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It came in the top of the eighth, with the Dodgers already ahead of the Angels by four on Saturday night. Shohei Ohtani walked to the plate with two outs and runners on first and second, thanks to a Max Muncy single and an Alex Call walk. On the second pitch, Ohtani looped the ball off the end of his bat, the baseball dropping just inside the line then bouncing off the ground and over the wall. Ground-rule double, right? Except the ball didn't go into the stands. It hit the netting that now sits atop the wall and bounded back onto the field. That netting is new, the Associated Press reported, added to Angel Stadium this year. (This is as good a time as any to pause and remember that netting is good—it makes going to baseball games safer for fans.) So was it out of play, or a live ball? On the replay, you can see Angels right fielder Jo Adell, a noted home run thief, throwing his arms in the air, signaling the former. The broadcast team thought the same, at first believing the ball had gone into the seats until it became clear that it had not. Because the moment felt so much like that routine ground-rule double, the broadcast didn't stay on Ohtani for long, necessitating a sudden zooming-out of the camera to capture his sprint toward home and easy slide into the plate.

From the Adriatic Sea up into the heart of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, the peloton tirelessly chased the breakaway. Stage 9 of the 2026 Giro d'Italia tempted a strong, organized group up the road and away from the bunch, yet Felix Gall's Decathlon CMA CGM team invested heavily in bringing them back in order to set things up for their leader. With three kilometers left and only a flagging Giulio Ciccone up the road, Gall made his move. The maglia rosa was shot out the back, along with every other general classification contender except for Jonas Vingegaard. Gall spent the next two kilometers turning around in a futile attempt to get Vingegaard to work with him, which he did not, only going to the front with 800 meters left to drop Gall like a stone. It was exactly how Vingegaard likes to race: clinical, efficient, and ruthless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhO3_roH_mg Depending on how you look at it, Vingegaard is either settling in to an impressive ride for the pink jersey, or he's confirming to the world that he no longer has it. He is either flying toward a sweep of all three Grand Tours, or he's cementing his status as a second-tier contender by failing to win the race against Tadej Pogacar's ghost. As we hit the second of somehow three rest days, Vingegaard is first among GC contenders, with 35 seconds on Gall and more than two minutes on the rest of a below-average pack of hopefuls. He's taken both summit finishes. In terms of the 2026 Giro alone, he's crushing it. The problem is, he's going to be judged against the impossible standard of Pogacar's 2024 Giro.

Now that we are one game away from the halfway point (by one metric) of the NBA playoffs, it is time to review them as a whole, on both aesthetic and competitive grounds. I think this is a useful exercise at this point, as the process of considering the eventual champion's worthiness or luck is a matter of confirmation bias that both overemphasizes the Finals and elides what is actually great about this postseason: the process. For example, last year's Finals were great, masking a middling-to-bad playoffs. We have not had what this reviewer would term a great playoffs since before the pandemic, with some notable stinkers (2021, when everyone got hurt, and 2024, which had precisely one good series) in the intervening years. Not anymore. This year's playoffs have been fantastic. We've had close games, wild series, and game-winners. Both legends and frauds have been forged. Here is the evidence, in three parts. Case Study 1: Cavaliers-Pistons, And What Follows

Today is Sean Kuhn’s last day at Defector. Sean has been our Head of Subscription Strategy for the last four years, and in that time he has become one of our favorite dudes. The only reason we’re not furious at him is because he’s leaving us for a dream job: doing fancy math crap for…

Around 59,000 years ago, somewhere in the Altai Mountains of southwestern Siberia, in lands prowling with woolly rhinos and cave hyenas, a Neanderthal had a toothache. The tooth was a molar, rooted in the lower left corner of the Neanderthal's mouth, and it had begun to rot. Such a dilemma is diabolically familiar to us modern humans, but at least we are fortunate to have dentists, who inflict upon us mild pain and terror in exchange for lasting relief. But a new paper in the journal PLOS One suggests that this Neanderthal had a dentist all of their own. After analyzing this ancient molar, which sported a strangely deep hole at its center, a team of researchers suggest this tooth is evidence of the world's earliest dental procedure, which, if true, might hold the superlative of being the worst possible way to get a root canal. The claim is big. The earliest confirmed evidence of a prehistoric dental treatment is from Homo sapiens from around 14,000 years ago. This new paper would push that date back more than 45,000 years and record it in a different species of early human entirely, one that has historically and wrongly been dismissed as brutish. But some outside experts are not convinced of the paper's claims. José María Bermúdez de Castro, a paleoanthropologist at University College London who was not involved with the new paper, does not find the paper's evidence robust enough for its argument, although he said would not be surprised if Neanderthals did attempt therapeutic remedies. Bermúdez de Castro has studied other fossil teeth in several species of early humans that have been similarly modified in a palliative process called toothpicking, which is exactly what it sounds like. "This could be another case of using a toothpick as a therapeutic remedy, without deliberate intervention from other individuals (surgical intervention), an operation that would be extremely painful without anesthesia," he wrote in an email. To Bermúdez de Castro, the Neanderthal molar seems to be just another tooth altered by toothpicking. "In my opinion, the authors of this research have '[made] a storm in a teacup," he said.

This article originally appeared May 11 on The Small Bow. Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.   Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right. 

Donald Trump was in China this week for a series of meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In order to cover the historic summit, major American broadcasters sent their newscasters overseas to broadcast from Beijing. Even the dolts from Fox News managed to get over there and commit a parking violation. Absent from the party, however, was beleaguered CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, who at this point really seems to be cursed. "Right now, I'm just about 100 miles off the coast of mainland China," is how Dokoupil began Wednesday night's broadcast from the balcony of a hotel in Taipei, Taiwan. Tony was being kind to himself: Taipei may be very close to mainland China itself, but it is 1,000 miles away from Beijing, where all of the important stuff was happening. The reason Dokoupil was stuck on that hotel balcony is that CBS failed to secure a visa for its man. Semafor's Max Tani reported that as a result the network had to send Dokoupil to Taipei at the last minute. Not content with personally fucking with her handpicked anchor's teleprompter and crashing his show's ratings, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss now seems to have robbed the network of its ability to complete basic logistical tasks. Things didn't get better for Dokoupil once he got over to Taipei. Wednesday night's broadcast was brought to a strange and sudden end when Dokoupil's cameraman collapsed (CBS later released a statement saying the cameraman is OK):

Here's a little secret about elite performers: They're always working to get better at their craft. The example I tend to use is Patrick Redford, who hosts both the Nothing But Respect and Only If You Get Caught podcasts here at Defector, but who is also always in the lab. He blogs. He has a lucrative sideline in the canine protein supplement space. And this week, with the NBA playoffs at full tilt, he joined us on The Distraction. The grind never stops, although it sometimes takes an ad break. Both of Patrick's podcasts are really good, although we focused most of our conversation on Nothing But Respect, which has quickly carved out a unique space in the basketball discourse as a place for ball-knowers who do not work in the ball-knowing space to get some shots up. Nothing But Respect has surely hosted more Pitchfork Best New Music honorees than any other basketball podcast, and the show has become a refuge and resource for people who would otherwise be forced to keep their basketball sicko opinions to themselves.

When you lay out the chain of events that have led to Mark Vientos playing first base for the New York Mets every day, it becomes less surprising that the Mets have been one of the worst teams in baseball this season. During the winter, the organization made the decision, which will likely seem pretty smart in the long term but was highly unpopular in the moment, to let another team pay full price for Pete Alonso's next five seasons. To replace the franchise's all-time home run leader, the Mets signed Jorge Polanco, with an eye on moving him to first base. Vientos, along with fellow not-quite-busted corner infield prospect Brett Baty, was surely a trade candidate during the offseason, but wound up on the Opening Day roster as depth and a platoon-specific option at designated hitter. That those three have not recreated Alonso's (middling to poor) early production with the Orioles in the aggregate is not surprising, really. Polanco has been more of a designated hitter than a second baseman in recent seasons, and hurt more often than healthy for much of his career; he had never previously been a first baseman and will turn 33 in July. Baty is by far the superior fielder at first, and has looked competent with the glove wherever the team has asked him to stand, but could most politely be described as an enigmatic offensive contributor; Vientos is the most capable of hitting the ball over the fence. That Polanco could miss a bunch of games was always a possibility, and that is happening now: After a slow start, he was placed on the IL in mid-April with a bruised wrist and a debilitating and stubborn case of Achilles bursitis that has shown every indication of becoming a classic Mysterious Lingering Mets Ailment. Though he was cleared for baseball activities earlier this week, Polanco by all accounts cannot really do any of those baseball activities right now. "We need to get asymptomatic with the ankle and with the bursitis," Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns said on Tuesday. "We're not there yet." Where the Mets are instead is "extremely in last place," and with the second-fewest wins in the sport. More specifically, it has meant that Vientos, who would ordinarily not start for any first-place division team and would ideally not be asked to play defense at all, is holding down first base while Baty plays third; Bo Bichette, also signed to play a new position, has moved from third back to shortstop while Francisco Lindor continues what seems likely to be a prolonged recovery from another ominously vague lower-body injury.

SAN FRANCISCO — Stuffed with dumplings, walking off the 22 bus past my neurologists' office and across Third Street up to the Golden State Valkyries' arena with the sun at our backs, I told my friend that the first thing he needed to know about the Chicago Sky is that they were a clown organization. These were not serious people. We were going to roll them. Though the Sky had signed a bunch of veterans and traded for one of the realest hoopers in the WNBA, they had also done an astonishing amount of losing on the margins. Olivia Miles, the coolest player in college hoops, was suiting up for the Minnesota Lynx instead of the Sky. The two expansion teams, one of whom was about to secure the first win in team history that night, fleeced Chicago for second-round picks in exchange for not taking any of the young players they were about to cut anyway. Had Golden State also made a strange draft-night move? Sure, but it had earned the benefit of the doubt, because it is a smart organization that knows how to conduct itself. As I warned of the Valks' questionable depth in the middle and detailed the steep competency gradient among WNBA ownership, I grew even more confident that my first trip to Ballhalla this season to be a glorious one.