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🏀 Wemby wins DPOY: Victor Wembanyama ran away with the NBA's Defensive Player of the Year award, earning all 100 first-place votes to become the first unanimous winner since the award's inception in 1982-83.
🎾 Alcaraz injury watch: Two-time defending French Open champion Carlos Alcaraz is in danger of missing next month's tournament in Paris with a wrist injury. He's already pulled out of this week's Madrid Open, and is awaiting more tests before deciding on Roland Garros.
🏈 NFL stars get paid: The Cowboys gave Brandon Aubrey a four-year, $28 million extension, making him the league's highest-paid kicker. The 49ers gave All-Pro tackle Trent Williams a two-year, $50 million extension, making him the first non-QB to exceed $400 million in contracts.
🏀 Draft lottery odds set: The Wizards, Pacers and Nets all have a 14% chance of landing the No. 1 pick after the NBA set its draft lottery odds by breaking six ties among teams with the same records. The Jazz (11.5%), Kings (11.5%) and Grizzlies (9%) have the next-best odds.
⛳️ Farewell, Hawaii: The PGA Tour will not travel to Hawaii in 2027 for the first time in 56 years as it moves towards a revamped schedule that will shift the season-opening Tournament of Champions and Sony Open away from the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
With the Giants off to a 9-13 start, rookie manager Tony Vitello is finding his way through the ups and, perhaps more importantly, the downs of the MLB regular season. Because in this business, sometimes learning how to lose can be just as hard as figuring out how to win.
For the folks actually living it — players, staff, coaches — Major League Baseball is a binary endeavor. The sun rises. A game happens. You win or lose. Either way, the sun sets.
Yes, there can be silver linings in defeats or sour tastes after victories, but more often than not, one's happiness (or lack thereof) is defined by the result. That's the case for all professional sports, but MLB's near-daily regular-season schedule takes the dynamic to the extreme. There are 162 opportunities to revel in the ups or wallow in the downs.
Few professions operate this way, with such constant, tangible feedback. Each night, as heads hit pillows, the joys of that day's W or the frustrations of that day's L can often be the last thing to pass through a coach's or player's weary mind.
And so, the most reasonable approach becomes to smooth it all down, to avoid getting too high or too low, to focus instead on the bigger picture.
Over the years, this has turned into a well-worn, eye-roll-inducing cliché in the baseball world. But like many clichés, it is rooted in truth. Really, it's a survival mechanism, this performative even-keeled-ness. Ride the roller coaster at your own risk; better to flush it and move on.
New Giants manager Tony Vitello is learning this very crucial lesson on the job.
A college baseball lifer best known for turning the University of Tennessee into a Division I powerhouse, the 47-year-old is accustomed to winning at a preposterous rate.
In Knoxville, Vitello went 341-131 across eight seasons at the helm. That's a .722 clip, which, converted to a big-league campaign, would be a 117-45 season. He was even more prolific in the years preceding his surprise departure to San Francisco, running a 257-70 record over his final four seasons at Tennessee, good for a .785 winning percentage (127-35).
But things are different now. In part, that's because his 9-13 Giants have stumbled out of the gate, but it's mostly because MLB teams simply don't go 127-35. Vitello has never won more than 60 games or lost more than 27 in a single season. He will, barring enormous catastrophe, surpass both those marks this season.
For the top college programs, a typical regular season features 56 games. So each individual showdown quite literally means more within the context of an entire year. If MLB's regular season is about quality emerging over a large sample, SEC ball is about complete and total domination. Blink, and you've lost.
That means Vitello is used to acting aggressively and weaponizing his unshakable enthusiasm to animate his ballclub. But while that strategy worked wonders, won championships and turned him into a coaching icon, it's not easily replicable at the big-league level.
"To make a drastic move in college, when there's fewer games, might make sense," Vitello explained before a recent game. "With this, it's not necessarily do or die. We can maybe make this change, but let's not go crazy with this or that. It damn sure is a challenge."
The last word: "It's been very difficult [learning how to lose]," Vitello admitted when asked about this aspect of his transition. "It's something that I was warned about from some of my friends. You have to deal with it the right way. Otherwise it'll sink you."