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The Ernie Clement Voting Scandal shoved all the rest of the news this week into the street—the World Cup, the NBA draft, the NHL draft, the NBA trades, the NHL trades, the Mets firing their manager for the sin of managing the Mets, the latest sports media meltdown around but not quite about Caitlin Clark, all of it. Or maybe you didn't notice that Ernie Clement was the highest vote-getter among American League players for the upcoming All-Star Game in Philadelphia. It's quite possible that you didn't notice Ernie Clement at all. Maybe you're not noticing him right now. Such is the beauty of that arcane old baseball storytelling staple, the unworthy All-Star. Ernie Clement mentioned in proximity to Shohei Ohtani—quel scandale! Perhaps we should instead refresh your memories on who Ernie Clement is before we start. He is the starting second baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays, and he really is one of the best second basemen in the American League, due in no small part to the fact that every other AL second baseman is hitting exactly .251 with six homers and a .712 OPS. For the record, Clement is hitting .294, has seven homers, and his OPS is .753, which is way better. Last year Clement was Toronto's starting third baseman, except for the times when he was the starting shortstop. He had a record 30 hits in the postseason last year, one in which the Blue Jays came within a Moosehead cap of winning the World Series. Clement is 30 years old and after a skittish start to a career that didn't really blossom until three years ago, has become a proper big league contributor—a versatile and reliable presence, competent fielder, and perfectly fine hitter. Every team should have an Ernie Clement. Hell, a few already have—Cleveland waived him after the 2022 season and Oakland released him outright in March of 2023.

Now that New York state and Erie County have spent $850 million in taxpayer dollars, the largest public contribution for any NFL facility in history, it's time for the next important step in the process of opening the Buffalo Bills' new stadium: kissing owner Terry Pegula's ass. While Pegula, for once in his life, did not say something incredibly fucking stupid at this week's ribbon-cutting ceremony, every other person in attendance seemed to bend over backward to make sure that no one watching realized how much he sucks. With the plastered-on smiles and manufactured passion of a Hallmark movie or a Viagra commercial, every speaker used their allotted time to tell the people that the fracking billionaire who owns the football team is deeply committed to the community of Buffalo and Western New York. Kathy Hochul, "the biggest Bills fan in politics" according to her introduction at the ceremony, marched up to the podium to announce Pegula's undying generosity and love for Buffalo. But I heard her awkward gasp masquerading as a "Let's go Buffalo!" chant, and I felt a part of my soul die in the process.

This post originally appeared on June 23 in the Oakland Review of Books, which is worth a subscription even if you don’t live in Oakland or read books. Carl must slay the naga princess! If he doesn’t, his best friend—the talking cat-wizard Princess Donut—will die instead. But Carl and his team have a plan. They track the princess to the god Khepri’s sanctum in the Vanquisher Club and slay the club’s guards with a MacGyver-demonology contraption. Inside the sanctum, though, Carl is surprised: The beetle-headed attendant supervising the insect banquet within is Khepri himself, god of Rebirth and the Sunrise, summoned as a trap by the devious princess. As a level-250 god, Khepri will slay Carl easily—disaster looms!

It takes a special kind of creep to stand out for sleaziness among NBA owners, objectively one of the worst demographics our species has ever established. Tom Dundon has been the official majority owner of the Portland Trail Blazers for less than three months, and already he is a standard-bearer. It's clear he doesn't mind being a villain. Having already downsized the organization with layoffs, pinched on travel accommodations, stiffed his team's two-way players, and cheaped out on playoff T-shirts, Dundon is now engaged in brinkmanship with the city of Portland over funding for arena renovations. Even that description is too generous: Dundon told an assembly of Portland businesspeople Wednesday night that he intends to pay a whopping zero dollars of his own money toward a $600 million project. The Blazers play in one of the league's older buildings. The arena opened in 1995 and was built using, in part, debt financing. Then-Blazers owner Paul Allen refused to back the debt with his own vast personal wealth; in a sort of grimly hilarious coincidence, given that Dundon made his fortune as a subprime lender, this subjected the project to shitty, expensive loan terms, an arrangement that kerploded after a decade and led to the arena being forfeited to its creditors at the bleak end of a 2004 bankruptcy. The building was operated by Portland Arena Management, an entity spun up by the lenders that now owned it, until Allen eventually re-purchased it, in 2007. In 2024, the arena was sold to the city of Portland for the startlingly low price of just $7 million. Perhaps it's cursed. In any case, the arena is now publicly owned, and the Blazers lease it from the city. The Blazers want the building upgraded, but their new owner, who considers printing and distributing T-shirts for a home playoff game to be an unreasonable extravagance, does not believe that this work should deprive him of any portion of his outrageous and ill-begotten private fortune. The way Dundon describes it, his team is already contributing enough to the pot. The city maintains a Spectator Venues & Visitor Activities Fund, which is funded in part by fees and taxes collected at city-owned venues, including on tickets to Blazers games. A portion of the city's burden of renovation costs would come from this fund. Voilà, says Dundon: Because the Blazers collect these fees and pass them through to the city, they are already paying their fair share. It's absurd and disingenuous on its face, but you really have to hear it in Dundon's own words to appreciate the leverage he is attempting to gain.

"I score in bunches, and then sometimes kinda just level out," Toronto Tempo guard Marina Mabrey said near the end of her press conference, after the Tempo's 125-97 win over the L.A. Sparks on Thursday. It was an accurate description of her own game, which is built on constant movement and a scalding but occasionally evanescent shooting touch. Last night, however, we finally got to see what would happen if Mabrey never reached the "kinda just level out" phase. What if a whole game was just one big scoring bunch? Well, in that case, Mabrey would walk away with 53 points and a share of the WNBA single-game scoring record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5OHRTRpztE Save your tsking about stat-padding for the next gunner who goes for the record, because this is as pure as 53-point nights come. Mabrey went 17-of-28 from the floor, 9-of-18 from three-point range, and 10-of-12 from the free-throw line. And thanks to the quirks of the Tempo's home arena, she wasn't even aware that the record was in reach until she had 50 points.

Late in the morning of June 13, as most New York City sports fans were mapping out their plans for watching Game 5 of the NBA Finals, I was on the A train headed away from the Brooklyn neighborhood I've called home for 17 years. I was on my way to Aqueduct Racetrack, post time 1:10 p.m.  At the end of the month, after 132 years of equine action, Aqueduct will no longer run horses. The first race took place on Sept. 27, 1894, on a track operated by the Queens County Jockey Club, in a facility named for its locale, where water was delivered to New York City from the Hempstead Long Island Plain. At one point, Aqueduct was a place where people came to soak in the glitz and glamor of the Sport of Kings. When it finally closes its doors after the 5:44 p.m. post time on June 28, nobody but a dwindling crowd of regulars is likely to even notice. The story of Aqueduct's slow demise is not much different from any fading racetrack's. Off-track betting gave way to TV simulcasts, which gave way to legalized mobile sports gambling. There's just not much reason to come to a place like this, even for chronic gamblers or horse-racing obsessives. 

Imagine you are seated at a table. A guy sits across from you. He is vaguely humanoid, with a long torso and two arms raised in fist-like clubs. His full name is Edible Agent, but we will call him Eddie and use he/him pronouns. There's something about Eddie that makes you feel at ease. Maybe it's his fragrance, which reminds you of apple juice, of childhood. Maybe it's his two black eyes that gaze upon you without judgment. You decide to unburden yourself to him. You tell him that you've been making mistakes at work, and you are so afraid of your boss's criticism that you have developed stomach pain. "Fear will only bar the path you are meant to walk," Eddie tells you, wiggling his edible arms to show you he understands. You tell him that to cope with your stress, you've been drinking every day. "There is no solace for those who seek refuge in dependence," Eddie tells you, wiggling once again. When you tell him that you can find no other way to deal with this burden, Eddie tells you to confront the problem, to contemplate your next step forward. "Only by tempering oneself and holding fast to one's convictions can one overcome the burdens one bears," Eddie says, wiggling. This encounter changes you profoundly. Then comes the question: After all you have been through together, would you eat Eddie? For many participants in a study recently published in PLOS One, the answer was yes—but rather reluctantly. (Turn on subtitles to understand the conversation with edible Eddie.) https://youtu.be/0_hgrf0pi2Y?si=_gDxOGlOXUGyMvyL&t=15 Turn on subtitles to understand the conversation with edible Eddie.

Drew is at the beach, the sun is high and hot in the sky, and all the major sports events are either over or in the early going. If there was ever going to be a moment to give the podcast over to a discussion of podcast industry dysfunction, conquering the fear of failure, and the goings-on among the cadre of horned-up half-sociopaths on Love Island USA, this was it. I knew what had to be done, and so I made the call. Or I sent the Slack message, and then I sent a second one, and then sometime later Kelsey and Alex joined me to talk about real-life stuff and reality TV stuff for what turned out to be a pretty delightful 64 minutes. All of which is to say that, despite my early statement to the contrary, we are not breaking down the NBA draft's winners and losers. Instead we spent the first half of the episode talking about Alex's fantastic Try Hard podcast, the second season of which began last week, and which is also making the move to video. We talked about why she chose to do that, and why so many other podcasts have been doing it—a trend that Alex has written about in the past, but which she understands a bit differently from the inside. Some of this was about the mortifying ideal of being known and the rigors of making yourself into an on-camera performer, but a lot of it was about the way the internet works and doesn't work now, from the daunting challenge of finding places where real people are looking for new things to the weirdnesses of "authenticity" as a selling point. We also discussed what celebrity podcasts are for and why they have proliferated in the ways they have, and what they reflect about an industry that seems not to understand or respect its own business very well. I forgot Mitch Hedberg's name in this segment, for which I apologize, although I did manage to paraphrase one of my favorite lines of his accurately enough.

SAN FRANCISCO — On Wednesday night, I attended a Major League Baseball game for the first time since the final game the Athletics played in the Oakland Coliseum. I have all but stopped paying attention to the sport, less in active protest than as a casualty of no longer being able to pay like $9 to be inside of a major-league ballpark (OK, fine, "major-league" "ballpark") within 30 minutes, though the existence of the geographically unmoored Athletics is omnidirectionally repulsive. It was an existence I was confronted with, as my friend Adam wanted to go to a Giants game, and it just so happened that the one game that fit both of our schedules was A's-Giants. Fine. Of the many ways the Athletics are currently giving me low-grade psychic damage, the primary one is that they did not disappear when they left Oakland. They remain a pitching, hitting symbol of team owner John Fisher's blithe cruelty toward the Town and the malignant indifference of commissioner Rob Manfred and MLB. When I see the team's logo, I think of the people who loved the Oakland Athletics, the dozens of crying fans I saw at that last game, the guy who brought a photo of his dead cousin to the game because baseball was something they always shared. On Wednesday night, the stadium was packed with tons of A's fans, as well as plenty of split-logo hats and 1989 World Series gear. It was a strange experience, seeing the masses animated by a sense of denial and nostalgia, proudly wearing their green and gold as if the Oakland Athletics still existed. It's like wearing a dead guy's clothes to watch him be reanimated, Frankenstein-style. It was sad. The loudest cheer of the night was for the displayed final score of Mexico's 3-0 World Cup win over Czechia.

Everyone's favorite summer sport is back in full swing. The country is tuning in. There are tears. There are shrieks of joy. There is a surprising and concerning amount of toe-sucking! Love Island USA, in its eighth season, has now aired three full weeks of episodes. With tonight's episode, the show will be halfway through the mid-season twist known as Casa Amor. Now seems like as good a time as any to check in with our bravest soldiers: the members of the Defector Staff who willingly sacrifice their time and sanity to watch five-to-seven hours of this damn television show every week. First off, who are your Sweeties this season? Luis Paez-Pumar: I only have one sweetie, and it is Trinity. This is not a bold take, but it is my truth. When I watch the small amount of reality TV I watch—mostly Survivor, The Traitors, and various cooking/baking shows—I value confessional skills quite highly, and Trinity is by far the best on this cast at that. This also translates to real-time commentary (“Oh, she bad” during the Casa Amor girls reveal…she was so real for that one). During a season that has lacked entertainment for a variety of reasons, Trinity has been the shining light.