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The Boston Red Sox are owned by the same people who own Liverpool FC, and are therefore acutely aware of the crucial soccer rubric that managers should be fired every few months in order to keep the job tender and supple on the grill. And yet, despite that, they hadn't fired a Liverpool manager since Brendan Rodgers got the sack in 2015. Those owners have, however, given us the first firing of the 2026 baseball season, and potentially the most incendiary one in years, by cacking Red Sox manager Alex Cora and multiple members of his staff. The finer details of this can be found in the latest installment of "Comrade Xu Watches Shitty Baseball"; the broad strokes can be gleaned with a glance at the American League standings. But we're not concerned with the Red Sox and their seminal role in creating a three-way tie for 12th with the Kansas City Royals and Chicago White Sox. We're thinking more of the two teams currently worse than those three, and why they haven't done the performative kneejerkery of firing their own manager. Your friends and compatriots at the bottom of the coal chute are the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets, and their broader circumstances are both similar and similarly dire. The Mets' issues are obvious. Owner Steve Cohen has spent eleventy skillion dollars on a team that just powered through a 12-game losing streak, beat the Twins twice and then got swept over the weekend by THE COLORADO ROCKIES, FOR BAAL'S SAKE! They currently feature the league's highest payroll, its fourth-oldest roster, and the sport's worst figures for fewest runs scored and OPS. Carlos Mendoza still has his job because, as near as we can tell, Cohen is pissed that he didn't think of doing that before John Henry thought of firing Cora, let alone firing him so spectacularly.

Baseball managers have very little say in whether or not their teams score 17 runs in a game, and only marginally more in whether or not their teams only allow one. Nevertheless, the optics of firing a coach—amendment: six coaches—right after a 17-1 victory are at the very least strange enough that Boston Red Sox management might have considered deferring the decision for one more day. They did not, and so, in full, manager Alex Cora, bench coach Ramón Vázquez, hitting coach Peter Fatse, third-base coach Kyle Hudson, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson, and hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin departed Baltimore unceremoniously after a 17-1 victory, on a black van that had COACHES4HIRE printed on its side. (The website coaches4hire.com is currently down.) This being baseball, it is not the first time a coach has been fired after winning by a 16-run margin, though the last time was on May 30, 1887, and included such proper nouns as "Cyclone" Ryan, "Lip" Pike, and the Cleveland Blues. In this case, the New York Metropolitans beat the Blues 18-2 and then fired manager Bob Ferguson. According to Baseball-Reference, the Metropolitans were eighth in the American Association with a record of 6-24, and the game, despite featuring 20 total runs, only lasted about 1:50. The Red Sox, though they are last in the American League East, have at 11-17 a better record than the New York Metropolitans did, but the rationale behind "fire everyone but the pitching staff" is at least clear. With a wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created plus, perhaps the most complete catch-all metric for baseball offense) of 84, the Red Sox are currently the third-worst offensive team in baseball, ahead of only the modern-day New York Metropolitans and their wretched nemeses-in-arms, the Philadelphia Phillies. Most notable would be the performance of former rookie Roman Anthony, who is undergoing a pretty dramatic sophomore slump, posting a wRC+ just over 90 compared to his previous season's mark of 140. That said, Red Sox pitching has hardly been stellar in isolation. Though the precise ranking depends on which standard and/or peripheral metrics the beholder favors, it firmly in the range of below average to very bad.

Down 58-41 at halftime on Sunday, the San Antonio Spurs were facing the most pressure they had in the brief but spectacular Victor Wembanyama playoff era. That said more about the team's inexperience with this kind of pressure than it did about needing to avoid a 2-2 first-round series against the Portland Trail Blazers, a team they should easily put away. While Wembanyama is the focal point of everything the Spurs do, somebody else on the team needed to step up to overcome such a deficit in Game 4. Yesterday, it was De'Aaron Fox, for a 114-93 victory and 3-1 series lead. Correlated with the concerns about pressure management is the matter of how Wembanyama would hold up against the ravages of the NBA playoffs. Game 4 marked his return from a concussion—which he obliquely indicated was mishandled, though he did not specify in what way—and though he announced himself with a huge dunk in the game's opening minutes, his team's offense was flat in the first half. San Antonio shot 16-for-46 over the first two quarters, struggling to get to the rim or finish there as Portland's sludgy defense gunked up the works. Toumani Camara and Jrue Holiday hounded ballhandlers and blew up actions early, and a bunch of nasty veterans supported them for 48 minutes of solid rim protection. The impact of all that defensive excellence was applied unevenly through the first three games; while Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle have both been balling, Fox's first three playoff games as a Spur were underwhelming. His young charges have gotten to go at Scoot Henderson and Jerami Grant, while he's been stalked by Camara and Holiday almost the entire time he's been on the court. Harper was scorching in Game 3, briefly and spectacularly materializing the lofty comp of Ethical James Harden With Bounce.

Connor McDavid is a hair away from being branded the worst greatest player in hockey history because, fans being raging nitwits on things like this, that's how it works in the legacy game. "You're only as good as the last thing I remember,” is the creed, “and I drink during games." Nevertheless, them's the rules, Pookie, and right now McDavid, the best player of his generation, is a game away from being ushered out of the postseason by the weird but plucky Anaheim Ducks, because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGtTMKPMPC0

By pulling off a 115-96 rout in Game 4 on Sunday, the Houston Rockets avoided what would have been a comical sweep at the hands of a Los Angeles Lakers squad that has played the entire series without its two best players under the age of 41. Luka Doncic (hamstring) and Austin Reaves (oblique) were both still sidelined as their Lakers attempted to close out the first-round series in Houston. Also stuck in street clothes for an elimination game was Kevin Durant, who missed Game 1 with a bruised patellar tendon, appeared in Game 2 only to pick up a bone bruise and a sprained left ankle, and has been out since. His absence has gutted the Rockets' half-court offense, which can only rise to mediocrity with the 37-year-old Durant on the floor. (It's even more dire than you think: In Game 2, during the minutes that Durant was off the floor, his team had an offensive rating of 40.) But in Game 4, the Rockets received an aid package of transition scoring: The Lakers committed 23 turnovers, which resulted in 30 points the other way. LeBron James, who has otherwise had a sublime series that has warmed the hearts of graying millennials, committed eight of those turnovers while hounded by the Rockets' corps of brawny defenders. After the loss, James blamed himself and the team's broader offensive execution. He finished with 10 points (on 2-of 9 shooting) and nine assists, hitting the bench to manage his considerable load with 7:25 left in regulation, after the sweep was well out of reach. The Lakers were likely already doomed when their one guy playing well, Deandre Ayton, was ejected in the third quarter for elbowing Rockets big Alperen Sengun in the head. "We both are sweaty guys," reported Ayton, who had 19 points and 10 rebounds. "[My arm] just slipped off his shoulder." Even Sengun thought the ejection was "a bit soft."

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Rachel Fabi, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rachel (she/her) is the creator and co-editor of the crossword puzzle fundraiser "These Puzzles Fund Abortion," which raises money for five abortion funds across the country. If you like crossword puzzles with a progressive bent and helping people afford necessary healthcare, you can donate here through the end of May to receive the puzzle pack! 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. Please note that submissions are closed from April 1 to May 1. 

What will it take to be fulfilled by life? Love, perhaps, or community, power, or professional success. At different points in my life I believed that having my work published would make me happy, or leaving the country, going back to school, getting a literary agent. I thought a new girlfriend might do it, or a new apartment. Some of these I achieved; some I’ve yet to; one or two, thankfully, are long behind me. And you know what? They did, at one point or another, satisfy me. Yet there has always been another waypoint, another goalpost, somewhere further along the way. I think this is why I have always connected with the fiction of Gwendoline Riley. A keen chronicler of existential disappointment, the English novelist populates books like My Phantoms and Cold Water with those who sense that they have been stymied by life, cast away by shifting currents of both capital and culture, yet who do not, even cannot, allow themselves to acknowledge the fact. Her narrators are marginal women, hacking away in the crevices of the publishing and culture industries, or downwardly mobilized—back to working service jobs in North England hometowns. Their mothers are self-confident to a suspicious extreme, blundering through retirement with a stage grin and a deep well of contempt for the people around them. Meanwhile, the men in their lives—lovers, bosses, and the occasional absent father—have a bad habit of lashing out, inflicting their failed vision onto a world too superficial to accept it. In The Palm House, newly published by The New York Review of Books, this narrator is a writer named Laura, a freelancer bouncing around from support job to support job, and occasionally contributing to a highbrow intellectual magazine called Sequence. Unfortunately it is the late 2010s, Brexit has just slipped through, and the magazine’s parent company have appointed a new editor-in-chief at Sequence, a Will Lewis-type near-illiterate with vague ideas and powerful friends, a grown man who insists that everyone call him “Shove.” In his goal to turn the publication into “a sort of London version of the New Yorker,” he is pushing out Edmund Putnam, a high-ranking editor who gave Laura her first entrée into journalism, and a man for whom Sequence has been virtually his entire adult life. Putnam’s future, Laura’s future, the future of media and writing and perhaps even thought as a going concern: All seems suddenly up in the air. Yet this crisis is only the initial spark of Riley’s idea. The Palm House is really the story of Laura’s precarious and sharply contingent life. Laura grew up in Liverpool, sharing a house with both her grandmother and mother. In this family, she recalls, there was “a terrific inhibition around substantive conversation,” and all forms of talk reverted ultimately to pat phrases and ready-made cliches. Her grandmother flips through “gadget catalogues” while her mother goes on and on in a strange and unplaceable foreign accent probably picked up from TV. Neither needs much input from Laura; as she drolly puts it, their “show ran regardless.”

Can you save the world by playing on green clay, staving off climate catastrophe? Probably not, but if all tennis courts in the world were made of green clay, we’d at least be better off, according to a new study in Applied Geochemistry. The paper, co-authored by Frankie Pavia and Jonathan Lambert, models the carbon emissions of different tennis court surfaces by accounting for the transportation of materials, construction, and maintenance. Compared to hard courts—the default setting for U.S. tennis—green clay courts produce 1.6 to 3 times lower carbon emissions in construction. Those green clay courts go on to offset emissions simply by continuing to exist. Because of how the clay material reacts with water and surrounding air, it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; over time, they can even go net-negative. Pavia and Lambert didn’t set out to fuse their enthusiasm for Earth science and tennis courts, but that’s where they wound up. They met as graduate students at Columbia University, which is based in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and has its campus for Earth sciences across the river in the New Jersey Palisades, so the pair spent a lot of time shuttling back and forth. Eventually they realized that there was a tennis court at Riverbank State Park, where the bus dropped them off, so they convened a consistent doubles crew to play on their way back from work.  They did not yet know that the intersection of these two interests lay in rocks—very helpful rocks. Mitigating climate change will require humans to not just reduce their carbon emissions, but actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using a suite of techniques collectively termed as carbon dioxide removal. One such technique is “enhanced rock weathering,” in which rocks with certain chemical makeup draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in a stable form for thousands of years.

It is of course nice to get the calls correct, but baseball is an entertainment product foremost, and a most delightful side effect of the new automated ball-strike challenge system is the few seconds of drama between a challenge and its resolution. Who will be vindicated? Who will be shown up? Who will have to wear the mark of shame? Will umpires be able to restrain themselves from muttering, "Not so easy, is it?" On Sunday, Seattle's Rob Refsnyder challenged a ninth-inning, strike-three call. He was vindicated, and a few pitches later hit what would prove the game-winning home run. Perhaps for some this is the apex of the system as it is meant to operate. For those of us with more whimsy in our hearts, said apex came on Friday, when Yankees 2B Jazz Chisholm tapped his helmet and challenged a strike call right down the pipe. https://twitter.com/ABS_Auditor/status/2047873562019614902

Victor Wembanyama, who sustained a concussion in Tuesday night's Game 2 between his San Antonio Spurs and the Portland Trail Blazers, has been cleared by medical personnel to return to action in Sunday's Game 4, according to a report by ESPN's Shams Charania and Malika Andrews. https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/2048472286395551853 As Defector's Patrick Redford wrote on Wednesday, concussions are notoriously tricky injuries, with notoriously unpredictable recovery processes and timetables. These are realities which have always cast a little bit of suspicion on the various sports leagues' ballyhooed brain-injury protocols: Somehow, superstar athletes seem to pretty much always complete their concussion recoveries in time to appear in their team's next do-or-die game, if not its next do-or-die return from a TV timeout. Stipulating that all brains are different, and that I know nothing more about the condition of Wembanyama's than anybody else who has never met him and only saw the event of his concussion on TV, this recovery seems particularly dubious to me. The dude's head bounced on the hardwood after falling from, well, Victor Wembanyama's height.