Ray Ratto
Ray Ratto is a staff writer at Defector who covers sports through the lens of dysfunction, mismanagement, and the ways teams and leagues squander their advantages. He writes across major leagues - NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and college sports - returning to franchises and institutions that are chronically underperforming or poorly run. His archive shows regular columns at Defector dating back to at least 2022 and continuing through the 2026 seasons.
Bad Football! No!
Ratto’s football writing focuses on the NFL as an overcrowded spectacle built on bad games, unstable teams, and recurring scandal. He returns repeatedly to the Raiders, describing Maxx Crosby “back in football purgatory,” the franchise as an “ancient evil” that “demands blood,” and coaches like Antonio Pierce learning what “every Raiders coach gets” in a cycle of churn and disappointment. He contributes multiple “Why Your Team Sucks” entries on the Raiders, as well as pieces on their coaching firings and ownership maneuvering, treating the team as a case study in organizational malaise. Around the Super Bowl he writes about the Chiefs forcing the championship game to be great, the “Superb Owl” leadup that never quite materializes, and the NFL’s tendency to accumulate scandals it then has to “eat,” framing the league as both dominant and perpetually compromised. He also writes on Tom Brady’s quiet decline and his potential roles as owner or broadcaster, emphasizing how star power and celebrity intersect with the league’s business priorities.
The A’s Are A Poison Pill
Baseball coverage for Ratto often centers on the Oakland/Las Vegas A’s and other underachieving or mishandled clubs, treating them as symptoms of broader problems in MLB governance and ambition. He chronicles the A’s relocation saga in Las Vegas through headlines about relocation talks, a Vegas deal that might already be falling through, the team as a “poison pill,” and the idea that fans will flock to watch “awful baseball,” all emphasizing the disconnect between ownership plans and on-field quality. His columns on the American League focus on teams rearranging “deck chairs,” divisional races in which “no one should win the AL West,” and Septembers that reshape the league, highlighting how mediocrity and short-term thinking drive strategy as much as genuine contention. He writes about the Red Sox as possibly “infected” by whatever is wrong with the A’s and about MLB’s underachievers preparing to shuffle personnel, showing a tendency to connect specific clubs to systemic rot. Individual player pieces on figures like Rafael Devers and Pete Crow-Armstrong are framed as proof that “no one knows anything” and that young players can suddenly answer “every question,” using personalities to underscore how little control teams truly have over outcomes.
It’s Already Code Orange For The Philadelphia Flyers
Ratto’s hockey work leans toward teams mired in historical or self-inflicted problems, such as the Canadiens and Flyers, and the strange habits that keep them from winning.
He writes about “Code Orange” for the Philadelphia Flyers, treating their situation as already precarious before a season truly begins. In the Canadiens piece where they refuse to shoot the puck and make that reluctance “everybody’s problem,” he uses a single tactical quirk to illustrate how organizational choices can turn simple actions into entrenched failures. He appears on a hockey-focused podcast episode titled “Jurassic Hockey And Sticky Stuff, With Ray Ratto,” reinforcing that his perspective on the sport extends beyond game recaps into discussions of its culture and evolving style. Across these pieces, he uses specific teams to explore how tradition, stubbornness, and poor decision-making calcify into long-term losing environments.
How Can I Be A Good Parent If I’m Conflict-Avoidant?
Ratto also writes off-field essays that apply his sports sensibility to everyday life, often using humor and frustration as primary tools. In “How Can I Be A Good Parent If I’m Conflict-Avoidant?” he turns family dynamics into a kind of coaching problem, treating his own conflict avoidance as a tactical flaw to be examined plainly. For Defector’s “Dadfector” vertical he writes pieces like “God Help Me, My Son’s Marrying A Packers Shareholder,” bringing fan cultures, team loyalties, and family relationships into the same frame.
During “Rays Week” he contributes columns such as “When The Joy Of Suck Fades,” “Rays Go Undefeated In Rays Week,” and “And Now, The Raybag,” mixing mailbag formats, long-running in-jokes, and reflections on being stuck with flawed teams.
He also joins collaborative projects like the “Defector Reads A Book” discussion of “The Artist’s Way,” indicating a willingness to move beyond strict game coverage into broader cultural conversations with colleagues. These pieces show that he treats sports not just as competition but as a language for talking about work, family, and the struggle to care about things that rarely reward the effort.
4 more sports journalists.
Adair Reid
Adair Reid is a sports columnist for The Cavalier Daily who covers Virginia men’s programs with a blunt, fan-aware voice that treats them as long-term projects rather than one-off games. He focuses on trajectory, legacy and risk, using opinion columns to question coaching decisions and program strategy while grounding his arguments in recent results, records, tournament performance and roster realities. Men’s lacrosse is a recurring subject, and his work on the program’s coaching change shows how he uses a single decision to examine overall health, standards and competitive standing. He frames games in terms of stakes, identity and institutional expectations, emphasizing postseason implications, recruiting, national perception and alignment with a championship standard. He writes mostly in the first person only when needed, keeps the spotlight on institutional choices and brings analysis-first, evidence-based judgment to Virginia’s flagship men’s teams.
Adam Stern
Adam Stern covers the business of motorsports and combat sports at Sports Business Journal, focusing on how sponsorships, media deals and new events reshape racing and fighting. His beat includes NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1, NHRA, rallycross, UFC and boxing. He tracks brands, broadcasters, manufacturers, promoters and streaming platforms, with reporting on sponsorship strategy, rights deals, original content, series growth, team projects and technical regulations. He examines how Cadillac’s Formula 1 entry supports broader marketing aims, how F1 Academy builds commercial momentum and whether new MMA promotions can challenge UFC. His work includes short speed reads on deals and longer features on multi-party investments. He reports on the money and strategy behind the action, treating motorsports and combat sports as connected marketplaces shaped by branding, dealmaking and media innovation.
Albert Burneko
Albert Burneko writes about how systems of power bear down on ordinary people, using sports, politics, technology, food, and domestic life as entry points. He is an assignment editor and writer at Defector and part of its founding ownership group. His politics and capital reporting examines how policy, policing, and public rhetoric turn into harm for specific people, centering victims and vulnerable people. He also covers artificial intelligence, media criticism, and technology’s effects, asking who benefits and who absorbs the costs. His domestic writing focuses on parenting, bodily discomfort, and everyday frustration. His recurring Chefector column turns cooking failures into comic studies of impatience, ego, and routine. He writes sharp reported essays, first-person dispatches, mock explainers, and sports-adjacent guides. His work combines moral seriousness, comic voice, close attention to ordinary life, and a focus on how people live under larger systems.
Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha is a sports investigative reporter who uses games to examine how power, money and culture shape players, workers, fans and communities. He works in The Washington Post sports section, covering global tournaments, migration, fan culture, sports betting, match-fixing, ownership, NIL money, football safety, participation gaps and the changing culture of women’s basketball. His reporting connects events on the field to decisions in boardrooms, betting markets, government offices and law enforcement. He previously reported for BuzzFeed News and wrote for the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly and the Riverfront Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He writes long, deeply reported stories that combine narrative scenes, data analysis, public records, medical records and other documents.