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PHILADELPHIA — I thought I would be miserable going to this game, watching two teams I hate (the Phillies and the Dodgers) ride high on their own egos amid overpriced concessions that jam a “ph” everywhere an “f” should be. I did it only so that I would finally get to see Shohei Ohtani play in person. But where was the phantastic two-way player, six-time all-star, and four-time MVP? Certainly not in the City of Brotherly Love. Whatever phacsimile was at the plate went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and an intentional walk. In other words, the most Ohtani did in that game was have a reputation for being a threat. Yes, I know players have bad games. But I’ve seen enough to understand that Shohei Ohtani is nothing compared to baseball’s real two-way player, Trea Turner, who was such an important force for both teams that he was responsible for almost half the runs scored in the Phillies' 10-7 win.  When Turner played short, ostensibly trying to help the Phillies prevent runs, everything hit his way turned to butter. Only one of his mishaps was ruled an error—a dropped ground ball from Mookie Betts in the top of the first which allowed the Dodgers to load the bases—but his defense assisted Los Angeles in several different ways. In the fourth inning, Turner misplayed a grounder from Alex Call to produce a single instead of a third out. In the sixth, he bobbled Andy Pages’s ground ball when he could have ended the inning with a simple throw to first, allowing Teoscar Hernandez to score. In the ninth, he misplayed Tommy Edman’s line drive up the middle to allow another runner on base and advance Pages. But also, because Turner is such a great two-way player, he hit two home runs and a double, bringing in a total of phive runs for the Phillies. His dual loyalty was so confusing that those in the ballpark couldn’t decide how to feel about him. When Turner stepped up to bat, they booed, then cheered, then decided simply to make ambiguous noise.

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 food hangups, cockroaches in heaven, shitting your pants on the football field, and more. Before I get started, you guys might know that I moonlight as a weekly columnist over at SFGate. I joke that I work for the only two decent news sites left in America, because it's kinda true. But SFGate, like virtually every other media company dependent on ad revenue, got hammered when Google turned its search product into an AI mill. To help counter the losses, my overlords at the gate rolled out a subscription app for the site last week. Like Defector, it’s a cheap date, it has a clean, ad-free interface, and it protects the company newsroom from being decimated by outside forces. So if you can spare five bucks a month, please consider giving it a whirl. Now, your letters:

A day after the French Open ended in May, the website tennis.com shut down its editorial operation. The brand dates back to the founding of Tennis magazine in 1965, and though the mag folded in 2022, the website continued to produce news, analysis, and feature articles. At least, until after the clay season. The new site amounts to a scoreboard for ongoing tournaments with tabs for the upcoming schedule and rankings. Endure a long scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll find a link to the news archive: all the articles on the website, still online for the moment.  A scrap of an explanation rested on the second page of an FAQ, stating that the website "evolved into a dedicated scores, and tournament information destination. For the full Tennis Channel experience—analysis, and original programming—visit tennischannel.com or the Tennis Channel app." (Tennis Channel owns tennis.com.)  Tennis was the standard-bearing publication about the game for decades. Pete Bodo, among the longest-tenured and most influential tennis writers alive, spent 50 years of his career there. Bodo wrote magazine profiles at the beginning of his career, getting to know the players and delivering accurate, poignant portraits of them to the public. His 1994 tennis tome The Courts of Babylon is studded with raw, startling anecdotes about players, like Ilie Nastase charging his German opponent in the locker room after a match at the 1976 US Open with a cry of "Fuck you, Hitler!" By the time the site folded, Bodo had shifted to part-time, but continued to write columns and features for tennis.com right up until the end of the website. 

"Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." As it is in life and love, so it is in soccer. From the outset, the 2026 World Cup was sure to mark an ending for Lionel Messi—not to his career as a whole, and likely not even to his days with the Argentina national team, but to his time on the sport's center stage, the venue which featured the 20-year unfurling of the exciting, hopeful, heartbreaking, agonizing, inspiring, and triumphant story that has defined one of the greatest tales sports have ever told. Across its full length, Messi's career at the World Cup was anything but predictable—featuring defeat when it seemed he would win, wins when it seemed victory had passed him by, and, most ridiculous of all, one last final against a teenager he had, unsuspectingly but almost literally, baptized as his heir when that teen was a baby. But being a story about life, this one too would have only one ending: Father Time confirming his undefeated record by at last claiming victory over one of his most stubborn opponents. It's not that Messi's Argentina had to lose to Spain, but Messi did and does have to lose to the inexorable passage of time. The loss on Sunday, and his completely peripheral role in the action therein, just made for a particularly tidy conclusion. I wouldn't exactly call the match's outcome scripted, at least not in the conspiratorial, "FIFA is rigging it!" sense that clouded too much of the conversation around Argentina's tournament, but I wouldn't be surprised if the paranoiacs disagree. After all, Tom Cruise, who first spoke the famous quote that starts this article, took to the field before Sunday's final and gave a speech about the nature of life, love, and soccer. Throughout the tournament, there has been a duality at the heart of Messi's 2026 World Cup. On one hand, seeing how incredibly he played made you think, Holy shit, Messi is 39 years old and is still the best! On the other, the unmistakable limitations of his aged body, evident even on his best days, made you think, Man, 39-year-old Messi is nowhere near as good as the younger versions. Far from being any kind of criticism, the latter impression only amplified the former. It speaks to how amazing a player he is and was: even when ambling around the pitch with a cane and creaky knees, Messi can still do things the rest can only dream about. Still, 39 isn't 25, or even 35. The total anonymity Messi displayed in such a one-sided final can only be understood as proof that, for all the skills he has successfully preserved over the years, he has nevertheless lost a lot of what once made him at least omnipresent, and very often omnipotent.

This is the fourth MLB season with a pitch clock, so one might think that any beef around the rule change has long ago expired. But José Caballero's got a huge supply of dry-aged steak in the walk-in freezer. The Yankees' base-stealing utilityman, who hits just a tick below league average, has made himself notorious around the league for the way he takes advantage of the pitch clock protocol. The big book of rules says that the batter needs to be ready for the pitch with eight seconds remaining on the clock—"ready" meaning in the box and making eye contact with the pitcher—and Caballero's favorite time to lock eyes with his opponent is something like 8.001 seconds remaining, which ideally gets him inside the pitcher's head and messes with his routine. Sometimes the pitcher, unused to coming set and delivering within those eight seconds, will run afoul of the clock and take an automatic ball. This strategic equivalent of "I'm not touching you!" earned Caballero a dramatic umpire warning in Toronto last month, though afterward his manager, Aaron Boone, sought and received assurance from MLB that he's just on the right side of the rule. It makes for the kind of line-toeing peskiness that keeps everyone alert. "There's some gamesmanship to what he does, but he's a smart, gritty player," Boone said in June.

While many of us can agree men are in trouble, few can agree on the exact cause. America has a masculinity crisis. Men are in trouble. The "masculinity crisis" is real. The male loneliness epidemic has received radically different diagnoses from men’s rights activists, religious conservatives, feminists, and heteropessimists. The manosphere, a loose affiliation of men who hold women in low esteem and value “alpha” behavior over weakness, ranges from hardcore redpilled incels and influencers, like Andrew Tate, to those who focus more on maximizing their own physical bodies, like Bryan Johnson and Clavicular. The blatantly sexist, racist, and homophobic language of figures like Christian nationalist Pastor Doug Wilson, who says women shouldn’t vote, and influencers like Myron Gaines has garnered a fair amount of inquiry and alarm—most recently in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary Inside the Manosphere. But not all men want to treat masculinity as a math problem that cheapens women. Former GQ editor Sean Hotchkiss has recently written a “memoir of male rage and recovery,” provocatively titled Hating Women. After years of engaging in hookup culture, he’s become a life coach focused on creating positive masculinity.  Hotchkiss joins the chorus of those claiming that heterosexuality is in crisis. Instead of arguing for nihilism, he proposes a kind of radical optimism. Men, he believes, can be reformed. He knows this because he was once the kind of guy who used women for relief. While Hotchkiss never quite seemed to try on the manosphere-inflected world of conspiracy theories and intense fitness, he did enjoy a certain amount of wealth and promiscuity. Yet, he discovers, “women held this incredible power over” him. Porn was his first line of defense in terms of stress relief.

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — After several years of lurking in the shadows, the specter of doping once again looms over the Tour de France. Though nobody has tested positive—or no positive test results have been made public—the biggest story at this year's Tour is a renewed aggression from testing authorities and a resultant increasing hostility from the riders. The tactics executed by anti-doping officials and the legal justifications marshaled to support them represent a modernization of anti-doping rules, intended to disrupt hypothetical cutting-edge pharmacological routines designed specifically to beat previous testing methods. The International Testing Agency (ITA) and the Union Cyclistes International (UCI) are no longer passively accepting that the extant testing regime is good enough. Here we see the latest iteration of an eternal story in cycling. The uneasy symbiosis between professional cyclists and the UCI is built on a shared interest in winning the public's trust. However, the sport's history makes that a fraught proposition, and while the riders would argue that a dearth of positive tests shows that nobody's cheating, the authorities would counter that no doping cases only means nobody's getting caught. Though riders and authorities ultimately want the same thing, it's incredibly difficult to balance labor's desire to be treated as trustworthy against management's desire to appear strong, without the former looking like liars or the latter looking like fools. So what's changed this year, and what does it say about the future of that delicate balance?

Credit to The Athletic for crafting the most haunting lede of 2026. Monday's article about the Eagles head coach begins with a single, chilling sentence: "Nick Sirianni discovered ChatGPT this offseason." The mind reels. More and more of what sucks about modern life is the result of a certain kind of person becoming overly enamored with the capabilities of chatbots. You hear that someone recently "discovered ChatGPT," and you reflexively begin preparing for a near future in which that person will soon be excitedly detailing hours-long conversations they had with their computer. So how far gone is Sirianni?

Just as every film is really about filmmaking, isn't every film also an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey? The hero's journey. The antihero's journey. The road trip movie. The war movie. Movies set in space or at sea, in the middle of a treacherous jungle or a barren desert. The story of Odysseus is a foundational myth, which makes the proposition of an actual movie of The Odyssey seem, among other things, redundant. And that's before you get to the near impossibility of filming it. But tell Christopher Nolan it's impossible to do something, and he will only want to do it more. And so we have his vision of The Odyssey, a massive, operatic cinematic experience mostly about the story's own operatic massiveness. In many ways, Nolan especially has always been making The Odyssey from the inside out, obsessed as he has been with his own harrowing quest to make big, majestic spectacles. It makes sense for him to just finally go at it for real. Nolan heightens and demystifies the mythology in equal measure, and the result is a throwback to the epic cinematic expressions of David Lean and Fritz Lang. It's also a treatise on Nolan's favorite subject: history's great men and the messes they make. The Odyssey is, of course, the story of wily Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his 20-year journey back home following the Trojan war. He and his men battle the currents, run into giants, cannibals, witches, sirens, and his own dead soldiers in his bid to get back to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who are barely holding his kingdom together as the many suitors vying for Penelope impose their will in Odysseus's absence. Damon's Odysseus is a wizened general, weary after another battle fought on behalf of King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). He's a serious, brilliant man, but arrogant in the face of mercurial Gods, which leads to much of his suffering.

A WELL-KNOWN VENUE IN THE MEADOWLANDS THAT FIFA WOULD THANK YOU TO CALL “NEW YORK NEW JERSEY STADIUM” BECAUSE IT DIDN’T GET PAID BY THAT STADIUM’S CORPORATE SPONSOR — The grass told the entire story.  If given the opportunity, FIFA would have very happily stripped every seat and beam and light fixture out of the venue that hosted Sunday’s World Cup Final and pawned it all off. In keeping with the organization’s best practices, those prices could have been set dynamically, while also being manipulated into an artificial scarcity that didn’t remotely reflect actual market demand. But only the grass sod that had been rolled out over the regular MetLife Stadium turf wasn’t bolted down, and so that would have to do.  That surface was far too dry and slow for high-level soccer, according to the players who contested some of the biggest games of their lives on subpar grass. Even from way up in the press box, you could see the ball bobbling about unprovoked and dying on its way from one player to the next.