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These are the sports moments from 2024 that the Defector staff enjoyed.
Shohei Ohtani’s Game 4 Home Run
I was blessed with a multitude of beautiful sports experiences this year: watching my alma mater get a football title; being alive for a Detroit Lions win I worried might never come; downing Fireball in Brooklyn after the Liberty pulled off an excruciating Game 5 triumph; cheering for my No. 1 diva Aryna Sabalenka up close in the first round, then very far away in the semifinals, as she earned that elusive U.S. Open victory. But if we define “moment” as, say, 10 seconds or less, there’s nothing that will stick with me longer than the Shohei Othani dong that opened Game 4 of the NLCS.
Ohtani’s dinger was the first MLB playoff at-bat that I ever witnessed live, and I did so as a fan of the Mets. This was unfortunate, because Game 4 was a bad night for them. In the delirious cold of their Queens ballpark, New York fell 10-2 to go into a 3-1 series hole. Even though a few stragglers who stayed for all nine innings got an optimistic “Mets in seven!” chant going, I will remember this crowd primarily for the woman who lit up a cigarette next to me in our emptied-out back row during the bottom of the eighth.
But when the place was still packed, Ohtani swung at the second pitch he saw and blasted a ball all the way to the bullpens in right center. To say that the ball “flew” is no cliché. From way high up, it actually seemed like it was gliding on air for several seconds. I was stunned, annoyed, and embarrassed that I had to be mad about such a beautiful act.
I’d seen Ohtani twice before, back-to-back in 2021 when I was in Michigan and chasing Miguel Cabrera’s 500th homer. On the second night, he was almighty, pitching eight innings of one-run ball and demolishing his 40th home run of the year in the top half of his final frame. The Detroit crowd cheered; we had to acknowledge that we’d never even imagined seeing anything like this.
None of the Mets fans cheered on that October night, and for good reason. But a few months removed, with the suspense and the stress now a memory, I feel a certain gratitude for that dong. Ohtani is probably the best baseball player I’ll ever live to see, and now I’m lucky enough to have two stories about an amazing thing I watched him do in an enemy ballpark.
I can’t wait for Juan Soto to top them both in 2025. – Lauren Theisen
Steph Curry In The Olympic Gold Medal Game
Every one of the Big Three took their turn carrying the team through some unexpectedly hairy moments. The rest of the world is catching up. We are no longer global bullies, but we still have the living legends. When things got iffy against Serbia and France, we had LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Steph Curry. The other team did not, and that was the difference.
It was Curry, only making his Olympic debut at age 36 thanks to ill-timed injury luck, who took over down the stretch in the gold medal game, nailing a series of increasingly absurd threes in a two-minute span to keep the U.S. out in front. “The devil named Curry is hurting us,” if you were French. If you were American, it was the most purely joyous moment in sports since … well, I genuinely can’t name another quite like this. A title is one thing, but you’re still on a relative island there. A world championship is something you can share and celebrate with 99 percent of the people you know, and on a Saturday afternoon on Twitter in one of that site’s last brilliant moments, it was a party. NBA Twitter, haters and grumps and freaks all, set aside their differences. A nation bonded by increasingly few things embraced its finest athletes. Their embittered hardcourt battles of the last decade were remembered fondly, as prelude to this, the joining of forces for perhaps the last time the U.S. could boast unchallenged dominance. I cheered, I texted everyone I knew, and then, without warning, I found myself tearing up. The gold medal was expected, but France 2024 proved to be about more than that. It was a victory lap for an era of American basketball. – Barry Petchesky
Tadej Pogačar’s Rampage
Tadej Pogačar spent his 2024 campaign—a bloodthirsty masterpiece, the best single season on a bike in decades and maybe ever, a monument to competitive spirit—alone. All year, from his first ride in Tuscany to his last in Lombardy, Pogačar won over and over again, often by attacking from counties away from the finish line and daring whole other teams of riders to chase him down. This is what will stick with me about Pogačar’s season: It’s one thing to win 25 races in a single season, but it’s something else to ride as if the accreted wisdom and best practices of a century of bike racing do not apply to you, and to be right.
The Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia wins are the headliners here, with good reason, though the example more indicative of his dominance was everything he did in one-day races, especially those held after July. Pogačar raced eight single-day races, winning six, including two Monuments and a World Championship, and finishing seventh and third in the other two. When he skipped the Olympics because the Slovenian Federation practiced Girlfriend Disrespect, Pogačar was free to target the World Championships. After going from 81 kilometers out at Strade Bianche and 34 kilometers at Liege-Bastogne-Liege, the only question was when he would make his move at Worlds. Even after the world had seen him rip Jonas Vingegaard’s heart out and win six Tour de France stages, he had another surprise in store. Pogačar went from 101 kilometers out. It was not a pure solo effort, as he bridged up to and then burned the breakaway, then towed Pavel Sivakov around for another 20 kilometers, but it was close enough. He did it himself, and it earned him men’s cycling’s first Triple Crown since 1987.
Cycling is not supposed to work like this. What makes the sport so tactically fascinating is that while only one rider ever wins a race, collective strength is always supposed to triumph over individual talent. The ways riders and teams negotiate that disparity is ever-shifting, but there’s no scripting any race because of the elements of bravery and surprise. At least, all that applied before this year. Pogačar is the best rider in the world, but he knows what it’s like to lose, and he’s taken that pain and turned it outward on the rest of the cycling world.
To win that many races and punish all your rivals, over and over again, well past the point of anything we have seen in decades, you have to want to destroy them. You have to race with an irrational competitive will, and be prepared to pay the price if you go down in flames. Pogačar almost self-immolated on the road to Zurich at Worlds, winning by 34 seconds. That’s somehow more impressive to me than the multi-minute wins he enjoyed at Lombardia or Strade Bianche, because he inched as close as he did all year to annihilation. It was beautiful and profane. – Patrick Redford
Francisco Lindor Did It
When I covered the New York Mets’ run to the 2015 World Series several jobs ago, I would take little breaks. My credential gave me access to the postgame interview room but not the locker room, a media-only entrance at which I once watched a displeased Mike Francesa pass through a metal detector, and a spot of my own in the overflow media room set up in what was ordinarily a fancy steam-table dining area. I was in there with my fellow smaller-time outlets and a few random ESPN types. One of my most vivid memories of the experience was trying to eat the messy Italian sandwich—the credential came with a voucher that covered most but not all of the cost—that I had before every game in a way that wouldn’t offend Pedro Gomez.
Most of the other memories came during those breaks, which I took whenever I felt too charged up to maintain the bare-minimum professional standard of Not Losing My Shit. I would leave the press area, buy one beer, and drink it at the most moderate possible pace while power-walking around the stadium, taking advantage of the opportunity to cheer for the team I care about, which was far deeper into October than I’d imagined was possible, in a way that I couldn’t while ostensibly on the clock. I was aware that this was a little bit deranged, but it was what I needed to do to remain normal enough to do my job. I didn’t really think about how weirdly I might have been acting if I didn’t have those obligations to my work and Pedro Gomez.
That was 2015, and this is the very end of 2024, but I now have my answer. All kinds of things were happening to me during the doubleheader between the Mets and Braves, played a day after the rest of the MLB regular season ended, and which wound up punching both teams’ tickets for the postseason. In the first game, the Mets were baffled and beaten for seven innings, then stormed into the lead, then duffed it away in brutal fashion, and then took it back for good thanks to a go-ahead home run by Francisco Lindor. All of the action happened over the stretch of 12 outs, and while my story about the game hints at what was going on in my apartment that afternoon—doing what can only be described as Stress Push-Ups, groaning, things of that nature—my recollection of it is all blacked out now. I was sober as a judge, the sun was still high in the sky, but it is also all gone.
I cared about this Mets team a great deal. In retrospect, I was putting a lot on all this, and loading various crowding and clamoring anxieties and longshot hopes, none of which really had anything to do with the Mets, onto my wish that the team could somehow keep fighting its way off the slab. Until they finally ran out of magic in the way such teams almost always do, they did it.
Even as it was happening, it felt like a dream. I tried to lean into that, and to enjoy the implausible new possibilities that dreamspace afforded. It was like I was powerwalking around the stadium for two straight weeks, but instead of making me tired, each revolution made me more convinced that I would never die. It felt great, probably. It seems like something I’d enjoy.
But there is one thing that I remember, that I have confirmed with my wife. She heard me say it, loud and clear, while on a work call in the back of the apartment. That’s regrettable, but it is nice to have this memory affirmed. When Lindor hit that go-ahead homer, I said, “Oh my god, he did it.” You can’t really know what’s going to come out of your mouth in a moment like that, but I feel like it checks out even beyond my wife’s confirmation. It seems like a reasonable enough response to watching an impossible thing become possible—not a dream becoming reality, but somehow just continuing to be a dream. – David Roth
Nights With Nikola Jokic
Watching your team win a title can turn you into a real annoying guy. When the Nuggets won their first NBA title in 2023, I promised myself that I would spend the rest of the Nikola Jokic era being a chill dude. I pictured myself, fingers interlaced behind my head, watching the next half-decade or so of Nuggets basketball without a worry anywhere near my mind. Everything is gravy after you win a title.
I have since learned that I am not a chill dude. Last season’s playoff collapse made me so mad, and my coworkers can attest to how annoyingly pessimistic I’ve been about the Nuggets so far this season. Multiple times a week, at roughly 11:48 p.m. ET, I will slink into our company Slack’s basketball channel to type something like “Jamal Murray needs a fucking BRAIN transplant.” I usually do this shortly before the Nuggets stage a dramatic fourth-quarter comeback and win the game.
I’m trying to get better about this, because it really is all gravy after your team wins a title, especially when Nikola Jokic is still on that team. Jokic is having the best season of his career so far, and I have found myself more appreciative than ever of his regular presence in my life. As the rest of the team has shrunk around him, Jokic has only grown more fierce. Sure, it sucks to watch your favorite team, a supposed title contender, lose to the goddamn Washington Wizards, but oh man is it fun to watch Jokic put up 56-16-8 on a Saturday night. It’s even more fun to tune in the next night and watch him beat the Hawks with a 48-14-8. Even his bad games can only get so bad. On Sunday night, as the Nuggets were getting trounced by the shit-ass Pelicans (they staged a dramatic fourth-quarter comeback and won in overtime, of course), I couldn’t stop talking about how disengaged Jokic looked. He finished with 27 points, 10 assists, and 13 rebounds.
Jokic has always been the main draw for any Nuggets game, but his pull through the first quarter of the 2024-25 season is as strong as it’s ever been. It’s hard to believe that I can still find new ways to be impressed by him, to still feel the urge to stay up past midnight on a weeknight because he might do something that I’ve never seen him do before, or produce a stat line that I could have never imagined. It’s pretty cool to have this guy around. – Tom Ley
The 2024 WNBA Finals
The year blessed me with more great sports moments than I can blurb. The Detroit Lions won a playoff game for the first time in my life, Blake Corum spun and scored en route to Michigan’s national championship, the Detroit Lions won a playoff game for the second time in my life, and that was just January. Later would come the Tigers’ whirlwind run to the postseason, and a few low-key but still-special memories: my first time seeing live tennis, on a cool evening in Montreál; my first NWSL game in Kansas City. What I found most meaningful, personally and professionally, was the chance to cover this year’s WNBA Finals between the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx.
These Finals capped off the noisiest WNBA season in recent memory, and easily the most difficult one I’d covered in five seasons at Defector. Any eager, welcoming spirit I’d taken into the summer slowly left me with each day’s new mini-drama. What was the point? It seemed like these games, these players, and my blogs about them were only a backdrop against which internet users could fight. I freaked out and yelled at my editor for asking me to blog a Pat McAfee news cycle. I freaked out and yelled at a commenter for stirring up shit about Angel Reese on a feature I was really proud of, about her game on the offensive glass. I was becoming this sour, prickly person I no longer knew. The sport that had felt like my only blogging home now brought on a sense of disorientation.
A week before I left for New York to cover Game 1 of the Finals, I filed a long essay about the sport’s online discourse, which took place on terms ever more abstract and unreal. But then suddenly, blessedly, I was roaming austere arena hallways, fishing through jacket pockets for folded-up box scores and credentials, poking at media meals, standing on the baseline. I was taking furious notes at warmups, practice, pressers. I was taking furious notes in-game about OREB MARGIN?, COURTNEY WILLIAMS 4:23, STEWIE BLOCK 3Q LOL, NYARA MINS, (indecipherable), LEAD CHANGE, CHECK PHEE ON STEWIE #S and oh my god, basketball was so incredibly real. The mere corporeality of Jonquel Jones and Alanna Smith zapped some life back into me. So did the perfect crowds in Brooklyn and Minneapolis, who together enjoyed maybe the best WNBA Finals series ever played, one whose daggers and nervy overtimes I won’t soon forget. It can be a real treat to touch grass, or hardwood. Nothing beats the WNBA IRL. – Maitreyi Anantharaman
Mondo Duplantis’s World Record
A weird discovery during the Summer Olympics was that I was the only person in the world, apparently, who did not know about Armand “Mondo” Duplantis. This was embarrassing because I work at a sports site, and doubly so because David Roth had written about him in 2022, and I try to read as many of our blogs as I can. Maybe I did read that one, then put it out of my mind. But when the pole vaulting portion of the Olympics came around, I quickly became the world’s biggest Mondohead.
I love track and field at the Olympics, because who doesn’t? I was locked in as Duplantis steamrolled his way through the competition, securing gold early enough that he had three attempts to break his own world record. It’s wild to see an Olympic event break down from its usual format into something more like an exhibition. Even the other pole vaulters appeared to be rooting for him to break the record.
At 24, the Swede-via-Louisiana had already broken the Olympic record of 6.03 meters by .07, but he had those aforementioned attempts to up the ante. Duplantis had set the previous world record of 6.24 meters in April at the Xiamen Diamond League event in China, and he had three tries to get up to 6.25, for what would be his ninth time breaking the world record.
While seeing a new world record in any sport is exciting on its own, the built-in drama of the three tries made this the must-watch moment of the Olympics to me, save for maybe Gojira’s opening ceremony bit. After the first try, in which he just failed to clear the bar, I was glued to the screen. When the second try failed, by what seemed to my untrained eye to be by millimeters, I was ready to barf from nerves. The moment he landed after the third try, a new world record in his grasp, he cathartically sprinted to the crowd to embrace his partner, his friends, and his family. Thousands of miles away, I too wanted to sprint around the house, because Mondo’s record-breaking jump was the coolest thing I saw this year. The Olympics are a mess in a lot of ways, but there’s no event that can quite capture these moments of individual athletic brilliance and broadcast them to the whole world. I hadn’t known the name Mondo Duplantis until he became all I could think about for an entire day. – Luis Paez-Pumar
Li Wenwen’s Olympic Lift
As someone who doesn’t really follow sports, my favorite way to watch the Olympics is to look at the list of events and watch the more obscure ones that I also think might include queer women athletes. Some examples: shot put, hammer throw, skateboarding, and weightlifting. This strategy doesn’t always result in lesbians—it often does—but invariably spotlights some of the most physically intimidating women athletes, who are my favorite athletes to watch. My absolute favorite event this year was the women’s +81kg weightlifting. Every single athlete in this category was an absolute beast, lifting unimaginable amounts of weight.
When the first athlete, Iuniarra Sipaia of Samoa, succeeded in a starting snatch of 100kg, my jaw was already on the floor—that’s 220 freaking pounds! But then the athletes kept coming and lifting bigger and bigger weights. Whenever Lisseth Ayoví of Ecuador drove up the snatch, her movements looked utterly buoyant, as if the weights were flying. I was rooting for everyone. Eventually, only the heaviest hitters were on the leaderboard. Park Hye-jeong of South Korea had succeeded in her second attempt at a 127kg snatch, and it looked like she was going to take it all, with just one lift to come.
Then, with a guttural scream, 24-year-old Li Wenwen of China ascended to the platform for her opening snatch of 130kg. She wore big round black glasses in her official Olympic headshot, giving her an almost bashful appearance. Onstage she was measured, even stern. She shushed her legions of fans, screamed again, lifted, and nailed it. Her next snatch of 136kg, which was 5kg above Park in second place—nailed it. Li opted not to take her last lift. Why would she risk injuring herself when she was already a floor above the competition?
Li made the clean-and-jerk look easy, sticking 167kg and then 173kg. After the second—accompanied by another celebratory scream—she walked off and embraced her coach, a man who stood several heads below her. Park, in second place again, attempted 173kg and failed, cementing Li’s first-place finish. The cameras cut to Li, bursting out in tears after realizing she had once again secured gold.
There was only one question on everyone’s mind now: Would Li attempt to best herself and go for a 174kg snatch? She walked out, and the crowd was going berserk. This time, Li egged them on, leading them in a clap and making a heart shape with extraordinarily powerful arms. From the sidelines, her coach clapped too. Li walked up to the weights but, at the last moment, turned around and ran offstage, instead grabbing her coach by the hand and soon hitching him up as if he were a baby. Li ran across the stage holding her coach, the two took a bow, and then Li ran off giggling. The crowd was crying. I was crying. I knew from then on that I would watch Li Wenwen lift anything! – Sabrina Imbler
NLDS Game 2
It is painful to write, now, about how good I felt on this day. As the long days of summer began to shorten, my friend Dana and I worried back and forth. After the All-Star break, the Philadelphia Phillies didn’t look right. They were not very good. They were in first place in the division, and a couple of wins away from the best record in baseball. But they didn’t look that good. We watched them every night. We went to the games. The team we saw in August was not the team of April that felt like they were on a rocket ship to the moon. It felt doomed from the beginning of the playoffs, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that they lost the first game of the NLDS to the Mets at home. But it still didn’t feel good!
We had tickets to Game 2, which ended up being the only game the Phillies would win in the series. But boy, was it a game. The lead kept changing, and almost all of the momentum came from our beautiful himbo Nick Castellanos. He got a hit in the fourth to start the change, but they lost the lead. They gained it again! They lost it again! By this point I had drunk two tallboys of Topo Chico, eaten nothing, and had so much adrenaline pumping through my body that I stood the whole game and never felt tired. When Castellanos hit a ball into the outfield grass for a walk-off win, the stadium was louder than anywhere I have ever been. I was screaming at the top of my lungs and could not hear myself. It was the best game I’ve ever seen in person, and I will cherish it for a long time. – Kelsey McKinney
Synchronized Diving
Simon must’ve been in his crib. It couldn’t have been long since he moved from the bassinet in our room. It could’ve been the first time we hung out there at night after he went to bed. We were watching the Olympics. We’d managed to avoid spoilers for anything that happened that day before NBC’s prepackaged broadcast—easy for my wife, a little harder for me. Simon helped me do it; I was still on parental leave. If it was too hot to walk him in the park, we probably went to the mall. Once Plymouth Meeting Mall charged him the full price when we went on the merry-go-round. He’s been on two carousels now, and didn’t spit up this time.
More competitive than carousel-riding was women’s three-meter synchronized springboard diving, which we watched with increasingly rapt attention. My wife and I love to watch at least a little of a minor sport scrolling through the channels. If it’s a gimmick sport, we will definitely stop. I am now aware of the sport of Omegaball—soccer with three teams at once. We came in halfway through that one and attempted to figure out the rules for 15 minutes. I thought we’d figured it out. When another episode aired next and rules were explained, we were further away than I could have imagined. I still don’t get how it works.
Synchronized diving was quite a bit easier to follow, but anything we had questions about was answered by analyst Cynthia Potter. She and play-by-play announcer Ted Robinson actually had us focused, especially because two Americans were in the mix for a medal. Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook ended up taking the silver, with three-time world champs Chang Yani and Chen Yiwen winning gold.
Those two dominated the competition wire to wire. It was a chance to watch some dives that after a long day I was describing as “beautiful.” Then there was lots of intrigue around silver and bronze. The U.S. pulled away in the end. But, oh, the bronze medal.
The Australian team of Anabelle Smith and Maddison Keeney looked locked in for bronze before the final dive. But Smith came off the side of the board, and the UK team took bronze instead. We gasped so loudly that I thought we’d wake up Simon; I felt a mixture of joy and horror. For me, this was the most surprising single moment in sports this year. I never enjoyed watching them more in 2024 than when my wife and I couldn’t contain ourselves. – Dan McQuade
Get In There, Lewis
Sometimes I resent the soft arc that Formula 1 greats get in their later years. Of course it’s easier to enjoy the charms of a driver when they’re no longer dominating the field, but I find it a mark of weak will. If you don’t like them at “I was racing, I was faster, I passed him, I won,” then you don’t deserve their final podium after they’ve mellowed out with age.
Lewis Hamilton’s win at Silverstone will mean very little to the broad picture of his legacy. It came at the awkward cusp of two eras, and will define neither of them. The later stretch of Hamilton’s career will be determined by his years at Ferrari; his time at Mercedes is already written in six-with-an-asterisk World Championships. This was more-or-less irrelevant to the emotional valence of the moment, which came after nearly three years without a win, in the form of a home race victory in the wet. It was racecraft mastery, matched by the luck necessary for a classic win. The win bypassed, for a moment, corporate politics, legacy, and any tacit rooting for Ferrari as an indicator for the future, to somehow make me feel romantic about Formula fucking 1.
That’s another cadence to the soft, late-career arc that I dislike: I’ll eulogize Hamilton’s F1 career when it’s over, and not a second earlier. There was a goodbye at Silverstone, but not for Hamilton’s greatness. While he also won the very next race in Spa to make for a tidy 105 wins in total—he inherited the win after teammate George Russell was disqualified due to a regulations violation; now that’s a classic F1 victory—Silverstone was the last one he won with Mercedes on track.
While Hamilton has bonds with mechanics, engineers, and executives within his team, fans really should place next to no value in whatever corporate livery their favorite driver is wearing. But aesthetics have power, and visual memory bends accordingly. The important parts of Hamilton won’t change as he joins Ferrari, but we’ll likely never get this version of Lewis Hamilton, dressed in teal and silver or black, again. Does it matter? Maybe not, but the trick in sports is to believe for just one moment that it really does. – Kathryn Xu
Simone Biles At The Olympics
If the Barbie movie existed in the real world, it would be a gymnastics meet. On the mat, women are the biggest stars, command the largest audiences, and get the loudest applause. There are sparkles and hair bows aplenty, nobody cares if you use the word “like,” and the fans might or might not bother to stick around to watch the men. In gymnastics, even when a man does break through, the American public can’t be bothered to learn his full name. He’s just Pommel Horse Guy.
Perhaps this is why the culture around gymnastics for so long remained stuck on a certain portrayal of girlhood for its athletes: someone who’s quiet, young, skinny, white—someone who takes a beating but still follows commands and never complains. Not because that’s what’s best for women or because there’s any science suggesting this approach produces the best athletes, but because that’s what’s best for men and so is inherently correct. If women were to have any sort of power, it still had to be on men’s terms. Even in gymnastics.
There was a certain sense to how much Simone Biles, on the cusp of claiming as her own the last of the gymnastics record books, kept talking about her age. In the third episode of the Netflix series Simone Biles Rising, it came up again and again: The greatest, at age 27, felt old. She made sure to qualify this with a laugh or smile to the camera and say, yes, she just meant old for a gymnast, but it’s difficult to not map her experience onto any woman’s life. People do look at you differently at age 30, and even more so after age 40, and that’s before factoring in for many of us the infamous biological ticking clock. The pressure to stay young and agreeable is everywhere; gymnastics just transforms it from a steady background hum into a crescendo.
Biles’s final moments competing in Paris stuck with me the most this year, and still do. (Getting to see them live in Paris did help.) As much credit as she received for what she accomplished on the mat—first woman to land one of the most difficult vaults in the world; first woman to win two Olympic all-around golds since Věra Čáslavská in the 1960s; most decorated U.S. gymnast in Olympic history; fighting for better training conditions for U.S. gymnasts; testifying before Congress about sexual abuse in her sport—it won’t be enough. As much fame and wealth as she garnered, it won’t be nearly what she should have been paid in a fair marketplace; Sportico estimated her official “winnings” in this Olympic year at $135,000, but most of her $11 million income came from endorsements.
Near the end of the Netflix documentary, Biles asked aloud, “What happens in life now?” The final clips shown are of Biles, not basking in her medals or magazine covers, but meandering around her under-construction house. It includes an office for her, though she isn’t sure what she’ll use it for, but it will have a computer. Gymnasts practice their flips and twists over and over again until they become routine. Perhaps now Biles can free herself from the unofficial but very real role of being the best gymnast in the world. Sure, it looked cool, but this isn’t a Hollywood movie. Now Biles can have for herself a little more time that is less choreographed, and more unknown. – Diana Moskovitz
The White Sox, In Their Totality
Because we spend our summers in the quaint vacation hamlet known as Bastardtown, we found the 2024 Chicago White Sox deeply compelling in ways that could not be matched even by the 2024 New York Jets, 2024 San Jose Sharks, 2024 Detroit Pistons, and even the 2024 Detroit Mercy Titans of the Horizon League, who didn’t win their first game of the 2023 season until Valentine’s Day of 2024. None of them became a national figure of fun quite like the White Sox.
Simply by going out day after day, losing in ways both spectacular and mundane, and then returning the next day to do it again, they challenged our very notion of record-keeping, which in baseball is like trying to slap riders and amendments on the law of gravity.
Their 41-121 record was not the worst record in baseball history, and no, your personal recollections are not the same as an agreed-upon standard for comparison. Other teams won fewer games, lost more, had a poorer winning percentage, lost more games in succession, and finished in last place by a greater margin than these Sox, and most of those teams were the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. When it was all done, they hadn’t relocated to Narnia like the Nevermore Oakland Athletics. They stayed and took their medicine, even if that medicine was just more toxins and injected with a javelin.
And because the White Sox made you consider the increased mortality rates of sports franchises in the age of rampant tanking, you are now prepared for the most modern version yet: the current Washington Wizards, who are preparing to make a serious run at the worst record in pro basketball history. They are still pacing slightly ahead of the 2011 Tulsa Shock, who finished 3-31 and lost those games by an average of 18 points per game, but these Wizards have the kind of lack of gumption that will make them a national byword by Presidents’ Day. The lesson? If you’re going to go, go big. If you can’t go big, go bad. And go bad hard. – Ray Ratto
The Bees At Indian Wells
Patrick spotted it before I did, from across the stadium at Indian Wells: a vast, hazy plague cloud descending onto the court. It sent fans running for cover. It attacked poor Carlos Alcaraz and sent him scurrying into the tunnel for safety. It condensed itself on one of the Spidercams that slide along a web of cable above the stadium. What was it? 2,500 to 3,000 bees. The tennis match was suspended. On the broadcast: “PLAY SUSPENDED – BEE INVASION.”
More compelling than the initial descent was the manner in which the bees were addressed. The Spidercam was retracted to one corner of the stadium, which was evacuated. Police and security would not allow fans to draw any closer to the equipment, which was by then slathered in a dense layer, like a cake generously frosted in bees. They were waiting for the arrival of a special individual. I will never forget what Patrick and I then witnessed, from feet away.
A man named Lance Davis, who resembled a roadie for a hair metal band, and who wore nothing more technical than a long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and wraparound sunglasses, single-handedly removed the bees from the premises. He vacuumed them up into a small cage he had brought with him. Where they could not be vacuumed, he picked them by hand, plucking them out of the most remote crevices of the camera. He got stung—a few times on the hands, and once on the cheek—but he’s been doing bee removal since 1984 and he gave up on protective equipment a decade into the work. He moved calmly, purposefully, humanely. “You don’t think about it,” he told us afterward. “Because if you think about it, you dwell on it too much. And something bad could happen. So it’s good. I just keep on working through it. And eventually I get all the bees.”
The image of Davis vacuuming and plucking away a feral colony of bees, with the sun-drenched San Jacinto mountains in the backdrop, was easily the most arresting sports image of the year for me. Afterward Davis jogged a victory lap in the stadium, to a roar of approval, and shook hands with the players. He threw the cage of bees onto his white pickup, which read “Killer Bee Removal” on the side, and then he drove away, his duty fulfilled. It was the most impressive performance of the 2024 professional tennis season. The 100-mph forehand Alcaraz hit upon resumption of the match was pretty good, too. But could Carlos Alcaraz pick up bees with his bare hands? “I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little bit afraid of the bees,” said the eventual champion. – Giri Nathan
Hayfield’s Fake Extra Point
My greatest sports moment of the year came on a fake extra point in a blowout high school football game in October between Hayfield and Falls Church. I’m still mad about it.
Perhaps you had to be there and care too much about what was going on with the Hayfield football program this season to find the play worthy of any commemoration. I was, and I cared too much about how the Hayfield principal and his athletic director thought they could get away with building a superteam at a public school with no football tradition, and I couldn’t and still can’t figure out why the superintendent of schools in Fairfax County publicly sanctioned their dumbass plan. Hayfield administrators poached all the players and coaches from Freedom High School, the reigning Virginia state champion, and also took in several high-level players from the top private school programs in the area as transfers. The result was the most scandalous season of high school football I’ve ever witnessed, and I wrote up the whole sordid story for Defector in November.
The Falls Church game was the first time I got to see Hayfield play in person, and, boy, did the game live down to expectations. Hayfield had a 21-0 lead after their first two offensive plays from scrimmage, with the Hawks defense having recovered a fumble in the end zone for a touchdown. Coming out of the half up 42-0, Hayfield kept its starters in. The Falls Church kicker appeared to intentionally boot the second-half kickoff straight out of bounds to prevent a return, just as the team’s punter had been putting every punt out of bounds. The Hawks, of course, scored a touchdown on their first play from scrimmage in the third quarter, making the score 48-0. On the subsequent conversion, Hayfield set up for a kick, but the Hawks holder, a well-regarded transfer from nationally renowned DeMatha, caught the snap, got up from his crouch, and bolted to the right, while another well-regarded transfer lined up at tackle took off on a surprise pass route. The fake worked, putting Hayfield up 50-0 with almost two full quarters to go. The state’s mercy rule, which comes into play whenever a team is up by 35 points or more in the second half, kicked in, and Falls Church spent much of the fourth quarter taking delay-of-game penalties to run out the clock. Hayfield had just three offensive plays from scrimmage in the half, and got TDs on all three.
I happen to have attended (and, what the hell, played for) Falls Church back in the day. A combo of our sad athletic history and being true to my school means that I’ve watched plenty of blowout losses. But if I’ve ever attended a sadder athletic spectacle than Hayfield/Falls Church, it doesn’t come to mind.
Hayfield went on to go 10-0 against fellow public schools, and outscore the opposition 638-20. The Hawks’ march to a state championship only ended because a local newspaper, the Fairfax Times, found text messages showing the athletic director joking about a plan to classify some portion of the two dozen or so transfers from Freedom as homeless, just so they could retain athletic eligibility and play for this pre-fab superteam without actually living in Hayfield’s district. Those texts forced the superintendent to pull the Hawks out of the state playoffs.
Who expects a team up 48-0 to fake an extra point? Here’s a clip of the play. I get mad all over again whenever I watch it. This story ain’t over. – Dave McKenna
