The Los Angeles Dodgers splashed in free agency Thursday, signing All-Star free agent Kyle Tucker to a four-year, $240 million deal. The team is still yet to officially announce the signing and hold their introductory press conference with the outfielder, but there's still plenty to learn about L.A.'s newest addition. With the Dodgers' announcement imminent, here are five fun facts about their newest outfielder.
My dad and I got to the stadium early to watch players warm up and get autographs--we were in the stands down the right field line. It was drizzly... There were almost zero fans in there at the time. It had rained the night before, but neither team was outstanding by any means, so attendance was low as a result. I got the full attention of the players.
Mario is no rookie when it comes to baseball, having taken to the field with Mario Superstar Baseball on GameCube and again with Mario Super Sluggers for the Wii. He's now returning to the sport with Epoch Games Super Mario Stadium Baseball, a tabletop game that has him and his friends swinging for the fences. It's a cute-looking game--and right now you'll find it for just $51.49 (was $60).
When Barry Bonds shakes my hand, he squeezes my metacarpals like he's gripping one of his old maple-wood bats. Then he looks directly at me and past me at once, like I'm some journeyman pitcher whose changeup he's about to take deep. He's no longer the 228-pound slugger you remember - a decade of cycling has made him much leaner than the previous time he was in the public eye.
Xavier Allen will be soon walking around Carson High showing off the two City Section championship rings he earned helping the football and baseball teams win titles. Last spring, he hit a walk-off home run in the City Division I semifinals, then saw Carson rally to win the Division I title over Banning at Dodger Stadium. On Saturday, he played linebacker for a Carson football team that defeated Crenshaw 36-0 in the Open Division final and allowed just nine points in three playoff wins.
It is a beautiful, late autumn morning as I sip a cup of coffee and watch the lingering, golden yellow leaves of a maple tree fall gently to the ground. The smell of banana bread completing its final minutes of baking wafts through the air. For this, I am thankful. This is the fifth consecutive year that I've been fortunate enough to publish this editorial here at Battery Power.
Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, competes with its own deep mythology. So many of its highlights are in black and white, and so many of its GOATs are ghosts, that the former national pastime is easily dismissed as past its prime. It isn't. The 2025 postseason, which ended when the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the 11th inning of the seventh game of an ulcer-inducing World Series, stands with any in baseball history.
There is a somewhat prevalent belief among fans that baseball should be boring. That is, baseball is a sport best suited for the interminable regular season grind of 162 games, and is best viewed at noon with a beer in hand, not in discrete odd-numbered series. Even though dismissing the euphoric potential of postseason baseball is straightforwardly outrageous, there are certain truths to this school of thinking.
The point of pitching management is to make the opponent's best hitters look their worst when it matters most. Everyone knows this. I was not yet in Kindergarten when this came out. But I do have some small disagreements with that Baseball Prospectus Basics piece. As it states, before the invention of the closer, managers used 'firemen' to try to get out of jams their other pitchers got into.
Baseball is extremely hard and extraordinarily rich in ways for things to go wrong, and firing a manager when things go wrong is the simplest way for an organization to signal to fans that it is addressing those things. It doesn't work, really, because managers only do so much, and are generally not the reason why bad baseball teams are bad.
As the World Series approaches, fans might take a moment to appreciate an era that has given us baseball players, like the Yankees' slugger Aaron Judge and the Dodgers' pitcher-hitter Shohei Ohtani, who will go down in history with Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle. Some things have changed between the eras. Aaron earned about two million dollars in his career; Ohtani's current contract is worth seven hundred million.
In the opening moments of a new film called "Diamond Diplomacy," Shohei Ohtani holds the ball and Mike Trout holds a bat. These are the dramatic final moments of the 2023 World Baseball Classic. The film puts those moments on pause to share the long and complex relationship between the United States and Japan through the prism of baseball, and through the stories of four Japanese players - Ohtani included - and their journeys to the major leagues.
When my household quit cable four years ago and I lost access to Seattle Mariners games on TV, I started streaming the radio broadcast on the Google Home speaker in my kitchen. Honestly? Baseball on the radio rules. You get to walk around and do stuff to the pleasant background sounds of the crowd. Sometimes you hear the crack of Cal Raleigh's bat hammering the ball into the stands one or 60 times. There's just one problem: spoilers.
To borrow a baseball term of art (okay, a cliché), Jane Leavy is an elite spitballer. No one is better built than Leavy, a crafty veteran sportswriter, for between-innings repartee, wry asides, and tossed-off ideas for improving her beloved sport-and maybe even keeping its ever-looming obsolescence at bay for another decade or three. Leavy's suggestions for spicing up baseball reflect the essence of spitballing-a pastime within a pastime.
I don't care about the playoffs. A short-series tournament with few/no adjustments to in-series win probability is a poor fit for a sport where it takes about 70 games for luck to influence a team's record as much as skill. But, on a completely different level, I do care about the players. And the players care about the playoffs. They've been raised and conditioned in a system where there's a tournament at the end, and they want to win the tournament.
Reminders of the New York Yankees' rich history can be spotted at every turn in and around Yankee Stadium. Babe Ruth banners hang outside the venue. Hallways are loaded with framed pictures of pinstriped legends. When Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider entered the stadium's news conference room Monday on the eve of Game 3, he walked past several 10-foot magazine posters featuring all-time Yankee greats.
Hundreds of people, young, old and wearing matching commemorative T-shirts, just finished dancing the "YMCA" on the field at Yogi Berra Stadium at Montclair State University. Little League teams, former MLB players and local politicians laugh and clutch their gloves as volunteers hand out souvenir baseballs. Yankees organist Ed Alstrom plays "Charge!" from a stage in center field, and the crowd responds on cue.
Bryce Eldridge, less than a week into his major-league career, remains in search of his first hit. That milestone, among others, should come in due time. While still batting .000, Eldridge has shown small glimpses of the promise that made him one of baseball's top prospects. His at-bats have been good, said manager Bob Melvin of the Giants' top prospect. We'd love for him to get his first hit and get that out of the way, but he has not looked overmatched.
The book is a skillful mix of history, personal connections, and insights based on watching innumerable games as a lifetime fan. She writes about the way baseball has been affected by changes in technology, from "moneyball" math to television cameras intruding on the playing field, the shift in ownership from families to billionaires, even the way stadiums are designed, the shift from "the sun is the pitchclock," keeping the action going to one estimate that there are only 17 minutes of action in a baseball game.
Describe your favorite fragrance: I HAVE FOUR. SEA AIR NIGHT BLOOMING JASMINE, FRESH CUT GRASS, AND MY WIFE, MICHELE 3. Choose an architect to design your dream house: a) Frank Lloyd Wright b) I. M. Pei c) Walter Gropius 4. Circle your preferred fruits: Banana Apple Pomegranate Pear Cherry d) Frank Gehry Pineapple Blueberry Grape e) Louis Sullivan Other: JAMES OTHER No Plum Nectarine CONTEST
1905 - Frank Smith of the Chicago White Sox pitched a no-hitter against the Detroit Tigers in a 15-0 victory in the second game of a doubleheader. The score is the most lopsided margin of victory for a no-hitter in AL history. 1912 - Smokey Joe Wood of the Red Sox, on his way to a 34-win season, beat Washington's Walter Johnson 1-0 at Boston. The victory was Wood's 14th consecutive, two shy of Johnson's AL record of 16 straight.
These losses aren't even funny anymore. They're certainly not fun. Not only have the Twins now lost the season series to Chicago, they snapped the White Sox's 205-game losing streak when trailing after eight innings. Of course it's THIS team. On to the parody, and I don't mean this pretend masquerading as a ballclub. Man, it's a late one,The fall attendance in a downward run,'Cause we find the Minnesota Twins certainly done;The owner's a fool.
