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Willson Contreras has played in 121 career regular-season games against the Milwaukee Brewers, by dint of spending the bulk of his career in the NL Central. In 23 of those games, he has been hit by a pitch, including once when he was plunked twice. No other team has hit him more than 14 times, and the Brewers account for more than one-sixth of the 131 total plunkings he's absorbed across his 11 seasons. It's a lot. The latest instance came Monday night in Boston. Contreras, now on the Red Sox, came to the plate in the third inning with his team up a run. The first pitch from Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff, a 93-mph sinker, ran up and in and scraped Contreras's knuckles. The contact was slight enough that Brewers manager Pat Murphy asked for a video review, but a baseball to the fingers does not feel great, and Contreras was pissed. He shouted at Woodruff and stomped angrily to first; after the review, he continued woofing until an umpire and a Red Sox coach convinced him to chill. These two will probably not ever be friends: Woodruff and Contreras have faced each other 29 times, and six of those plate appearances have now ended with an HBP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjlunRII3SA

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 chefs, noogies, hoodie storage, and more. I’m back! YAYYY! And what a treat to have Dave McKenna host the Funbag last week in my stead. Let’s all give the man a round of applause, because he’s got more stories to tell than Shakespeare did. A true original. And now, your letters:

There is a particular indignity that comes from living in America, derived from the experience of waking up in the morning to see reports that Donald Trump has said something profoundly evil, and then needing to type "truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump" into your web browser to see if he actually said that. Once there, you can see a post in which Trump did indeed threaten to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, stacked on top of an ad for a sketchy herbal supplement of some sort: A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

Now that the World Cup field is set, and the international breaks are over, it's time for the club season's final sprint. The top European leagues have comfortable leaders—except for Paris Saint-Germain, who is only four points up on Lens in Ligue 1—but there's still enough time for narratives there to flip. There are also domestic cups to be handed out, and trophies to be won or lost. However, the best drama left in the season is definitely in the Champions League, where at least half the quarterfinalists can reasonably convince themselves that they can win the whole thing, and the other four teams wouldn't need much hope to believe the same. The draw has set up some juicy quarterfinal showdowns, with even more enticing semifinals on the horizon. There's a rematch of an exciting Copa del Rey semifinal, a showdown between the reigning continental champs and the most successful club in England, and the Champions League final boss of Real Madrid facing its second consecutive mega-challenge. There's plenty to talk about in each of these matchups, but let's start with the one that should, on paper, be the most lopsided contest, the one between the current Premier League leaders and a Portuguese side looking to prove that it's not out of its depth.

It was a lovely day above the Moon. The Artemis astronauts did some science, took lots of pictures, didn't die or get replaced by bodysnatchers, and perhaps most importantly, made me bawl a couple of times. One was when Orion came back into communications range after 40 nerve-wracking minutes behind the Moon. Mission specialist Christina Koch, after confirming that she and mission control could hear each other loud and clear, gave a stirring little speech. Artemis isn't the culmination of anything—it's meant to be just the start of the exploration of the wider cosmos. But, Koch said, no matter where humans go, home is still home. "We will explore," Koch said. "We will build. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers. We will do radio astronomy. We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other." The other time I must have gotten some space dust in my eye was a quieter, more personal moment. The astronauts were observing the lunar surface, and identified a pair of unnamed craters, possibly unseen before by human eyes, residing as they do in the borderlands between the near and far sides of the Moon. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen on the mic relayed to Houston a request from the entire crew, that the craters be named Integrity, for their crew vehicle, and Carroll, for Commander Reid Wiseman's wife, who died of cancer in 2020. I do urge you to watch the video, to hear Hansen's voice cracking with emotion and to see the crew embrace Wiseman.

Monday's NCAA Championship Game delivered a huge victory for the University of Connecticut, in that Dan Hurley did not bring himself, his team, the university or the coaching profession into three days of disrepute, nor did Dawn Staley repeatedly offer to kick his ass. Hey, sometimes the championship you're playing for isn't necessarily the same one everyone else recognizes. It will be a lot of text to fit onto a banner, but it's something—five wins packaged neatly into one loss. Not that Ol' Bug Eyes Himself didn't want to win the national championship of men's college basketball. It's just that his charges chose a bad night to get into early foul trouble and subsequently watch Michigan shoot 25 free throws, and a worse one on which to miss 11 consecutive threes while trying to dig out of a double-digit deficit. They definitely chose a bad time to be scheduled to play in a gigantic football stadium that made shooting from distance a festival of long rebounds for both teams. They could not have picked a more dreadful night to challenge a bigger stronger team at the rim. All that suggests that Michigan's 69-63 victory in Lucas Oil Stadium last night was a fait accompli for the Wolverines. It wasn't, and not just because Michigan hadn't won one in 37 years and represents an elephantine conference that hadn't won a title in the last 26. This would be statistically accurate, but only that. The game was in many ways a grisly slog, not the least of which was the fact that Michigan's shooting numbers were only barely better than UConn's—13 misses in 15 attempts from three, and just 21-for-55 from the floor overall for the night. The difference was that, after having fallen behind early, the Huskies needed to take 33 treys in an unforgiving airport hangar with roughly the same shooting background that the Artemis astronauts see out their window, against a team whose defense wasn't offering any agreeable alternatives inside 12 feet. Connecticut acquitted themselves well enough for being the less accomplished team at the rim, but in the end that only gets you a half-hour of lead time in the transfer portal.

Watching an all-time great athlete fade into anonymity comes with a perverse sadness: a slow death on a public stage, with stakes that only matter because people have decided to lend it some fictive narrative purpose. In baseball, a sport that worships statistics if there were any, the feeling is at its worst while gritting through negative-WAR seasons and watching career batting averages tick below .300. Sometimes this comes with schadenfreude, with an athlete who was a particular terror back in her day, but surely nobody, really, can manufacture such resentment toward Mike Trout, a slam-dunk Hall of Famer who, by nature of baseball and signing a 12-year contract with the Los Angeles Angels, was never given the opportunity to terrorize anyone, at least not in a game that really, truly mattered. Trout is now 34. He has played two-or-so full seasons, depending on how you count, since he was named the American League MVP in 2019. One of those seasons took place last year, in which he posted an OPS under .800 and did not play a single game in center field. Judging by the general history of the Angels, the most important singular moment of Trout's career will likely be his at-bat against Shohei Ohtani during the 2023 World Baseball Classic. Which all made Mike Trout's start to this season feel a bit like a unicorn reappearing after a four-year-long hiatus. The most enjoyable part of early-season baseball is ignoring the wailing child crying about sample size and pretending that everything is meaningful. For those who crave a Trout resurgence, if just to see again what made him so great, he has put on a brilliant early showing. Even adjusting for Trout's lofty walking standards, he has been walking a lot because, even now, give Trout something to hit and he will hit it. Pitchers have barely been pitching to Trout, which has resulted in a pretty funny early heat map for the year, in which Trout's wOBA is precisely .000 for a third of the strike zone, including right down the middle of the plate.

The Chicago Sky were supposed to be getting a franchise building block when they drafted Angel Reese with the seventh overall pick of the 2024 draft. Instead they ended up with a player who didn't even make it through her rookie deal. The Sky announced Monday morning that Reese had been traded to the Atlanta Dream, in exchange for two first-round picks and a second-round pick swap. Devoid of certain context, this is a trade which the Sky could defend on its merits. While Reese was the best player on the team and an All-Star in each of her first two seasons, the Sky have won a total of 23 games since drafting her and are in desperate need of a rebuild. Then there's the way the 2025 season ended for Reese: with her being suspended for the first half of a game after she offered a sharp and accurate assessment of the franchise to the Chicago Tribune. It would be safe to assume that Reese wouldn't have been keen to continue her tenure in Chicago once she became a free agent, and so it stands to reason that the Sky would use her as a trade asset to try and kickstart their latest roster overhaul. They received 2027 and 2028 first-round picks from the Dream in today's trade. That said, the Chicago Sky and merit are concepts as distant from each other as Earth and the Moon. This is possibly the worst organization in American pro sports. The Reese trade is a culmination of numerous managerial fuck-ups that have turned the Sky into the clowns of the WNBA. One reason the Sky might have been so desperate to get their hands on a 2027 first-round pick is because they already traded swap rights on their own first-round pick in that draft to the Washington Mystics. That swap was made as part of a trade in which the Sky received Ariel Atkins for the 2025 No. 3 draft pick, which the Mystics turned into All-Rookie guard Sonia Citron. Oh, and Chicago would've had the second overall pick in this year's draft, if not for a last-minute swap with the Minnesota Lynx right before last year's draft.

A couple of Antetokounmpos took the court for the Milwaukee Bucks on Sunday, in a home win over the Memphis Grizzlies. Neither of them were the good Antetokounmpo. Thanasis, the second-oldest of the five brothers, played two minutes and scored a bucket. Alex, the youngest, played one minute in what was his fourth-ever NBA game, and also scored a bucket. The good Antetokounmpo, Giannis, was in street clothes, missing his 11th straight game since a calf strain. The Bucks say he cannot play because he is injured. Giannis says that he wants to play but the team is forcing him to sit out while healthy. The NBA is investigating the dispute under the Player Participation Policy, which allows the league to punish teams for sitting star players. The policy, which was established by the NBA Board of Governors ahead of the 2023–24 season, addresses specifically what the Bucks are accused of doing: On the first page of the document, the policy says that teams "must refrain from any long-term shutdown (or near shutdown) whereby a star player ceases participating in games or begins to play a materially reduced role in circumstances affecting the integrity of the game." Further down, the policy reiterates that the league has discretion to "impose discipline" whenever a star player "stops playing (or, in the judgment of the league office, begins to play a materially reduced role) in circumstances affecting the integrity of the game." At this time of year, it is very common for lousy NBA teams to shelve star-level players for injuries that under better circumstances would not be considered season-ending. The Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards recently made a trade-deadline business out of soaking up expensive stars who could soon be mothballed for minimally plausible rehabilitation reasons, so the policy has obviously not had the intended effect. For tanking teams, the incentives still dwarf the penalties described by the policy, which are limited to monetary fines that any good owner would happily eat. None of the ideas in commissioner Adam Silver's package of anti-tanking proposals stand the remotest chance of solving the problem. So long as there is a player draft, and the player draft is viewed as a pro-parity league-balancing necessity, there will be tanking.

For as reassuring as it may be to know you have a world-spanning team of geniuses overseeing your well-being, the Artemis crew has to get a little annoyed by mission control sometimes, right? They're constantly in your ear and up your butt. They're nagging you to exercise when you're trying to do science stuff. They're making you use Outlook. They're waking you from your too-rare and too-short sleep by playing music, and then cutting it off right before the chorus, which you were looking forward to hearing! What those astronauts wouldn't do for just 40 blessed, dreadful minutes of silence. Good news, then. The Orion spacecraft is nearly 250,000 miles from Earth, which you'd think would provide a little peace and quiet, but there's a whole lot of work to be done, and a whole lot of people back on the ground making sure the astronauts stick to their strict schedule. And today is a particularly loaded day. Late Sunday night, Orion entered the lunar sphere of gravitational influence, which means it's now being tugged on by the Moon more than it is by Earth. It'll use that gravity to swing around the far side of the Moon, and for about seven hours, they'll be close enough to undertake this mission's grandest visual science: detailed observations of the lunar surface. Already we're getting some cool stuff. Because Orion is hurtling toward where the Moon will be, not where it is—like a quarterback leading his receiver—they've already got a slightly different angle on the Moon than we do here on Earth, where because we are tidally locked we see the same face of the Moon all the time. At the lower left of the photo atop this post, you can clearly see the Orientale Basin, a well-defined impact crater never before seen from this angle by human eyes. "It's clear that we are not on Earth because that feature is not all visible from Earth," pilot Victor Glover said.