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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 flouting the law, botched first dates, jealous dickheads, and more. Drew is off today. I have seized the means of funbagging and, as is my custom, forgotten to make use of them until the last second. With that in mind, let's get to... Your dang letters:

Some people are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: It’s over.

Until a month ago, everything was going great for David Ellison and his plan to control American cultural production. He'd successfully made Paramount an outer arm of the Trump Administration, with all the lucrative sinecures and harrowing moral and journalistic compromises that come with such an arrangement. Ellison's smooth ascent to power took a little bump when he lost the initial bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, but his father is Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, and he's a close ally of Donald Trump, so he threatened and bought his way into a hostile takeover that WBD shareholders approved in February and the U.S. Justice Department approved in June. Congratulations David Ellison, nobody will make a good movie or say anything faintly critical about Israel on CNN ever again. Or so he thought. Even before the DOJ rubber-stamped the deal, Bloomberg reported that several states were looking into mounting a joint legal challenge. On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit in Sacramento after getting 11 other states including New York to join him in the legal effort. In a column for Variety (which, balls-and-strikes, needed a little editing) that dropped alongside the suit, Bonta wrote that the merger would create a super-entity immune from competition, one that could exert the directed force of monopoly control. "By combining two of the five largest film distributors and two of the five largest basic cable channel owners, the resulting media behemoth would control nearly one-third of theatrical movie distribution and nearly one-third of basic cable channels," he wrote. "It would control more than 30 percent of the blockbuster release distribution that buoys the movie theater business and 50 of the most popular cable TV channels, spanning an unrivaled slate of news, sports, entertainment, kids, family, factual, and lifestyle content." The result? "That’s a death knell for the film and TV industry — and for our democracy."

Maybe we've been viewing Harrison Bader all wrong. Not that he hasn't behaved like a Thanksgiving ham in a batting helmet, but he may have spurred his soon-to-be former employers to accept their current situation with a clearer eye and purpose. And with some gelignite. The San Francisco Giants have been freefalling all season long, which if nothing else marks a refreshing change from their decade of mediocrity in stasis. The amazing thing about their season is that they still haven't chased away their in-house fan base despite an uninterrupted series of decisions that would not be much different if they had been aimed at doing just that. Maybe lousy community and corporate relationships, plus some truly hideous baseball have unlocked some masochistic impulse in the regional baseball-going public; it seems to have worked for Love Island, after all. On Monday, with the looming MLB trade deadline and 112 games of diaper-grade baseball as impetus, the fellows finally faced their fears and fraudulence and began tackling the rebuild they had always said they wouldn't entertain. Not with Bader, mind you—they're just trying to void his contract on the grounds that a professional athlete should be able to avoid driving his scooter into a fire truck—but with what has happened since.

A lot of people in and around the WNBA are talking about trans women. In the aftermath of Indiana Fever role player Sophie Cunningham's negative comments about trans people playing sports in an ESPN profile, transphobic right-wing grifters and small groups of protesters have made a show of themselves at her games. In response, Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton was suspended by the league for telling off a couple of Cunningham boosters, while coaches like Cheryl Reeve and Natalie Nakase have given statements in support of trans women and girls participating in sports. Still others in the league, like Caitlin Clark, Fire coach Alex Sarama, and Fever coach Stephanie White have delivered more mealy-mouthed quotes about this controversy that Fox News describes as a "culture war" and ESPN describes as "the disunited United States that shadows the WNBA." If you came across these headlines as a non-sports fan, it would probably be fair for you to assume that there's a trans woman playing in the WNBA, or at least one at a high level in college who might be drafted soon. Google's autocomplete suggestions, which offer phrases like "trans wnba star" or "wnba player who looks like a man," imply that some number of curious people are trying to put a proper name to all this chatter. But there's no such trans basketball player. Not unlike that period in the 2000s when male athletes would get asked if they'd be comfortable with an imaginary gay teammate, these quotes, both for and against, are all about trans women and girls as a concept, as opposed to an actual woman who could potentially speak for herself. So why is anyone talking about this? Let's go back to the most memorable presidential campaign ad of 2024, the one I remember seeing all over the MLB playoffs that year: "Kamala is for they/them, not you." Following Donald Trump's win, a number of people upset by the result blamed trans people—as a concept—for the Democratic Party's defeat, while Republicans went full steam ahead with the idea that they could win by publicizing that their opponents weren't sufficiently anti-trans. It's no secret that they see women's sports as the key wedge issue that they can use to their advantage, selling people who might otherwise recoil at their policies on the idea that a handful of athletic trans girls and an even smaller number of athletic trans women with comparable hormone levels to cis women represent some existential threat to womanhood—and that the only way forward would be mandatory sex testing for any girl who might want to play soccer or volleyball with her friends.

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.