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Good morning! Hope you get to savor the holiday. Coming up:

Checkpoints: Wait, those teams are leading MLB?

We’re going with an obvious lead, as today marks the unofficial start of summer and a pretty-much-official milestone in MLB’s season. Here’s Tyler Kepner:

In baseball, almost every team will win one-third of its games and lose one-third of its games. It’s the other third that makes the difference. In a 162-game schedule, that one-third number is 54 games, which comes for most teams around Memorial Day.

In other words, we’ve reached a scenic milepost on the long drive to October. And when we pull over to admire the standings, the view looks pretty spectacular.

That’s because the season is upending conventional wisdom, which is always pretty fun. Several underdog rosters are thriving in the final year of the collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players.

In fact, most of the first-place teams rank among MLB’s lowest spenders:

The Brewers lead the National League Central. The Rays lead the American League East. The Guardians lead the AL Central. The Athletics, who play in West Sacramento, lead the AL West.
Their payroll rankings, according to Spotrac: 20th (Brewers), 21st (Athletics), 28th (Guardians), 29th (Rays).

Oh, and the Marlins, who rank 30th, just swept a weekend series from the Mets, who rank second. The last-place Mets are one of four teams among the top six in payroll below .500, with the Phillies, Blue Jays and Red Sox.

The biggest spenders in the AL Central, the Tigers, are in last place at 21-33, and the biggest spenders in the AL West, the Astros, are 23-31.

Nobody claims that payroll is meaningless. The most accomplished players command the highest salaries. But sometimes those players are past their primes, injured, or both. The Brewers, A’s, Guardians and Rays tend to have cheaper players whose careers are on the rise. Sometimes, rosters like that — with reasonably priced veterans mixed in for specific roles — can be really good.

Yes, top-tier payrolls are the ones that win the World Series. But one of these years, it stands to reason that a surprise team will break through and go all the way. That’s just the nature of baseball. And even if the Dodgers do win again, the fact that so many low-payroll, small-market teams are succeeding would undercut the owners’ argument that the sport needs a salary cap for competitive balance.

I still believe that there’s too much at stake for owners to sacrifice part of the 2027 season by demanding a salary cap when the CBA expires on Dec. 1. They will probably need a lockout to create leverage in negotiations with the union, but the damage of a long-term shutdown would be devastating at a time when the sport really is in a good place.

Plenty of action to follow today; more on that in a moment. Onward:

News to KnowFritz’s awkward French Open result

U.S. men logged a milestone in Paris yesterday: Wild card Nishesh Basavareddy won his first-round match 7-6(5), 7-6(5), 6-7(9), 6-1 for the first victory for an American man over a top-10 opponent at the French Open since 2000. The problem? Basavareddy’s opponent was a compatriot: No. 7 seed Taylor Fritz. Welp.

Other notable results included Novak Djokovic’s recovery from losing his opening set, Emma Raducanu’s loss in her return to tennis and Ukrainian player Marta Kostyuk’s win just hours after learning a missile had struck “100 meters away” from her parents’ home in Kyiv.

For more extensive daily email updates on the tournament, sign up for our Grand Slam Briefing.

Playoffs

NBA: The San Antonio Spurs absolutely locked down the Oklahoma City Thunder last night en route to an emphatic Game 4 win. Victor Wembanyama scored 33 points, and the 103-82 final marked the Thunder’s lowest scoring output in any game this season. The series now sits at 2-2. More takeaways and top plays here, including a filthy Wemby fast break sequence. By the way, did Gregg Popovich influence this?

NHL: The Vegas Golden Knights have put themselves one game from yet another trip to the Stanley Cup finals, and this time they did it in the most soul-crushing manner for the Colorado Avalanche, who went up three goals in a must-win game, only to see it all erased. What’s worse for the Avs: injuries started to pile up again in the 5-3 loss. Get all the takeaways here.

From the Department of Pettiness: A fantasy and betting site made a version of the board game Operation that mocks Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for his reputation of embellishing contact. Yes, really.
Swedish driver Felix Rosenqvist won the closest Indy 500 ever on a stunning last-second pass. Watch it here.
Northwestern lacrosse bested North Carolina 14-11 in yesterday’s women’s final, a reversal of last year’s result. Sick (UNC) play inside. The men are up today (1 p.m. ET, ESPN).
Juggernaut Oklahoma softball will miss the Women’s College World Series for the first time since 2015 after falling to SEC foe Mississippi State in the Super Regionals. See the full WCWS field.
Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu’s season debut was spoiled by the Wings and rookie Azzi Fudd, who put up 24 points off the bench in Dallas’ 91-76 win.
Driver Katherine Legge’s attempt to become the first woman to complete the famed “Double” — the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 on the same day — ended early as she crashed just 18 laps into the first race.
Lionel Messi exited Inter Miami’s final MLS game before the World Cup yesterday with an apparent injury.
Sentencing for Yasiel Puig’s federal felony convictions, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been delayed more than a month. More details here

📰 Find more news here 24/7.

Watch Guide

đź“ş French Open: Emerson Jones (WC) vs. Iga ĹšwiÄ…tek (3)
6 a.m. ET on TNT, TruTV and HBO Max
The four-time champion Świątek starts her French Open revenge tour against a promising young talent in the Australian 17-year-old Jones. Round 1 will be in full swing all day; follow our live coverage here.

đź“ş MLB: Yankees-Royals
3:40 p.m. ET on ESPN
A stacked baseball day all around, but this is our national broadcast, with two teams who’ve been on skids as of late. Full MLB schedule here.

đź“ş NBA: Knicks vs. Cavs
8 p.m. ET on ESPN
Both of these things have been said (many times), but if you’ll allow again here: New York is one win away from its first finals berth in 27 years after winning 10 straight games, and no NBA team has ever come back from a 3-0 series deficit. The odds are extremely not in Cleveland’s favor.

đź“ş Hurricanes-Canadiens
8 p.m. ET on TNT, TruTV and HBO Max
This series, tied 1-1, has both a lopsided result and an overtime thriller so far. Carolina feels like it’s starting the series over after Saturday’s win, and our projections still favor the Hurricanes to win the Cup title.

Pulse Picks

One curious decision about the U.S. World Cup squad has experts questioning what was otherwise expected to be a pretty predictable roster. Maybe coach Mauricio Pochettino has a master plan, but at a minimum, the vision for the team changed.

Six NHL talent evaluators provided our Corey Pronman with their predictions for how the first 10 selections of the 2026 draft will shake out. Here are the consensus picks.

The inaugural Enhanced Games took place yesterday. It sounded like a weird scene in Las Vegas, as chronicled by Vic Tafur.

ICYMI last week: the art of getting hit by a pitch in college baseball, and why it’s a trend that’s steadily on the rise in recent years.

Most-clicked in the newsletter yesterday: Roger Federer’s viral 2024 commencement speech and why it connected — a story that just keeps resurfacing!

Most-read on the website yesterday: The news that Kyle Busch died after complications from severe pneumonia and sepsis.

📫 That’s all for now! Say hello at thepulse@theathletic.com, and check out our other newsletters.