Ray Ratto

I think we can all agree we got cheated last night, and to be technical about it, it was still last night—at least on the West Coast where the nice people live—when Freddie Freeman hit the 609th pitch of Game 3 of the 2025 World Series into the darkness beyond center field. We stayed up as a nation…

It’s one thing to open your season with a 40-point, 15-rebound masterwork, but it is quite another to discover in short order that such deeds are in fact “the least you can do.” This is the situation in which Victor Wembanyama now finds himself three days into his third season as the NBA’s most visually…

It’s not the sort of career-capping achievement anyone had in mind, but Bill Belichick really has done something amazing at North Carolina. He has somehow managed to make his job, which was supposed to be coaching the school’s football team but quickly revealed itself as something more like turning the Tar Heels into a version…

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Brent Pry was technically the second coach to be fired this year (UCLA’s canning of DeShaun Foster beat Pry’s by a few hours) after…

There are two ways to become popular as a sports owner. The harder of the two is to win a championship and not act like an ass about it; the simpler one is firing someone your customers dislike. At Tottenham Hotspur, the first is apparently out of the question, which meant the owners went to…

The Los Angeles Clippers are alleged to have set up a no-show job for star forward Kawhi Leonard to help convince him to sign with the team. And not just any no-show job, but a $28 million, multi-year gig with a carbon credit/tree-planting company that has since gone bankrupt, and whose co-founder has been indicted…

Psychoanalyzing Jerry Jones is the safest and cheapest dollar there is to be made in all of sports punditry. The template is already there, and everyone uses it. He’s old. He’s powerful. He’s competitive. He’s spiteful. He’s a megalomaniac with the tongue of an auctioneer. Check, check, check, check, and double check. Thus, his decision…

Some people are fans of the Detroit Lions. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Detroit Lions. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Dan Campbell and some other stuff. Your 2024 record: 15-2. Actually, 15-3, and here’s where the…

There are few things in Podworld, or any other world for that matter, that will erode your faith in the value of a pastime quite like people claiming that said pastime plays a salutary role in the world as a whole. Silly things, sports very much included, can do a person good; arguing that your […]

Admit it: The Milwaukee Brewers were beginning to torque you off, right? Every night a win, every night a different way, every win powered by metrics that make them look like the deteriorating St. Louis Cardinals (2025 version) instead of the best team in baseball. Until the streak came to an end on Sunday, the […]