always remember when I called it St. Patty’s Day online and everyone yelled at me that it’s “St. Paddy’s Day,” not “Patty’s.” I despise the Irish now. Your letters: