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The Los Angeles Dodgers got Tarik Skubal, damn them. Damn them for having money; damn them for being too damn good; damn them for ruining baseball. That they got Skubal, the hottest commodity on the stove at the trade deadline, for relative peanuts, well. In this case, you damn everyone else. This trade will ostensibly impact the Dodgers' odds through the 2026 World Series, though that's the least relevant part of the picture. All anyone can think about, at least as it pertains to the Dodgers, is what baseball will look like in 2027, if we get any baseball in 2027 at all. In that sense, the 2026 World Series does matter. No doubt the future of the sport depends heavily on the team that wins; considering Tarik Skubal and his $9.5 million in remaining salary cost three decent prospects, you could infer that every single owner wants it to be the Dodgers. For the greater good, you see. If one were conspiracy minded, one could trace the logical threads from this trade to that conclusion. There are qualifiers on Skubal's performance this year that might justify a lower price—he has had injury trouble and a novel surgical procedure to treat it; though his ERA is still excellent, his peripherals aren't nearly as tidy; he is a rental only through the end of the year—but those qualifiers would be in place at any price, no matter where he went. It is both borderline incomprehensible and self-evidently true that other teams in the rarefied contention window like the Tampa Bay Rays or the Milwaukee Brewers—neither of which, mind you, have ever won a World Series—did not outbid the Dodgers' winning offer, not even for the sake of driving the price higher. It is equally strange that the Detroit Tigers did not shop more rigorously around the league for a higher return.

Who is ruining baseball? For me, today, it's the Washington Nationals. Games played by my home team make up a solid 90 percent of the baseball I watch in a given regular season. Like a lot of baseball fans, I was hoping Tarik Skubal would go to the Milwaukee Brewers or the Tampa Bay Rays instead of the Dodgers, but in a distant, uncommitted sort of way, the way that I might hope that my friends have favorable weather while they are taking a trip someplace. Skubal's trade destination is firmly not my problem. While the Nationals are playing competitive baseball, I really do not give a rip what the Dodgers are up to. While the Nationals are anywhere near the hunt, I might watch as many as two Dodgers games a month, and the chances are very good that Skubal will not happen to be pitching in any of them. Also, sorry to Detroiters but the Tigers can burn in hell for all I care. The Nationals have had a good season. They were supposed to be bozos in 2026, but instead they have been frisky and fun. They've had the best offense in the majors, and not even in a dreary, optimized, true-outcomes sort of way. Yes, they hit lots of home runs—they are presently first in all the majors in dingers—but they also collect lots of all kinds of knocks (third in total hits) because they put the ball in play a lot (ninth-best team strikeout percentage). They also lead all of the majors in stolen bases, which just objectively kicks ass. They've had good vibes, and though their pitching has been broadly horrendous, more often than not it has been a good idea to tune in for one of their games. You are likely to see a dinger or two, you're likely to see some action on the bases, you're likely to get some early offense and some late offense. Guys are smiling and bat-flipping and having a great time. The Nationals made it to the second half still right there in the mix for the final National League wild card. New general manager Paul Toboni made comments suggesting that he was going to lean into this unexpected success and try to give the team its best shot at playing into October. When the Nationals traded Curtis Mead to the Boston Red Sox, it was possible to accept this as a kind of fortification: Mead was extremely productive for the Nationals, but they've got plenty of offense and have a desperate need for starting pitching. Connelly Early, the player they received in return, is a perfectly solid starting pitcher who is expected to join the big-league rotation later this month, after completing a rehab stint. Then the Nationals dropped a series to the Blue Jays and lost the first three of a four-game set in Atlanta. For Sunday's finale, against a rookie right-hander, Luis García Jr. was suddenly scratched. When Andrés Chaparro took a ball to the noggin and had to come off for a concussion test, and the team needed a healthy first baseman, they turned not to García but to Brady House, who has never played first base in his life. Everyone understood.

Some people are fans of the New Orleans Saints. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New Orleans Saints. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: New Orleans Saints. Your 2025 record: 6-11, otherwise known as the record of the false dawn. It's a record that looks a lot better than 3-14, until you remember how easy it is for a bad team to scrape together three meaningless wins (or four, or five) at the end of the season, long after everyone else in the league has stopped giving a shit.

This puzzle was constructed by Eli Robinson, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Eli is the Chief Trivia Officer of Water Cooler Trivia. He has far more questions than answers, if you must ask. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

DETROIT — It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, just one week from Election Day, and Abdul El-Sayed’s Detroit office is standing room only. The front and back of the room are packed with volunteers eager to hear the Senate hopeful speak before they go out and canvass the nearby neighborhoods. Many of them are still coming off the high of what they saw as a stellar performance from El-Sayed in the candidate debate that aired the night before. “He was so good, so good,” Lisa, a woman from Grosse Pointe Woods, tells me. While she has previously canvassed for El-Sayed, today she’s brought backup: her son, a college student at Michigan State University who is volunteering for the campaign for the first time.  El-Sayed’s campaign has knocked 190,000 doors since he launched his run for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, and in these final days before the election, they’re hoping to drive those numbers up. Every meaningful conversation they’re able to have with an undecided voter could make all the difference come Aug. 4. In the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-backed progressive with a background in public health, is facing off against Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate congresswoman who has picked up the support of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The money in this race is decidedly not on El-Sayed’s side. Super PACs have spent more than $60 million to support Stevens, with over $30 million of that coming in from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

DUBLIN — David Hickey was built for Gaelic football, the sport that can’t stick to sports. Hickey, who was a two-time GAA all-star and four-time All-Ireland winner as a half-forward for Dublin, used football’s biggest weekend as a platform for protests.  First, Hickey loudly refused to show up for a so-called Legends Lunch at storied Croke Park on July 24, where he was to be honored alongside other members of the Dubs’ 1976 championship side. Hickey’s boycott was aimed at the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), the event’s organizer and primary football player advocacy group, for what he called its “failure to take a stance” against Allianz, a Germany-based insurance giant with a fetish for profiting from crimes against humanity. The transnational underwriter has been the preeminent sponsor of Irish games, hurling and football, since 1993, when it acquired naming rights for the national leagues in both sports. Allianz also invested billions of dollars in Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza. “I do not want the memory of that team associated in any way with the GPA, who have failed miserably to stand up for anything worthwhile apart from money,” said Hickey, who became Ireland’s leading transplant surgeon and a high-profile social activist after leaving the game.

Weird trade. They must think they can re-sign her. This is more or less what I said before the 2025 season, when the Los Angeles Sparks traded for a year of Kelsey Plum. In a three-team deal that also sent Jewell Loyd to Las Vegas, the Sparks gave up the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft to Loyd’s former team, Seattle. Plum was the best player in that deal, and in Los Angeles, she did kind of prove what she wanted to when she sought an opportunity to lead her own team, out from the shadow of A’ja Wilson. In the 12 games she played this year before she went down with a leg injury, Plum was averaging close to 24 points per game and putting up some outrageous paint scoring numbers with her rim pressure. The problems become visible with additional context: The undersized Plum certainly didn’t help, but last year’s Sparks defense was hopelessly bad, and this year’s retooled roster with reinforcements Nneka Ogwumike and Ariel Atkins hasn’t done the trick either. Late Saturday night, after a few days of rumbling that Plum wanted out, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the 10-17 Sparks were trading Plum to the 11-19 Phoenix Mercury. Weird trade? They must think they can re-sign her? The Mercury are sending over a 2027 first-round pick, solid rotation guard Monique Akoa Makani, and a 2028 second-round pick. The weirdness this time owes to Phoenix’s place in the standings, which was half a game below Los Angeles at the time the trade was reported. Usually, a deadline buyer does not have a worse record than the deadline seller they patronize. The Mercury have always had a funky roster, and injuries made their thin rotation even thinner, so their 2026 season has been a real disappointment following last year’s Finals run. Kahleah Copper has played better after a brutal shooting start to the season, but as of deadline day on Sunday, the Mercury still sit 12th in the WNBA standings and a full six games back of New York for the final playoff spot with 14 games left. You could read a bit of euphemism in Charania’s post about the news: “Plum, a two-time WNBA champion, and the Mercury have shared excitement about the future in Phoenix.” Maybe that meant Plum and Phoenix had some understanding about her staying there long-term. The Mercury have a habit of trading away picks for star players, a habit they can sustain because of their resources to attract free agents and their international scouting wins. But The Athletic’s Annie Costabile reported on Sunday morning that Plum “still intends to go through free agency,” which would make her a fairly expensive rental for a team with an already-poor defense and very little hope of making the playoffs. When the Sparks first traded for her, ESPN reported that Plum “hopes to stay with the Sparks beyond 2025.” Technically she did, though L.A.’s hope was probably that she’d stay with them a little longer. 

The “heartbreaking endings to 2026 Chicago Sky games” montage that CBS showed in the final minute of the Sky’s Saturday matinee against the Las Vegas Aces hinted at how this game might unfold. One of the endings was from a game against the New York Liberty in late June, the same game 25-year-old undrafted rookie Sydney Taylor debuted in Chicago’s starting lineup. On the possession after Taylor hit a go-ahead three with 15 seconds left, the Sky let Sabrina Ionescu waltz to the rim for a layup to give New York the lead back, and Taylor’s next shot at the buzzer fell short. Her teammates had to peel her off the floor, where she sat in tears. Team minority owner Dwyane Wade, sitting courtside, came over and leaned down to pat her shoulder. Taylor called it a “tough feeling” after that game. “But if you’re willing to take those shots, you’ve got to be willing to live with the result.”   Fifteen games later, Taylor is the number-one option still taking those shots, and Saturday’s was a happier result to live with. A’ja Wilson’s much-too-easy go-ahead layup with three seconds left seemed destined for the Sky heartbreak montage. But on the next play, Taylor shook off Jackie Young (with the help of another screen from Elizabeth Williams) and hit the game-winning three. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMiElP7QzD4 Chelsea Gray’s half-court heave, also unnervingly close to a place in the Sky heartbreak montage, would not have counted anyway.

The Boston Red Sox enjoyed a 15-game win streak that vaulted them back into the playoff picture last month, and they've stayed upright in the days since. Holding a four-game edge over the third and final wild card slot, Boston's preserved their flame with a series of games in which they've simply, pardon the cliché, found a way to get the victory. Whether they're smashing the ball over the fence or knocking it just a few feet beyond home plate, the Red Sox are proving very tough to handle. The active win streak at the moment is four games, and the first of the quartet was an extra-inning triumph at the Athletics' temporary ballpark, where Andruw Monasterio launched a two-run shot into orbit in the top of the 10th to deliver a 4-2 final. In Thursday's game, the Sox were down 4-3 in the eighth, but the demolition duo of Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras hit back-to-back solo dingers to take the lead, each of them feasting upon some juicy off-speed stuff as they sent Luis Medina's offerings to deep center field. Usually, when a team is winning as often as the Sox are, the clubhouse is happy and everybody's getting along. But Jarren Duran's remained a bit touchy. The man who was an All-Star outfielder two seasons ago and still put up 3.9 fWAR in a comparatively disappointing 2025 has been struggling through a brutal campaign where he's been unable to keep his average above .200. On Thursday, Duran shouted at Contreras when Contreras didn't tag and score from third on a shallow fly ball Duran hit to left. Contreras downplayed the incident in the postgame, but Duran announced his feelings loud and clear.

If Shohei Ohtani doesn't return to the pitcher's mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers this season, they've got themselves a hell of a replacement. Late Saturday night, the back-to-back defending world champions made the biggest trade deadline move possible, acquiring back-to-back AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for three prospects. This trade helps a strong team grow even stronger, and their 10-game lead in the NL West already makes the Dodgers the presumptive winners of that division yet again. If their starting rotation was looking a little thin with the injuries to Ohtani, Blake Snell, and Tyler Glasnow, it doesn't anymore. The thrill of imagining Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto starting the first two games of a playoff series is exactly the feeling that contending teams should want to spark in their fans when they bring on a new guy at the deadline. While MLB continues its campaign to get people mad at the Dodgers for spending money and winning, a half-season of Skubal's services was clearly within the budget of the league's other franchises, too—even the ones that keep payrolls low. The Dodgers will spend $9.5 million on his contract before he enters free agency, and they haven't parted with any irreplaceable players. From this deal, the Tigers will add a pretty obscure Single-A hurler; a 27-year-old pitcher in Triple-A named River Ryan that some folks seem to like; and, the best of the bunch according to MLB Pipeline, 21-year-old Double-A outfielder Zyhir Hope.