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This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now. Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

C.B. Bucknor has got to be the only person on Earth wishing that Angel Hernandez was still an active major league umpire. Ever since Hernandez abruptly retired in 2024, the search for baseball's new bad-call bogeyman has been on. It seems that the spotlight is settling on Bucknor, who has long matched Hernandez in inaccuracy if not infamy. Over the weekend, Bucknor became the sullen face of the ABS era when baseball fans discovered how much fun it is to watch an umpire get humiliated in front of a packed stadium over and over again. Bucknor had six of his strike calls overturned while behind the plate during Saturday's Red Sox–Reds game, including two would-be third strikes on back-to-back challenges. Bucknor was the first-base umpire in Tuesday night's game between the Brewers and Rays, and managed to step in it even without ABS looking over his shoulder. In the sixth inning, Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers hit an infield single. There was a bit of confusion following the play, because Bucknor had called Bauers out despite the throw to first sailing far wide of Rays first baseman Jonathan Aranda's glove. As Bauers was walking back to first base, Aranda decided to tag him just in case he had initially missed the bag, at which point Bucknor decided that, yes, Bauers had failed to touch first and was therefore out. The only problem was that Bauers had clearly touched first. I don't mean that he grazed the corner of the bag while running at a sprint; he put his whole foot in the middle of the damn base. It is not possible to touch first more solidly or obviously than this:

JAŸ-Z is coming back, umlaut included. Not that he’s been some kind of recluse the past few years, absent from the public imagination—he’s been doing evil billionaire things, laundering the NFL’s post-Kaepernick reputation through the grandiose production of the Super Bowl halftime, escaping Diddy’s dragnet, and somehow showing up as part of a fraud charge levied against the Uncle Nearest whiskey brand. Music-wise, he’s been quiet: no album, no single, no concert, no significant output since co-starring on Jay Electronica’s 2020 album A Written Testimony. The last time anyone was talking about him in a musical context was 2022, with the verse he did on DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” which was fine but mostly notable for being long. But he’s back now, with a splashy new interview in GQ, headlining The Roots Picnic in Philadelphia and a couple of Yankee Stadium shows in the summer to satisfy our cultural love of anniversaries that are multiples of five. 2026 marks the 30-year anniversary of his classic debut album Reasonable Doubt, and 25-year anniversary of The Blueprint, the album that solidified his place as one of greatest rappers ever, if not the greatest.  The Yankee Stadium shows will no doubt be grand affairs: The online ticket queues clocked in at over 800,000 people for each, and of course sold out immediately; they’ve added another date they’re calling “extra innings.” They will likely include some expected special guests (Mary J. Blige, Eminem, possibly a Jaz-O reunion) and a few that might be a little more surprising: Nas, Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, Slick Rick, and Q-Tip, who all feature in some way across these two albums. I don’t know, it’s JAŸ-Z; he might bring out Barack Obama and Oprah. People will spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to go scream every word of his songs back at the man and feel the euphoria of celebration. And Hov will make a few million dollars. Everyone involved will get what they want. 

Tiger Woods was “sweating profusely” and appeared “lethargic and slow” after his crash last weekend, according to an arrest affidavit released Tuesday. The golfer told investigators with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office that he had taken “a few” prescription drugs earlier in the day, and a deputy later found two hydrocodone pills in Woods’s left pocket. Wood was…

In the first of the recent rambling Instagram Live sermons that got him fired by the Chicago Bulls, Jaden Ivey hunts through a Bible for passages to share with his followers. He evidently did not do the prep work to place sticky tabs or bookmarks in there, so there are awkward moments of silence while Ivey flips back and forth and sniffs and mutters. It's a lot of very tedious work for almost no payoff: Every passage Ivey selects is a threat of damnation, and the most he ever wrings out of his selections, by way of translating them into plain language, is a superficial and increasingly whiney exhortation. You guys, don't you see how this further goes to show that you are going to go to hell? He winds himself up like this, so that by the end of the video his voice has risen half an octave or more, as if he has been waiting for some tangible sign of breakthrough and feels his audience is to blame for not having produced one, perhaps due to their inner hypocrisy. But it's a pretty friendly audience, judging by the comments: If recent studies about sycophancy in AI chatbots reveal anything broader about online psychosis, Ivey is absorbing a dangerously potent wallop of behavioral reinforcement. He spent several hours over the weekend preaching to this crowd, much of it from the interior of his car, hammering the same talking points about how to avoid eternal damnation, not refining his message too well but certainly gaining steam through repetition. It's not surprising then that some of the confessions Ivey struggled to articulate in the making of his first video are shouted with authority in the most recent one, which came after his employers decided they'd seen enough of this shit. "God saved me from a life of fornication," Ivey professes early in the first video, in an affectless bass, looking away from the camera. "He saved me from a life of drunkenness, he saved me from a life of, um," and here there is a pregnant pause before Ivey completes the sentence with "pornography." Later in the session, repeating the same point, Ivey record-scratches on that pornography bit, stares blankly, and then moves to another thought. By Monday's video, he'd gotten the hang of it. "I was a fornicator! I was a pornography addict! And I used to get drunk! That's all I knew!"

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, guest host Dave McKenna is talking about cowboy hats, music, high-risk eating, and catch phrases. What an honor this is! Other than initials I have nothing in common with Drew, the legendary Funbag founder and a real man of letters. But now somebody messed up and let me have the keys to his column. I’m reminded of the time the Exxon Valdez was commandeered by Captain Hazelwood. Let’s commence this voyage.  Your letters:

He looked a little bigger, and a little greyer. But Justin Verlander in a Tigers jersey is still 2011 AL MVP Justin Verlander in a Detroit Tigers jersey. Nine years, two World Series wins, and two Cy Youngs since he last pitched for the club that drafted him, the 43-year-old took the mound for his new old team's fourth game of the 2026 season. I had to snap a picture to capture the moment. I'm searching for a more interesting word than "surreal" and coming up short. Seeing "VERLANDER" and 35 on that specific road uniform takes me back to a completely different version of myself—a confused student who has yet to learn basically any lesson she'll consider important by the time she gets to age 30. An athlete's life advances at the same pace as your own, but Verlander's career has taken such a strange loop back around that it's left me a little dizzy. He's been to Houston, and then the operating room, then Queens, then Houston again, and then San Francisco before signing this one-year deal. It kind of feels a little arrogant, after what's become such a long and varied career, to even make the claim that JV has returned "home." Detroit isn't the only city that can claim him.

A half-decade ago in the early days of this website, long before ABS or "The Big Dumper," I became obsessed with a very rare and unexciting way to play baseball. Frustrated by the prevalence of the long ball over small ball in MLB, I imagined a different world: one where players chose to sacrifice themselves for their team. I wished for a way to honor those selfless players who worried not about their own stats, but instead about the good of the club. To hit for the Saint Cycle (which I made up), a player must only sacrifice themselves in every plate appearance. They cannot be glorified with a hit, and in each trip to the plate, they must be saintly in a new way. Specifically, they must get four of these five outcomes: hit by pitch, walk, sacrifice bunt, sacrifice fly, and productive out. A productive out, in case you forgot, is when the batter gets out, but the other players on the bases move into scoring position. When I conducted my initial research in 2021, only three men had ever managed to hit for the saint cycle in all of baseball history: Tim Flannery, Jose Morales, and Biff Pocoroba. At the end of the 2021 season, I checked to see if there were any new saints. There weren't, and I promptly forgot about my obsession entirely.

Hockey fights always feel a little absurd when their performativeness is laid bare. We know how it works, and why it's done, but crave permission to suspend disbelief. Just give us the smallest fig leaf of interpersonal dislike, and we'll buy it. But a move toward a safer and more peaceful version of the sport has, to the larger benefit, made those moments fewer and further between. We recently celebrated the anniversary of one of the big Red Wings–Avs brawls, and the genuine venom and intent to injure in those clips is jarring when compared with most modern-day fights, the most famous recent example of which was arranged on a group text. But rituals can matter for their own sake, and for the social cohesion they provide. The original philosophical principle of performativity referred not to insincerity trumping intent—virtue signaling, in other words—but to the use of words or acts that actually bring something into being. How being pronounced man and wife makes them married, for example. Or how fighting an opponent who injured your teammate might tangibly strengthen the bond of your team. Not because you hate that other guy or because you want him to feel physical pain as punishment, but because that's what teammates are supposed to do. Does the heavy "supposed to" of Monday's delayed Maple Leafs vs. Radko Gudas throwdown render it less genuine? I don't know! It's all very fraught and on some level not really measurable from the outside, because if the bond is the thing rather than revenge, it's not something I can see or measure. But the epistemology of a hockey fight becomes even more confusing when one party doesn't bother fighting back, and just stands there and eats the punches due.

This week on the show, we were joined by Papo2oo4, the New Jersey rapper behind last year's excellent Papaholic, Vol. 1 and, more relevantly, a New Jersey basketball expert par excellence. We talked about Andrei Kirilenko, when Papo briefly started a podcast that was derailed because his co-hosts were only interested in talking about Kanye West, and why Kyle Anderson was the best high school basketball player he's seen. We also talked a little at the top about a harrowing basketball-watching habit I have, and Harry shared a galactic-brained Darryn Peterson take. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!