Sports

Narrative Sportswriting, Endurance Culture & Athletic Craft

In This Issue

Spin Cycle: Ganging up on Pogačar — Escape Collective
Demi Vollering is not having fun at the airport.
Will 71 km of time trials be enough for Evenepoel? — Escape Collective
The 2027 Tour de France will have more ITT kilometers than any edition since 2012 – but the numbers say that Tadej Pogačar probably won't mind.
Super Typhoon Champi’s 20-Foot Monster Waves Pummel Taiwan Coastline (Video) — Surfer Magazine
The Category 5-equivalent monster has weakened, but dangerous surf, destructive winds, and torrential rain continue threaten Taiwan.
Jolanda Neff joins Fenix-Premier Tech for 2027 — Escape Collective
2021 Olympic cross-country champion Jolanda Neff will join Fenix-Premier Tech for the 2027 season, following the closure of Cannondale Factory Racing at the end of 2026. Along with Olympic gold, Neff also won the elite XCO world title in 2017, the XC marathon world title in 2016, and the World Cup series overall on three occasions, in 2014, 2015 and 2018. Neff will also return to the road, having previously competed for Trek in Women’s WorldTour races including the Tour de Suisse and Tour de R
Women's MTB brand Juliana merged into Santa Cruz — Escape Collective
Garmin Revamps and Opens Up Connect Developer API Program: All the Details — DC Rainmaker
Garmin Edge 1060 Cycling GPS Hands-On: Everything You Need to Know! — DC Rainmaker
Tech Tidbits: Withings Adds $100/year Apple Health sync Fee, and Omata is Back! — DC Rainmaker
Suunto Race 3S In-Depth Review: A Pricey Upgrade — DC Rainmaker
Garmin MARQ Gen3 In-Depth Review: Worth $3,100? — DC Rainmaker
Fitbit Edge Announced: Everything You Need to Know! — DC Rainmaker
Garmin Enduro 4 Everything You Need To Know: What’s Actually New? — DC Rainmaker
COROS Pace 4 Pro In-Depth Review: Worth the Upsell? — DC Rainmaker
Possible Tornado Rips Through San Clemente Golf Course As Extreme California Weather Escalates (Video) — Surfer Magazine
The National Weather Service is investigating a possible tornado at San Clemente Municipal Golf Course as bizarre storms, huge surf, and flooding continue to batter California.
Fiji Surfers Rally Against Proposed Iron-Sand Mine at Sigatoka River Mouth — Surfer Magazine
A foreign-backed mining proposal could destroy one of the country's most important waves.
Lake Michigan Erupts as NOAA Warns of 26-Foot Freshwater Monsters (Video) — Surfer Magazine
A roaring October storm turned Lake Michigan into an inland sea, with forecast 26-foot waves blasting lighthouses and piers as cameras rolled along the shore.
Watch Boat Go Airborne in Brutal Wipeout as Wave Flips 3 Overboard (Video) — Surfer Magazine
Video from New South Wales, Australia shows a motorboat launching off breaking waves before capsizing. Miraculously, everyone survived.
Massive 16-Foot Crocodile Killed After Stalking Surfers at World-Famous Wave — Surfer Magazine
A 16-foot saltwater crocodile slipped into the lineup at Lance’s Right, triggering a frantic evacuation, a military response, and a fiercely debated kill.
Shark Repellent Fails as South African Swimmer Dies in Horrific Attack — Surfer Magazine
A 65-year-old ocean swimmer was killed off South Africa while wearing a magnetic shark band, intensifying scrutiny of “shark-proof” tech.
Finisterre’s New Shearwater Wetsuits Are Built for Cold Water, No Compromises — Surfer Magazine
A new line of petroleum-free winter wetsuits and booties for men and women.
How to Vote For a Fielding Award: A Study — Baseball Prospectus
This article contains my ballot for the Fielding Bible Awards, as revealed today at Sports Info Solutions. But first, if you’ll forgive, a lengthy aside. For as long as baseball has had defensive metrics, they’ve been maligned. You can see in the earliest box scores how Alexander Cartwright grappled with how to assign the proper amount of virtue and sin into fielding; totals for put-outs, assists, and errors crowded the column space. The countable has always won out over the uncountable, particularly for a sport so dependent on the archaeology of pre-televised box scores for its data, to provide any support for the often biased eyewitnesses of the day. Much of the rest of the data fell away—perhaps unfortunately, since outs created, and its logical next step defensive efficiency, is far from the worst way to measure defensive value—and for a century, our rating system condensed into the simple error, Cartrwight’s value system at its most refined. Players who didn’t make mistakes were good defenders. When advanced defensive metrics were introduced, they arrived largely to scorn, and common refrains—these numbers from different sources didn’t even compare to each other. (They still don’t, often.) Instead, though, I struggle to imagine how Gold Gloves were decided before those metrics arrived. Sure, there’s a base level of competency that’s easy to sniff out, but once you reach the margins, it’s nearly invisible to the naked eye. In a sense, it’s like voting on manager of the year: You can’t get an appreciation for the sum of a player’s defense in a day, or even a weekend. You’d have to sit with it every day, watch carefully to see what plays one guy makes that another might not quite. And even then, you’re doing that for one club; how could you compare it to the guy in Cleveland, who you’ve seen nine times all year? And yet we do have to decide who’s good at this, because that’s a little piece of the job. So we have to turn to the numbers, and politely ignore their petty little squabbles and sample-size issues. After all, some of the discrepancy arises not out of inexactitude, but philosophical differences: Do we measure pre-pitch positioning as part of a player’s contribution, or do we measure how difficult the play was at the moment they took their first step? How much do we weigh the value of an outfielder’s or a catcher’s arm, and what do we do when it’s so good that runners prefer not to test it? Can we even trust the scorekeepers on what an error is anymore? (No.) Awards are designed to be subjective—a single point, perceived from a hundred different vantages—despite the fact that metrics, with their tenths and hundredth places, make it all look so precise and objective. With that rather sizable piece of context out of the way, to my ballot. Except that we’ll have to add one more disclaimer: my own philosophy toward the awards. I tend to approach each award in a different way. The MVP and Cy Young awards I treat as individual, historical accomplishment, and focus primarily on a player’s strict seasonal output more than what they “deserved” in a more peripheral sense. For Rookie of the Year, as I’ve explained before and will do again in a few weeks, my perspective is rather opposite: rookies can’t control their own playing time or environment, so I’m more likely to look at peripherals and underlying traits, rather than sorting by WARP. With defense, I find myself splitting the difference. I’ll use the metrics to determine production, checking with folks in case something activates the spider senses. But these ballots tend to be split by position, and players often play multiple positions, so I don’t want to use straight counting stats to reward the guy who moved around the least. Defensive skill, to me, isn’t a counting stat. Caveats complete, for real this time. My ballot, with brief explanations behind my thought process:
The Three Trades of Freddy Peralta — Baseball Prospectus
December 9, 2015: Seattle Mariners trade RHP Freddy Peralta, RHP Daniel Missaki, and RHP Carlos Herrera to Milwaukee Brewers for 1B Adam Lind. This was a nothing trade at the time it happened. Lind was a platoon first baseman with one year making low-end regular money left coming off a string of seasons where his OPS was in the low-to-mid-.800s in semi-sheltered playing time. In other words, quite a useful player, but not a particularly valuable trade asset; guys like this get traded all the time. What Milwaukee did here was ahead of the curve in a way they’ve repeated a lot over the years: in a trade for a low-medium return, they took a portfolio approach on guys at the lowest levels of the minors with traits. Missaki was an intriguing arm who had already pitched in the WBC at the time of the trade; he would never actually pitch in the Brewers system due to recurring elbow problems, although he ultimately carved out a niche as an international and upper-minors journeyman swingman in the 2020s. Herrera never made it out of Low-A and got released during the pandemic. Peralta was, in BP’s estimation when the deal occurred, neither the headliner (Missaki) or most projectable (Herrera) in this deal. He was an unranked prospect coming off his third season in complex-level ball, with a sterling strikeout-to-walk ratio but unimpressive stuff. He would never actually make a Brewers Top 10 prospect list for us either; in November 2017 we wrote that he was a fastball/slider type topping out at 92 with “no show-stopping pitches.” Indeed, in his rookie campaign in 2018 Peralta averaged just 91 mph on his fastball. His velocity would jump three ticks that offseason, but it was still not until 2021 that he established himself as a regular member of the major-league rotation. The Brewers shrewdly extended him well before that, in the 2019-2020 offseason, for a price reflecting the unproven swingman he’d been to that point: just $15.5m guaranteed with and two $8 million team options running through 2026. In case you didn’t know, the Brewers are really good at all of this stuff, and have been for over a decade now. Over time, “Fastball Freddy” established himself as a pretty reliable low-end no. 2 starter, spamming a mid-90s heater with solid breaking balls looks. But despite occasionally flashing top-of-the-rotation upside, he never really emerged into one…until 2025, when he gained another tick of velocity and his changeup ticked up. He posted a 2.70 ERA and finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting.
Does Aaron Boone Deserve Tenure? — Baseball Prospectus
In 1989, the college rock band Too Much Joy released a cautionary song called “Bums.” “Making fun of bums,” they sang, “bad karma thing to do.” If this is correct then it also almost certainly applies to rooting for someone to lose their job and thereby possibly join the ranks of the downwardly mobile. This poses a bit of a trap, because no doubt there are karmic exceptions for those who use their jobs to harm others, but the whole problem with Yankees manager Aaron Boone is that he’s harmless. What in other contexts would be a virtue is, in the dugout, a massive fault. It’s tedious, this repetition of a milquetoast manager and good but flawed teams, but the Yankees will be serving the same breakfast again next year. Whenever baseball is next played, Boone will join the list of managers who have been employed by the same team for 10 or more consecutive seasons (beginning in 1900). As Sparky Anderson once pointed out, there are reasons for changing managers even when his results have been perfectly acceptable. He didn’t say familiarity breeds contempt; he said they just get sick of looking at your face, but the meaning is the same. Similarly, a manager who delivers a solid but stagnant product might be valuable in some contexts, but invigoration requires a change for a simple self-evident, almost childish reason: If he coulda, he woulda, but he hasn’t, so he can’t. That said, it’s not clear that innovation is something that’s even required of managers these days. That it isn’t being asked of the Yankees manager seems obvious from the attempt to give him plug-and-play rosters which are then allowed to drag the team downwards when they don’t work out. Consider third base, a position that didn’t work out for either the Yankees (.215/.271/.358) or the Mariners (.197/.288/.294). For the M’s, the primary problem was their best options kept getting hurt. For the Yankees it was that they didn’t have a best option. The Mariners flailed at the problem, giving six different players at least 10 starts at the hot corner. The Yankees persisted with the McMahon/Amed Rosario platoon except for a couple of brief periods in which McMahon was on the IL. The substitute was José Caballero, a player who enlarges himself in small doses but shrinks with more exposure. That was it. That was all they tried. Was the wide-eyed terror Boone’s, Brian Cashman’s, or both? Given just how many managers there have been since the start of the 20th century and how few of them have been granted Boone’s sort of tenure, it’s worth looking at the divergent CVs of those who have received it. First, here are the 24 ten-year men who won at least a single World Series and the year of their tenure in which they won it:
Rays juntó todas las piezas y avanza a la Serie Mundial — Baseball Prospectus
Dos años después de haber quedado hecho pedazos, Tropicana Field se convirtió en la casa del ganador del banderín.
Choices, Choices — Baseball Prospectus
The Milwaukee Brewers have a difficult decision on their hands. Brandon Woodruff, one of the team’s best starters and past postseason heroes, hasn’t pitched in a game since the Fourth of July, an outing that saw him pulled with two outs in the fourth, unable to throw a fastball. The report afterwards was the dreaded shoulder discomfort, and after a couple of weeks and a couple of inspections, he submitted himself to season-ending right shoulder capsule surgery. Except that it wasn’t, somehow. A month later, Woodruff began a throwing program, and a month after that he was targeting an optimistic (on multiple levels) World Series return. At least half of that optimism turns out to have been justified. Now, with the deadline looming, with some bullpens and a live BP under his belt—he threw between 90 and 92 mph, a hair under where he sat all year—Matt Arnold and Pat Murphy will have to perform some heavy math. Roster rules declare that “a club may request permission from the commissioners’s office to replace a player who is injured during the course of the series,” which is just loose enough a wording to allow for multiple interpretations. If Woodruff were to suffer a setback after being placed on the roster, is that a new injury? Is it a recurrence of an existing injury? What are the odds the league rejects the application? Is Woodruff’s upside worth the potential risk of playing a man short, 170 games into the season? We don’t know. Arnold and Murphy barely know, with all the information at their disposal; all they can do is extrapolate, filter the data through their minds and hearts. And the calculation isn’t as simple as assembling the best 26 players on the roster, comparing Woodruff to whichever reliever they’d have to drop, estimating the odds of the former being healthy and effective, and landing on a number. There are other factors, as teams have demonstrated all October.
Let Us Know If You’ve Seen Sponge’s Stolen Guitars — Defector
Brian Evenson Will Mess With Your Head — Defector
A Cool Night — Defector
Defector’s Completely Decentralized NBA Season Preview Has Now Been Recentralized — Defector
Basketball Game Interrupts Shit-Talk Session Between Luka Doncic And Yaxel Lendeborg — Defector

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