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While Hikaru Nakamura was making an ignoble sort of chess history, Javokhir Sindarov yawned. Just 12 moves into their fifth-round match at the 2026 Candidates Tournament, the 20-year-old had tied the world's second-ranked player in quite the knot, forcing Nakamura to sit and think for over an hour. Nakamura, playing with the white pieces, attacked Sindarov with the Marshall Gambit, though the Uzbek player surprised the American by castling on the twelfth move. Nakamura was down two pawns and clearly not prepared for Sindarov to counter him like this, so he thought for 67 minutes and 44 seconds, only to screw up. "He just thought one hour and played the wrong move," Sindarov said afterward. "And after this I take this advantage and played very well, in my opinion." Sindarov is currently taking the 2026 Candidates by storm. He got himself into big trouble in his first match against Andrey Esipenko, only to reverse a huge time disparity and win a stunner. By the sixth round, he had already tied the record for most match wins at a Candidates with five. He has drawn three times and has yet to lose, taking an extremely impressive two-point lead into the ninth round on Wednesday. Sindarov made his Candidates debut this year as the fifth-highest ranked player at the tournament and 12th-ranked player in the world, and he beat three of the four players ranked above him on the first time through the round robin. This is one of the strongest debuts possible, and it has even caught the attention of recently self-exiled chess king Magnus Carlsen.

The most anticipated sporting event of my life was Sunday, Feb. 23, 2014: the Michigan men's basketball team playing Michigan State in Ann Arbor. I'd grown up around Big Ten basketball, but I was a newly minted Wolverine fan (and a freshman on campus). My matriculation coincided with off-the-charts hype for Michigan hoops—the Brady Hoke doldrums of the football team combined with a thrilling 2013 Final Four run at the start of an era that would send a whole bunch of recruits to the NBA. I struggled at the football games—imagine thousands of binge-drunk college kids packed into bleachers blacking out through a 3-5 conference record—but I found a kind of home in the basketball arena. You could get a spot just behind the benches, as long as you showed up early enough. The football-school culture meant that the attendees were generally more sober and less willing to let disappointment ruin their entire week. And I liked that the basketball players were instantly recognizable, without helmets or pads. For two years, I lived just a few steps from the ones in the Class of 2017, and even though that didn't make us friends or even acquaintances, you get a little boost rooting for people you see every day. The Michigan State game was the one you circled months in advance, pitting the standard-bearers of the region against a program that'd recently proven it could hang at that level. For a national audience, this was No. 20 vs. No. 13, so it probably didn't feel like the game of the year. But for me it was Game 7 of the Finals. There were rules against camping out overnight, but no rules against camping out nearby. My roommate and I (who had the most conveniently located dorm) hosted a slumber party in our 200-ish-square-foot room. We fit two people in each bed, one on the futon, and two on the floor, including me. (I was feeling generous.) We woke at the crack of dawn and walked down to join the line already forming outside the closed doors of Crisler Center.

Willson Contreras has played in 121 career regular-season games against the Milwaukee Brewers, by dint of spending the bulk of his career in the NL Central. In 23 of those games, he has been hit by a pitch, including once when he was plunked twice. No other team has hit him more than 14 times, and the Brewers account for more than one-sixth of the 131 total plunkings he's absorbed across his 11 seasons. It's a lot. The latest instance came Monday night in Boston. Contreras, now on the Red Sox, came to the plate in the third inning with his team up a run. The first pitch from Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff, a 93-mph sinker, ran up and in and scraped Contreras's knuckles. The contact was slight enough that Brewers manager Pat Murphy asked for a video review, but a baseball to the fingers does not feel great, and Contreras was pissed. He shouted at Woodruff and stomped angrily to first; after the review, he continued woofing until an umpire and a Red Sox coach convinced him to chill. These two will probably not ever be friends: Woodruff and Contreras have faced each other 29 times, and six of those plate appearances have now ended with an HBP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjlunRII3SA

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 chefs, noogies, hoodie storage, and more. I’m back! YAYYY! And what a treat to have Dave McKenna host the Funbag last week in my stead. Let’s all give the man a round of applause, because he’s got more stories to tell than Shakespeare did. A true original. And now, your letters:

There is a particular indignity that comes from living in America, derived from the experience of waking up in the morning to see reports that Donald Trump has said something profoundly evil, and then needing to type "truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump" into your web browser to see if he actually said that. Once there, you can see a post in which Trump did indeed threaten to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, stacked on top of an ad for a sketchy herbal supplement of some sort: A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

Now that the World Cup field is set, and the international breaks are over, it's time for the club season's final sprint. The top European leagues have comfortable leaders—except for Paris Saint-Germain, who is only four points up on Lens in Ligue 1—but there's still enough time for narratives there to flip. There are also domestic cups to be handed out, and trophies to be won or lost. However, the best drama left in the season is definitely in the Champions League, where at least half the quarterfinalists can reasonably convince themselves that they can win the whole thing, and the other four teams wouldn't need much hope to believe the same. The draw has set up some juicy quarterfinal showdowns, with even more enticing semifinals on the horizon. There's a rematch of an exciting Copa del Rey semifinal, a showdown between the reigning continental champs and the most successful club in England, and the Champions League final boss of Real Madrid facing its second consecutive mega-challenge. There's plenty to talk about in each of these matchups, but let's start with the one that should, on paper, be the most lopsided contest, the one between the current Premier League leaders and a Portuguese side looking to prove that it's not out of its depth.

It was a lovely day above the Moon. The Artemis astronauts did some science, took lots of pictures, didn't die or get replaced by bodysnatchers, and perhaps most importantly, made me bawl a couple of times. One was when Orion came back into communications range after 40 nerve-wracking minutes behind the Moon. Mission specialist Christina Koch, after confirming that she and mission control could hear each other loud and clear, gave a stirring little speech. Artemis isn't the culmination of anything—it's meant to be just the start of the exploration of the wider cosmos. But, Koch said, no matter where humans go, home is still home. "We will explore," Koch said. "We will build. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers. We will do radio astronomy. We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other." The other time I must have gotten some space dust in my eye was a quieter, more personal moment. The astronauts were observing the lunar surface, and identified a pair of unnamed craters, possibly unseen before by human eyes, residing as they do in the borderlands between the near and far sides of the Moon. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen on the mic relayed to Houston a request from the entire crew, that the craters be named Integrity, for their crew vehicle, and Carroll, for Commander Reid Wiseman's wife, who died of cancer in 2020. I do urge you to watch the video, to hear Hansen's voice cracking with emotion and to see the crew embrace Wiseman.

Monday's NCAA Championship Game delivered a huge victory for the University of Connecticut, in that Dan Hurley did not bring himself, his team, the university or the coaching profession into three days of disrepute, nor did Dawn Staley repeatedly offer to kick his ass. Hey, sometimes the championship you're playing for isn't necessarily the same one everyone else recognizes. It will be a lot of text to fit onto a banner, but it's something—five wins packaged neatly into one loss. Not that Ol' Bug Eyes himself didn't want to win the national championship of men's college basketball. It's just that his charges chose a bad night to get into early foul trouble and subsequently watch Michigan make 25 free throws, and a worse one on which to miss 11 consecutive threes while trying to dig out of a double-digit deficit. They definitely chose a bad time to be scheduled to play in a gigantic football stadium that made shooting from distance a festival of long rebounds for both teams. They could not have picked a more dreadful night to challenge a bigger stronger team at the rim. All that suggests that Michigan's 69-63 victory in Lucas Oil Stadium last night was a fait accompli for the Wolverines. It wasn't, and not just because Michigan hadn't won one in 37 years and represents an elephantine conference that hadn't won a title in the last 26. This would be statistically accurate, but only that. The game was in many ways a grisly slog, not the least of which was the fact that Michigan's shooting numbers were only barely better than UConn's—13 misses in 15 attempts from three, and just 21-for-55 from the floor overall for the night. The difference was that, after having fallen behind early, the Huskies needed to take 33 treys in an unforgiving airport hangar with roughly the same shooting background that the Artemis astronauts see out their window, against a team whose defense wasn't offering any agreeable alternatives inside 12 feet. Connecticut acquitted themselves well enough for being the less accomplished team at the rim, but in the end that only gets you a half-hour of lead time in the transfer portal.

Watching an all-time great athlete fade into anonymity comes with a perverse sadness: a slow death on a public stage, with stakes that only matter because people have decided to lend it some fictive narrative purpose. In baseball, a sport that worships statistics if there were any, the feeling is at its worst while gritting through negative-WAR seasons and watching career batting averages tick below .300. Sometimes this comes with schadenfreude, with an athlete who was a particular terror back in her day, but surely nobody, really, can manufacture such resentment toward Mike Trout, a slam-dunk Hall of Famer who, by nature of baseball and signing a 12-year contract with the Los Angeles Angels, was never given the opportunity to terrorize anyone, at least not in a game that really, truly mattered. Trout is now 34. He has played two-or-so full seasons, depending on how you count, since he was named the American League MVP in 2019. One of those seasons took place last year, in which he posted an OPS under .800 and did not play a single game in center field. Judging by the general history of the Angels, the most important singular moment of Trout's career will likely be his at-bat against Shohei Ohtani during the 2023 World Baseball Classic. Which all made Mike Trout's start to this season feel a bit like a unicorn reappearing after a four-year-long hiatus. The most enjoyable part of early-season baseball is ignoring the wailing child crying about sample size and pretending that everything is meaningful. For those who crave a Trout resurgence, if just to see again what made him so great, he has put on a brilliant early showing. Even adjusting for Trout's lofty walking standards, he has been walking a lot because, even now, give Trout something to hit and he will hit it. Pitchers have barely been pitching to Trout, which has resulted in a pretty funny early heat map for the year, in which Trout's wOBA is precisely .000 for a third of the strike zone, including right down the middle of the plate.

The Chicago Sky were supposed to be getting a franchise building block when they drafted Angel Reese with the seventh overall pick of the 2024 draft. Instead they ended up with a player who didn't even make it through her rookie deal. The Sky announced Monday morning that Reese had been traded to the Atlanta Dream, in exchange for two first-round picks and a second-round pick swap. Devoid of certain context, this is a trade which the Sky could defend on its merits. While Reese was the best player on the team and an All-Star in each of her first two seasons, the Sky have won a total of 23 games since drafting her and are in desperate need of a rebuild. Then there's the way the 2025 season ended for Reese: with her being suspended for the first half of a game after she offered a sharp and accurate assessment of the franchise to the Chicago Tribune. It would be safe to assume that Reese wouldn't have been keen to continue her tenure in Chicago once she became a free agent, and so it stands to reason that the Sky would use her as a trade asset to try and kickstart their latest roster overhaul. They received 2027 and 2028 first-round picks from the Dream in today's trade. That said, the Chicago Sky and merit are concepts as distant from each other as Earth and the Moon. This is possibly the worst organization in American pro sports. The Reese trade is a culmination of numerous managerial fuck-ups that have turned the Sky into the clowns of the WNBA. One reason the Sky might have been so desperate to get their hands on a 2027 first-round pick is because they already traded swap rights on their own first-round pick in that draft to the Washington Mystics. That swap was made as part of a trade in which the Sky received Ariel Atkins for the 2025 No. 3 draft pick, which the Mystics turned into All-Rookie guard Sonia Citron. Oh, and Chicago would've had the second overall pick in this year's draft, if not for a last-minute swap with the Minnesota Lynx right before last year's draft.