Connect with us

Published

4 years ago

on

8:00 AM ET

Former West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck still remembers, with vivid clarity, the day Pittsburgh and Syracuse officially announced they were bailing on the Big East to move to the ACC. He was headed east from Morgantown to the West Virginia-Maryland football game on Sept. 17, 2011, and made a plan to get to league commissioner John Marinatto as quickly as possible.

The two met alone in a suite inside Maryland’s football stadium. Marinatto sat in a high-backed chair at the bar as the two briefly discussed how exactly the Big East would survive as a football-playing conference. The elephant in the room, of course, was that Pitt and Syracuse had delivered a double gut punch that sent shock waves across the league, signaling to every remaining football-playing member that the time had come to forget about conference loyalties and look out for itself.

Neither said what appears obvious, in hindsight. Even if they wanted to, they never had the chance. Marinatto got a phone call five minutes into their meeting. Luck watched as Marinatto turned ashen and pale, then fell to the ground.

“I remember saying to myself, ‘Oh my god, the conference is falling apart, the commissioner just [fainted] in front of me and I don’t know what to do,'” Luck said in a phone interview, adding that the call concerned Dave Gavitt, the Big East founder, who died just as his beloved league was breaking up.

Luck raced to find medical personnel, who helped Marinatto regain consciousness. But there is a reason, 10 years later, that Luck remembers that moment so clearly. That day serves as a point of demarcation where nothing would ever be the same for the Big East or its league members.

In short order, TCU pulled out of its agreement to join the Big East after just 11 months. Forty days after Luck met with Marinatto, West Virginia announced it was moving on to the Big 12, beating out Louisville in a high-stakes race that drew in high-powered politicians and pitted two Big East members against each other for the final open spot.

Skepticism among remaining teams was high; trust was low. Presidents, athletic directors and coaches made calls behind one another’s backs to find a secure conference home that would not only provide stability but also a financial windfall that guaranteed their own futures, all while sitting in Big East meetings identifying schools to add in an effort to save the conference. As Big East officials worked on creating a Western flank with Boise State and San Diego State, remaining schools Louisville, Cincinnati, UConn, South Florida and Rutgers kept making entreaties to other conferences to find an escape route.

To be sure, the Big East did not set off the wave of realignment that impacted every Power 5 conference between 2010 and 2012. The Big Ten did that when it announced in 2009 that it would begin exploring expansion possibilities before ultimately adding Nebraska in 2010.

But the Big East was the only major conference to lose half its football-playing members over that span, and that ended up delivering a blow from which the conference could not recover. Ultimately, the basketball-playing contingent retained the Big East name and split off; the remaining football-playing members joined with nine new schools and formed the American Athletic Conference.

For those with deep Big East connections who watched the events unfold in real time, hurt feelings, anger and sadness remain 10 years later. Marinatto, who died in June at age 64, blamed himself for what happened to his beloved league on his watch, according to multiple former colleagues. He never granted an interview after he resigned as Big East commissioner in 2012.

“I don’t know if anybody could have stopped what happened from happening,” one former league official said. “Especially when you had schools hell-bent on taking care of themselves.”

Of course, the schools that left view what happened much differently.

“We were all aware of the movement happening around us,” former Syracuse athletic director Daryl Gross said. “We just had a TV deal fall through with the Big East, and the Big East is looking like a burning ship, and there’s a cruise ship here to pick us up. So what are you going to do?”

TO UNDERSTAND HOW everything unraveled for the Big East, a short history lesson is in order. The Big East formed in 1979 as a basketball conference and stood proudly behind that sport, even rejecting Penn State as a member in the early 1980s.

But as football grew in power and financial stature, the league invited in Miami, Virginia Tech, West Virginia and several others, and began sponsoring football in 1991, allowing long-standing league members like Pitt, Syracuse and Boston College to play football in a conference for the first time. But doing so always left the league slightly off-kilter compared to others because of the unusual football/basketball dynamic.

“Ever since the start of the Big East, there always was concern about the football schools breaking away,” one former Big East official said.

Realignment hit the Big East first in 2003 when Miami and Virginia Tech left for the ACC. That summer, the remaining Big East football-playing schools decided they wanted to split away, believing their interests were no longer aligned with those of the basketball-playing schools. Kevin O’Malley, a TV executive-turned-consultant, was brought in to help then-commissioner Mike Tranghese keep the league together.

“They had actually drafted a letter that was going to be sent,” O’Malley recalled. “As far as they were concerned, the basketball schools were history. What I pointed out was something that is a recurring theme through all of this, which is how much the basketball schools and the football schools needed each other. It took a while, but we put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”

Boston College eventually left too. Though the league added Louisville, USF and Cincinnati to fill in the gaps, the growing importance of football from a revenue-generating standpoint, most importantly during television contract negotiations and making sure it had a seat at the table in the old Bowl Championship Series, only widened the chasm between the football and basketball schools.

It became much harder for the league to not only figure out its identity — caught between its basketball tradition and the riches of football — but also to keep everybody moving forward together.

“There are no rules in this game of realignment, right? There wasn’t an arbiter. You couldn’t go to the NCAA or the federal government. It was a game we likened to musical chairs. You don’t want to be the one standing when the music stops.”

Former West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck

“Over time, it got more contentious because the basketball side was always wary of the football side,” one former Big East athletic director said. “And as we drove some of those ideas, it was viewed as more of a football play instead of a league play.”

That essentially is at the heart of where so much went wrong, starting in December 2009. When the Big Ten announced it would explore expansion over the ensuing 12-18 months, athletic directors across the country realized a seismic shift in the landscape was about to happen. Some schools and conferences would end up with an enormous financial windfall, while others would scramble to find a suitable home.

“The day the Big Ten announced that,” former Pitt athletic director Steve Pederson said, “I think everybody said, ‘OK, here we go.’ If you don’t know whether you’re going to be one that’s going to be selected, the risk is high. So we really tried to come up with some kind of way to cement the Big East together. Understandably, a lot of schools just didn’t want to make that kind of commitment. They said, ‘Well, what if what if we had a chance to go to one of these conferences?'”

Gross remembers attending one set of meetings before the conference basketball tournament in 2011, looking at the agenda and seeing nothing listed on the topic of expansion.

“To this day, I have no idea why no one wanted to touch the subject,” Gross said. “It was almost like, if we don’t talk about it, then we don’t have to worry about it.”

He raised those concerns during the meeting. Afterward, another athletic director walked up to him and asked, “Are you guys leaving?”

Gross maintains that at that point Syracuse had no plans to leave. “I was just trying to figure out, ‘What’s the plan?'” he said. “I felt so lost. I thought for sure this would be the biggest discussion topic in the entire room.”

Whether the league was proactive or not is a matter of perspective. Multiple times, the Big East tried to form a partnership with several Big 12 schools, but it was only in response to the possibility that Texas and Oklahoma would leave.

Once Texas and Oklahoma decided to stay put, the idea fizzled.

Marinatto sent a bottle of champagne to then-Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe to congratulate him on keeping his league from disintegrating.

Soon, there wouldn’t be much to celebrate.

THE BIGGEST DISCUSSION topic in the Big East became its television rights. At the time, the Big East was working with ESPN on a new rights deal that would bump its annual payout from $36 million per year to $155 million per year. All told, the new deal would be worth more than $1.3 billion over the life of the contract. As its television partner at the time, ESPN had an exclusive negotiating window to make a deal happen with the Big East.

But there were multiple presidents and athletic directors who wanted to wait and take the Big East to the open market once that window with ESPN closed, believing its entire rights package was worth more than what ESPN was offering. That group included Georgetown, Pitt and Rutgers.

“We just felt like at the time that the deal didn’t reflect our value,” Pederson said. “As you looked at the numbers, you just said, ‘If you’re going to sign a long-term deal that you feel is undervalued, then you’re just going to be sorry almost the minute you sign it.’ We understood we were not in the same position at that point as the Big Ten or the ACC, but we felt we were in a better position than the way the numbers came out.”

Though the majority of league schools wanted to take the deal, those with misgivings controlled the conversation and became the loudest voices in the room. Things came to a head in May 2011 when the newly expanded Pac-12 with Colorado and Utah aboard announced a television package of its own with ESPN and Fox worth a reported $3 billion — substantially greater than the Big East offer.

That caused everyone in the league to reevaluate what was on the table, and the decision ultimately was made to walk away from the proposed TV deal.

“That deal came out of nowhere, and people started to ask, ‘If they’re willing to pay that for the Pac-12, why wouldn’t we be able to get more?'” one person with knowledge of the discussions said. “So now everybody’s thinking Comcast has all this money, and we had a year to go before the end of our contract, so people said we should go to the open market.”

One former Big East official said ESPN asked for a counteroffer, but none ever came. O’Malley described multiple athletic directors as being “in disbelief” that the league walked away from the deal.

“I’ve always been the ‘one in the hand is better than two in the bush,’ and that would have kept us very stable,” then-Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich said. “But I was the newcomer talking. We were very happy where we were, and maybe those schools weren’t happy. Maybe they had bigger aspirations. I don’t know.”

Officials from the schools that eventually left deny they were in negotiations with other conferences at the time the TV deal was nixed. But there are some former Big East officials who remain dubious.

One went so far as to say “sabotage” would be an accurate way to describe the way some schools led the push against the TV deal only to later leave, though others in the room at the time felt that was too strong of a word.

“There were so many people that just loved the conference and were so invested in it, and then you had double agents in the room,” another former Big East official said.

Multiple sources pushed back on that assertion.

“There was sincere and genuine effort put towards trying to figure out a way to shore ourselves up and present more value to the market to capitalize on our deal,” one former school official said. “This theory that we deliberately tried to stop the TV deal from happening because we were all at the finish line with other conferences is bulls—.”

Multiple sources confirmed that Pitt and Rutgers tried early in the process to get league members to agree to a grant of rights, in which schools relinquish control of their TV rights to the conference. But there was no consensus. With no grant of rights, no expansion plan and no television deal, there was simply nothing to hold the league together.

Add to that a perceived vacuum in leadership — with the more mild-mannered and less well-connected Marinatto now the commissioner instead of Tranghese — and it seemed like a foregone conclusion that the competing agendas threatened to fracture the conference for good.

“There was no guarantee if we did that deal things weren’t going to still shift, but it would have helped the schools left behind to at least have that in their pocket, and if we had to renegotiate it down, fine, but we still had it,” a former Big East official said.

Despite the behind-the-scenes drama, league officials spoke optimistically at media days in Rhode Island in August 2011 about the lucrative potential for a TV package despite turning down ESPN. One league official told The New York Times, “We’re excited. It feels like the tide is turning in our favor.”

Clearly, not everyone felt that way.

Gross, who was in favor of taking the TV deal, said once that fell through “things were fragile and could fall apart or crumble.” He said he first heard from the ACC in early September, recalling that his phone rang as he walked to his car following a tennis match at the US Open. When ACC officials asked whether Syracuse would be interested in joining, Gross said yes without hesitation.

Within a week, the Syracuse trustees met at a hotel in Beverly Hills, California — where they had traveled to watch Syracuse play USC in football. Gross made a presentation, and the group voted to accept the ACC invitation. Similarly, the situation with Pitt and the ACC moved quickly in September. Both Gross and Pederson said they had no idea they would be joining together until the end of the process.

Despite the uncertainty and fragility of the Big East, multiple people described feeling “blindsided” that Syracuse and Pitt — two of the league’s most identifiable members, including one founding member — would leave. One person said it “shook the conference to its core.”

“Syracuse and the Big East were synonymous with one another for the entire history of the conference,” a former Big East official said. “When they left, there was no recovering.”

Added Jurich: “I know a lot of people’s feelings were hurt, especially the schools that had been in that league for a while. They were crushed because they had such a great loyalty and relationships with those schools.”

Pederson, when asked whether he thought the decision to leave surprised the league, said Pitt was always upfront about the situation. “I guess that would be from their perspective,” he said. “Nobody knew exactly where anybody might be going, and all those negotiations are very private. So maybe there were people that were surprised. I don’t know.”

At that point, any existing loyalties seemed to vanish.

“When one starts splitting away, then the avalanche occurs,” Jurich said. “Everybody was scrambling. It’s, ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to survive? How do we keep our head above water now that the TV deal is out?’ You don’t have a chance to use that as any leverage. From our standpoint, all I cared about was our program.”

Meanwhile, TCU, which agreed in November 2010 to join the Big East as a way of boosting its profile as a member of a BCS conference, pulled out to join the Big 12 in mid-October. By then, the Big East was pushing hard for Boise State to join as a football-only member — all while Louisville and West Virginia were jockeying for the last open spot in the Big 12.

“There are no rules in this game of realignment, right?” Luck said. “There wasn’t an arbiter. You couldn’t go to the NCAA or the federal government. It was a game we likened to musical chairs. You don’t want to be the one standing when the music stops.”

BOISE STATE PRESIDENT Robert Kustra took a keen interest in realignment, believing his football program had positioned itself well for a move into a bigger conference with better access to the BCS. In 2010, he met with the presidents of Utah, TCU and BYU to discuss whether Boise State was ready to make a move from the WAC to the Mountain West.

“I gave my salesman pitch, and then I said to them, ‘How can I know that the Mountain West is going to be the Mountain West it is today?'” Kustra recalled in a phone interview. “‘Are you all going to be there for the Mountain West?’ And these presidents, they were either lying through their teeth or they were completely ignorant of their athletic directors’ plans.”

Only a few days after Boise State announced it would join the Mountain West, Utah accepted an invitation to join the Pac-10. Then BYU announced it was going independent in football. In November 2010, TCU agreed to join the Big East. This was not the Mountain West the Broncos agreed to join.

At this point, Boise State had played in two BCS games as an undefeated team (2007 and 2010 Fiesta Bowls) but had never gotten a legitimate shot at playing for a national championship. Beyond national championships, the Mountain West did not have an automatic spot into the BCS, meaning Boise State would have to go undefeated every year and then hope for a selection as an at-large team.

Kustra felt he had to do something to improve those chances. He had previously lobbied the Pac-12 to no avail. So when the Big East, with an automatic bid into the BCS, called in October 2011 to see whether the Broncos would be interested in a football-only partnership, he listened.

At the time, Boise State was ranked in the top five. On paper, the move made sense: Boise State needed access to a BCS conference, and the Big East needed to fill gaps and boost its football-playing profile. As a way to make its move east more palatable, Boise State needed a travel partner from the West, boosting San Diego State into the conversation.

“I personally thought that taking the Boise State story on the road with the Big East was a great opportunity to get national coverage that we weren’t getting here in the Intermountain region,” Kustra said.

The Mountain West had taken one hit after another during realignment and could not afford to lose Boise State, its highest-profile school. Commissioner Craig Thompson worked the phones to both Kustra and then-San Diego State president Elliot Hirshman, telling them both, “There’s a lot of money being dangled in front of your face, but there’s not going to be a Big East in the long term,” according to a person with knowledge of their conversation. Thompson declined to comment for this story.

The Big East also had conversations with Air Force, Navy and Army but ultimately opted for football-only partnerships with Boise State and San Diego State. In addition, UCF, Houston and SMU would join as full-time members. The moves gave the Big East the largest footprint in the country.

But because the conference looked so different, nobody knew whether it would retain its BCS status or what a future television deal would be worth. Skepticism remained that bringing in Boise State and San Diego State from the other side of the country would actually keep the Big East together. The basketball schools were not thrilled either.

Though Boise State coach Chris Petersen and San Diego State coach Rocky Long spoke in positive terms about the move publicly, they expressed reservations privately. Long declined interview requests for this story; Petersen did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“There were some ideas that were not ideal, but when you’re in a position like that, you start to look at everything,” Jurich said. “They were not just saying let’s put our head in the sand and say we’re fine when it truly wasn’t. Did it fit for everybody? Absolutely not, including us. It didn’t, but I don’t think you could look at and say it’s about fit when you were looking for survival.”

Several former Big East officials still believe this alignment could have worked long term at the time. But in April 2012, a plan for a four-team playoff was announced, and it became clear there would be no automatic qualifying designation for the Big East under the new format, taking away a huge advantage the league had over the Mountain West.

Marinatto resigned in May 2012 with the league in turmoil. As one friend of his said, “He was just a guy that was the student manager for the basketball team for Dave Gavitt at Providence College and was Mike Tranghese’s friend, and was handed the reins by the two of them. And the conference collapsed. That’s the weight that he carried with him.”

Whether he could have done anything differently to keep the league together is a question up for debate, considering all the outside factors that were beyond his control.

“I don’t think anybody deserves any particular blame for anything,” Pederson said.

Mike Aresco was hired as commissioner in August with an eye toward maximizing television rights. But first, Notre Dame announced it would be taking all of its Big East-affiliated sports to the ACC while remaining independent in football. When Rutgers (Big Ten) and Louisville (ACC) announced their own departures over a one-week span in November 2012, the Big East as a football-playing conference fell apart.

For good.

In mid-December 2012, the seven Big East basketball-playing schools announced a split from the football-playing schools. A few weeks later, Boise State struck a deal to return to the Mountain West. San Diego State followed shortly after that. The Broncos were given the green light to sell their home games separately from the conference’s television package, allowing them to earn more money than the other members of the conference — about $1.8 million more per year in revenues.

Kustra said the Mountain West presidents at the time called him and offered more money from television rights as a way to get Boise State back into the league.

“I’m asked, if you had to do all over again, what would you do?” Kustra said. “And I’d say, I would do exactly the way I did it. I didn’t know that the Big East was going to fold. But look what we got out of it. We landed on our feet financially. And to this day, the Mountain West is still trying to figure out what to do about that.”

Tensions over the special deal Boise State secured have grown over the past several years — and it was a major point of contention during the Mountain West’s most recent television rights negotiation.

Meanwhile, the newly reconfigured Big East – with Xavier, Creighton and Butler – has been led by Villanova basketball over the last decade, winning national titles in 2016 and 2018. But perhaps the biggest news in recent years involved UConn, which decided to go independent in football so it could rejoin the Big East, where it thrived as a basketball power. The Huskies officially rejoined in 2020 after a seven-year absence.

The American Athletic Conference — renamed and rebranded after the basketball split — has thrived as a Group of 5 conference. The league has secured the most Group of 5 automatic bids into the four-team playoff. With the playoff format soon expanding to 12 teams, its chances of making the playoff have increased. But the same could be said for Boise State in the Mountain West.

“Realignment hit us pretty hard,” said Aresco, now the AAC commissioner. “We were in disarray, making sure that the conference would survive. But it turns out, not only did we survive, we thrived immediately. We’ve been thriving ever since.”

While that is true, there are still those with a deep abiding affinity for the Big East who remain emotional about its breakup 10 years later. Because, as one former league official said, “it’s not what it was and will never be the same again.”

ESPN reporter David Hale contributed to this report.

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Sports

Best slugger, best game … badonkadonk of the year?! Jeff Passan’s 2025 MLB season awards

Published

5 hours ago

on

September 24, 2025

By

Best slugger, best game ... badonkadonk of the year?! Jeff Passan's 2025 MLB season awards

With another two months until votes for the Most Valuable Players, Cy Young Award winners and Rookies of the Year are revealed, now seems the perfect time for a far wider-ranging set of honors for Major League Baseball’s 2025 season.

The third annual Passan Awards aim to celebrate the most enjoyable elements of a season and recognize that even those who aren’t the best of the best deserve acknowledgment. Certainly, the winners are talented, but the players favored to win the MVP awards for the second straight season, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, will not get this hardware. Instead, the first award honors a player for his anatomy.

Badonkadonk of the Year: Cal Raleigh

As if it could be anyone else.

Ball knowers understood who Raleigh was entering the 2025 season: the best catcher in MLB, a switch-hitting, Platinum Glove-winning, home-run-punishing hero with the most appropriate (and inappropriate) nickname in baseball — the Big Dumper, for his lower half putting the maximus in gluteus.

This, though? A superstar turn in which the Seattle Mariners‘ best player passes Hall of Famers such as Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr. in the record books? A seasonlong run in which he keeps pace with Aaron Judge, the best hitter in the world still at the peak of his powers, in the American League MVP race? A legitimate shot at becoming only the seventh player in MLB history to hit 60 or more home runs in a season?

Look hard enough and it makes sense. A season like Raleigh’s 2025 necessitates playing every day, which, at a position where 120 games is the norm, is almost impossible. Well, Raleigh has sat out three games this year. Amid all his responsibilities as a catcher, he has taken a right-handed swing that was the weaker of the two and honed it into a stroke as powerful as his left-handed wallop.

The confluence of it all in Raleigh’s age-28 season has thrust the Mariners to the precipice of their first AL West title since 2001 and put Raleigh on a pedestal alongside Judge. Raleigh’s case for MVP is strong. He has got the numbers to back up the narrative, which could be very compelling for voters: the game’s 2025 home run king, playing its most important position, carries the franchise with which he signed a long-term extension to the postseason while the star in the Bronx, already a two-time AL MVP winner, doesn’t do anything different from what he typically does.

Of course, just maintaining his status quo is actually a pretty good case for Judge, considering his OPS exceeds Raleigh’s by nearly 175 points. But that’s for MVP voters to decide. The case of the best badonkadonk is open and shut. From the city that gave the world Sir Mix-A-Lot comes version 2.0: bigger, better, dumpier.

None of this is new for Schwarber, the 32-year-old who has spent the past four seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies as the National League’s three-true-outcomes demigod. Schwarber is third in the NL in walks (behind Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani), second in strikeouts (behind James Wood), and tied with Ohtani for the lead with 53 home runs. Beyond the seasonlong compilation of gaudy numbers, though, are the moments that have appended “of the year” onto the slugger label he long ago earned.

When NL manager Dave Roberts needed hitters for the All-Star Game swing-off — a truncated Home Run Derby that would break the game’s 6-6 tie — of course he chose Schwarber, who whacked three home runs on three swings and secured the win. If anyone in the sport was poised to go on a single-game heater and pummel four home runs, he was near, if not at, the top of the list for that, too — and did so Aug. 28.

Schwarber is the archetypal slugger. He will have some rough at-bats, and his slumps will be uglier than most because of his propensity to strike out. But when he gets hot, there’s nothing like it: the compact stroke, the innate power, and the symbiosis between him and the electric crowds at Citizens Bank Park converge to create a monster of which pitchers want no part.

Even though the team doesn’t have ace Zack Wheeler and All-Star shortstop Trea Turner because of injuries, Schwarber stabilized the Phillies and kept them from sliding down the standings alongside the New York Mets. Schwarber’s impending free agency will grow into a heated bidding war because he is as beloved as he is good, and he’s very, very good.

In the meantime, because he is a designated hitter with a mediocre batting average, Schwarber will not receive the MVP love he deserves. So, consider this a way of honoring Schwarber: king of the sluggers, ready to light up another October.

Base Thief of the Year: Juan Soto

Of all the unbelievable things to happen in the 2025 season — the no-way-that-can-be-true, how-did-that-happen, you-got-to-be-kidding-me facts — this is unquestionably the wildest: Juan Soto leads MLB in stolen bases in the second half.

Seriously, Juan Soto. The $765 million man. In 58 games since the All-Star break, Soto has 24 stolen bases — four more than runner-up Jazz Chisholm Jr. This season, Soto has swiped 35, nearly triple his previous career high of a dozen set in 2019 and 2023. And it’s not as if Soto is leaving all kinds of outs on the basepaths; he has been caught just four times this season (though three of those are in September).

Soto hits home runs with regularity (42 this season, 19 in the second half). He has the best eye in the game. Stolen bases, though? The guy who ranks 503rd out of 571 qualified players in sprint speed? The one who takes more than 4½ seconds to go from home to first base?

It’s just further proof that ripping bags, in this era of larger bases and limited pickoff moves for pitchers, is no longer the sole domain of the speedy. With a little bit of know-how and gumption, anyone can become a base stealer. Josh Naylor, the Mariners’ burly first baseman, is fourth in MLB in the second half with 17 — one ahead of Tampa Bay rookie Chandler Simpson, one of the fastest runners in the big leagues. Miami rookie catcher Agustin Ramirez, who is also objectively slow, has stolen more bases since the All-Star break than Bobby Witt Jr., Jose Ramirez, Fernando Tatis Jr., Julio Rodriguez and Elly De La Cruz.

The new rules have led to remarkable seasons: Ronald Acuna Jr.’s 40/70 year in 2023 and Ohtani’s 50/50 campaign last year. As unprecedented as each was, they’d have been likelier bets than Soto threatening to become just the seventh player to go 40/40. That he’s at 30/30 already — alongside Chisholm, Jose Ramirez and Corbin Carroll — is remarkable enough.

Credit is due in plenty of places. To Mets baserunning coach Antoan Richardson, whose work with Soto encouraged him to study the craft of stealing a base and trust his instincts. To the Mets’ late-season ruin that made every base seem that much more important. Most of all, to Soto, who, after signing the richest contract in professional sports history, refused to pigeonhole himself as someone defined by patience and pop and actively sought his most well-rounded incarnation yet.

Best Player You Still Know Nothing About: Geraldo Perdomo

Who were the five best every-day players in baseball this year? There are three locks: Raleigh, Judge and Ohtani. After that, it’s a matter of preference. Want a masher? Schwarber or Soto would qualify. Prefer an all-around player? Witt is a good choice at No. 4; Jose Ramirez always warrants consideration; and, had he not gotten hurt, Turner would have been firmly in the mix.

Consider, however, the case of Perdomo, the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ 25-year-old shortstop. As easily as Perdomo’s bonanza 2025 can be summed up with wins above replacement — his 6.9 via FanGraphs ranks behind only the three locks and Witt, and Perdomo’s 6.8 via Baseball-Reference comes in third behind only Judge and Raleigh — his statistics get even more interesting upon a granular look. Here are Perdomo’s numbers, followed by their MLB rank out of 144 qualified hitters:

Batting average: .289 (13th)
On-base percentage: .391 (5th)
Slugging percentage: .462 (47th)
Runs: 96 (13th)
RBIs: 97 (14th)
Strikeout rate: 10.9% (8th)
Walk rate: 13.4% (14th)
Stolen bases: 26 (19th)
Games played: 155 (8th)

And that’s to say nothing of Perdomo playing the second-most-important position in baseball at a high level. He is not Witt defensively, but Perdomo is always on the field — his 1,363 innings is the most at shortstop in the majors this season — and, outside of the occasional throwing mishap, eminently reliable.

Take it all into account and it adds up to a legitimate case for Perdomo to join the game’s luminaries. He is neither the most well-known star on the Diamondbacks (Carroll) nor even in his own middle infield (Ketel Marte). And that’s fine. The numbers tell his story. And it’s one worth knowing.

Individual Performance of the Year: Nick Kurtz

Since the turn of the 20th century, a period that comprises around 4 million individual games played by position players, there have been:

  • Nine games with a player scoring six runs

  • 21 games with a player hitting four homers

  • 81 games in which batters went 6-for-6

  • 170 games with a player having at least eight RBIs

And only one game with all four.

That belongs to A’s rookie first baseman Kurtz, who, three months after his major league debut, turned in arguably the greatest game by a hitter. Facing the Houston Astros on July 25, Kurtz, 22, started with a single in the first inning, followed with a home run in the second, doubled off the top of the wall in left field two innings after that, and finished homer, homer, homer in his final three at-bats.

The home runs came off four pitchers: starter Ryan Gusto, relievers Nick Hernandez and Kaleb Ort, and utility man Cooper Hummel, whose 77.6 mph meatball went over the short porch in left field at Daikin Park. Five of Kurtz’s six hits that night went to the opposite field, a testament to his lethal bat that should win him unanimous American League Rookie of the Year honors and will land him on plenty of AL MVP ballots.

Kurtz finished the game with 19 total bases, tying a record that has long belonged to Shawn Green, whose line was almost identical to Kurtz’s: a single, a double and four home runs with six runs — but only seven RBIs. Yes, all four of Green’s homers came off big league pitchers, and he did it at Miller Park, a tougher place in 2002 to hit homers than Daikin in 2025.

When trying to adjudicate a winner, every factor counts. But for argument’s sake, let’s say Kurtz’s game was better than Green’s because of that additional RBI. Was it superior to Ohtani’s last September in which he went 6-for-6 with a single, 2 doubles, 3 home runs, 10 RBIs and a pair of stolen bases — and in that same game he became the first player with at least 50 homers and 50 steals in a season? It’s difficult to argue with the historical nature of Ohtani’s game. Context should matter, and to do something never conceived of before 2024 adds a delicious narrative flourish to Ohtani’s performance.

If Kurtz’s game isn’t the best, it’s certainly among the top five. And in the year of the four-homer game — there have been an MLB-high three this season, with Schwarber and Eugenio Suarez joining the party — none compared to Kurtz’s.

The average major league fastball ticked up another 0.2 mph this year, all the way to 94.4 mph, more than 3 mph harder than when the league began tracking pitch data in 2007. Pitch velocity is a marker not only for where the game is now but where it’s going. And where it has gone is featuring a starting pitcher with a slider nearly as fast as a league-average heater.

Misiorowski, the Milwaukee Brewers‘ rookie right-handed starter, is a walking outlier. At 6-foot-7, he is taller than all but 18 of the 868 players who have thrown a pitch this season, and at under 200 pounds, his slender body and its elasticity stretch the bounds of what a pitcher should look like. What they create is magic.

Though the 23-year-old’s triple-digit fastball generates the most oohs and ahhs, his slider induces the most gawking. Misiorowski’s slider averages 94.1 mph. He has thrown 85 of them at least 95 mph this season — a full 10-plus mph over the rest of the league’s average. He got Mookie Betts swinging on a 97.4 mph slider in August. It was the full-count version of the pitch he delivered at 95.5 mph against Willi Castro on June 20, though, that earned this award.

It wasn’t just the velocity or pitch shape that was most impressive. It was the swing Misiorowski induced. Castro just wanted to get on base. Hell, he just wanted to make contact. Instead, he got this:

That right there — the velocity, the late movement, the pitch shape — is an evolutionary slider. For all the pitchers who have made 90-plus mph sliders a regular thing, Misiorowski essentially said: “Thank you for walking so I could run.” Castro did not simply swing and miss. He got pretzeled. Misiorowski punctuated it with a celebratory twirl off the mound. The visual only amped up Miz Mania, which peaked when, barely 25 innings into his career, MLB named him an All-Star replacement.

Since then, the league has caught up to Misiorowski. The plan is for him to pitch out of the bullpen in the postseason, though injuries to the Brewers’ pitching staff — the best team in MLB this year — could change that. Whether he’s a starter or a reliever, Misiorowski can unleash the sort of pitch previously seen only in dreams — or, as Castro will attest, nightmares.

Put together two teams like the Pirates and Rockies and the possibilities are endless. Most of those possibilities, of course, are offensive — and not in the run-scoring sort of way. The baseball gods’ sense of humor reveals itself at the oddest times, though, and when the teams met at Coors Field the day after the trade deadline, they partook in the most madcap, rollicking affair of the 2025 season.

That day had already offered a Game of the Year candidate: Miami’s 13-12 victory over the New York Yankees, who blew a five-run lead in the seventh inning, recaptured it in the top of the ninth and got walked off in the bottom. The notion that the Pirates and Rockies would one-up that was unlikely, but then the beauty of baseball is as much in the unexpected as it is the known.

It started as any game at Coors can: with a nine-run top of the first inning, matching the run support the Pirates had given Paul Skenes in his previous nine starts combined. Pittsburgh, facing Antonio Senzatela, started single, single, single, single, grand slam, single, walk before Jared Triolo grounded into a double play. The Pirates followed single, walk, home run, single, single, then finally closed the frame when their 14th batter, Oneil Cruz, struck out.

The Rockies chipped away — a run in the first, three more in the third. The middle innings were chaos. Three for the Pirates in the top of the fourth, two for the Rockies in the bottom. Three more for the Pirates in the top of the fifth, four for the Rockies in the bottom. After a run in the sixth, Pittsburgh held a 16-10 lead and carried it into the eighth inning, when the Rockies scored a pair.

The bottom of the ninth beckoned. Pittsburgh had traded its closer, David Bednar, to the Yankees the previous day and called on Dennis Santana, who came into the game having allowed seven runs in 46⅓ innings. He struck out Ezequiel Tovar for the first out. Then, the madness of the day peaked. A Hunter Goodman home run. A Jordan Beck walk. A Warming Bernabel triple. A Thairo Estrada single. And, finally, a Brenton Doyle walk-off homer to left-center field.

Final: Rockies 17, Pirates 16.

In the modern era, only 20 games featured more runs than the Pirates and Rockies — the two lowest-scoring teams in 2025 — put up that day. Just two of those were decided by one run. Neither ended on a walk-off, let alone a walk-off homer.

Baseball is funny like that. Even two last-place teams that have combined for more than 200 losses this season can face off and emerge with something unforgettable.

The Chicken-and-Beer Award for Most Staggering Collapse: New York Mets

Note: This could wind up including the Detroit Tigers, whose lead over the Cleveland Guardians — 15½ games on July 8, 12½ on Aug. 25 — has almost evaporated. If Cleveland surpasses Detroit in the AL Central, consider the Tigers compatriots in ignominy with New York.

For now, the dishonor belongs alone to the Mets, who on June 12 won their sixth consecutive game to extend their major-league-best record to 45-24. Queens felt like the center of the baseball universe. Soto wasn’t even hitting up to his standard, yet the Mets were still bludgeoning opponents enough that they held the best expected winning percentage along with the top record.

Since then, the Mets have the same record as the White Sox: 35-52. Not only have they frittered away what was then a 5½-game advantage over Philadelphia atop the NL East, they’ve fallen out of the first, second and third wild cards, too. As of today, they are on the outside of the postseason looking in.

The Mets haven’t flamed out in one spectacular blaze. It has been a slow burn, a consistent degradation of quality, gradual and raw. It’s everywhere. An inconsistent lineup. A bad bullpen. A starting rotation that buoyed them over the first 69 games disappeared, through injury and ineffectiveness, to the point that New York is now relying on three rookie starters, all of whom the team preferred to keep in the minor leagues until next year.

Now, Nolan McLean, Jonah Tong and Brandon Sproat are fundamental parts of any salvage job the Mets hope to hatch. And that is the most damning indictment of all: a $340 million team, left to rely on a group of young players to rescue the franchise from its self-inflicted depths. Attempts in the middle of the season to turn things around, as they did in making an NLCS run last year, didn’t work. Adding reliever Ryan Helsley and outfielder Cedric Mullins at the trade deadline didn’t, either.

This collapse isn’t the 1964 Phillies or even the 2011 Red Sox, whose pitching staff habitually ate fried chicken and drank beer in the clubhouse during games, even as the team’s nine-game advantage in September evaporated. At least that was the equivalent of a Band-Aid being ripped off. This has been interminable, a stark reminder that for all the Mets have going for them — the richest owner in the game, plenty of talent, excellent resources — they’re still the Mets, professional purveyors of pain.

There were plenty of choices. Soto’s contract is an all-timer. Max Fried has been everything the Yankees needed. And there was no shortage of trade options, from the blockbusters (Kyle Tucker to the Cubs, Rafael Devers to the Giants) to the deadline stunners (Mason Miller to the Padres, Carlos Correa back to the Astros).

In terms of sheer impact, though, the Red Sox’s December acquisition of Crochet is unbeatable. And it’s among the most infrequent of trades, too: one in which both parties emerge elated. Without Crochet, 26, headlining the rotation, Boston isn’t sniffing a playoff spot. Not only did the Red Sox think enough of him to give up four players who had yet to make their major league debut, but during spring training, they kept Crochet from reaching free agency next winter with a six-year, $170 million contract extension even though the left-hander had never thrown 150 innings in a season.

Boston’s faith was well-founded. Crochet leads MLB in strikeouts and the AL in innings pitched. He has faced 788 batters this year, and they are hitting .220/.268/.360 against him. And with a 17-5 record and 2.69 ERA, he has positioned himself as the likely runner-up behind Tarik Skubal in AL Cy Young voting.

All was not lost for Chicago. The four players the White Sox got back in the deal are all doing well, too. Kyle Teel has been exceptional and looks like a future All-Star at catcher. Chase Meidroth gives the White Sox a high-on-base, low-strikeout threat at either middle-infield position. Wikelman Gonzalez is becoming a reliable big league bullpen option. And Braden Montgomery, a switch-hitting center fielder, is already up to Double-A.

Trades don’t work out more often than they do. (Just ask the Mets.) But on the day this deal was consummated, the industry response liked it for each side. The White Sox weren’t willing to commit to a Crochet extension and wanted to avoid injury or ineffectiveness cratering his value, and in Boston, they found a team desperate enough to offload an immense amount of talent. Year 1 of a deal that included a combined 30 years of club control is too early to name definitive winners and losers. So for now, it’s an easy call: the rare win-win.

The Tickle Me Elmo Award: Torpedo Bats

Remember the torpedo bat? It was going to revolutionize baseball. The first weekend of the season, with a lineup full of hitters using the bat that looked like nothing MLB had ever seen, the Yankees hit 15 home runs — against the Brewers, who since have been among the best teams in baseball at home run prevention.

The concept was simple: MLB allows the redistribution of wood weight as long as the bat stays within specified parameters, so why not take the mass that typically is toward the end of the barrel and create a new shape that better suits individual hitters? After the Yankees’ home run barrage, the torpedo bat became baseball’s version of Tickle Me Elmo, Furby and Cabbage Patch Kids: the must-have toy of the moment.

Well, the moment passed. Torpedoes certainly remain in circulation — Raleigh uses a different model from each side of the plate — and are not going anywhere. But the notion that half the league would switch bat models ignored the realities that (A) baseball players are creatures of habit and (B) the torpedo doesn’t suit the significant number of players who hit the ball more toward the end of the bat.

And that’s fine. Not every piece of technology is meant for every consumer. The takeaway from torpedo bats isn’t that they are a failure because they haven’t taken over the market, nor is it that they are a success because the best home run hitter of 2025 uses them. It’s that the game is full of curious people who aren’t afraid to build a new mousetrap. That’s how a game that has been around for 150 years evolves. And that’s a perfectly good thing.

Thing we’ll still be talking about in 50 years: The Colorado Rockies’ run differential

Maybe Raleigh hits 60. Or Judge continues his spate of all-time-elite seasons, giving this one greater context. Perhaps there’s a surprise World Series winner. It is baseball, which means trying to predict the next 50 minutes, let alone the next 50 years, is a fool’s errand.

But in the modern era, which comprises every season since 1900, never before has there been a team as good at giving up runs while being as bad at scoring them as the Rockies. There have been thousands of baseball teams in the game’s history. None has a worse run differential than Colorado’s minus-404 (and counting).

That is not just hard to do. It has been, to this point, impossible. Getting outscored by more than 2½ runs per game is the domain of teams in the 1800s. (The 1899 Cleveland Spiders yielded an astounding 723 runs more than they scored in 154 games.) And yet, here are the Rockies, whose ignominy won’t launch them past the White Sox for the most losses in a modern season but will place them atop record books with a minuscule likelihood of being supplanted.

The numbers are quite simple. Colorado has scored just 584 runs, fewer than any team except Pittsburgh, which has an offense that includes a single player (Spencer Horwitz) with an adjusted OPS above league average. Colorado has allowed 988, the most in the big leagues by more than 125 runs. And the heretofore mythical minus-404 differential, seen as an impossible wall to breach, has crumbled, felled by an organizational ineptitude that has grown uglier annually since 2019. Even the all-time-bad teams — the 1932 Red Sox (43-111, minus-345), the 2023 A’s (50-112, minus-339) and the 2003 Tigers (43-119, minus-337) — look at these Rockies and say: You are awful.

So, yeah. It’s not the kind of record worthy of celebrating or shouting from the mountaintops. It’s just one strong enough to stand the test of time, even if it takes another 100 years to break it.

Continue Reading

Sports

Skubal, Tigers collapse; caught by Guardians

Published

7 hours ago

on

September 24, 2025

By

Skubal, Tigers collapse; caught by Guardians

  • Jesse RogersSep 23, 2025, 11:44 PM ET

    Close

      Jesse joined ESPN Chicago in September 2009 and covers MLB for ESPN.com.

CLEVELAND — It happened fast. And without a ball even leaving the infield. The Detroit Tigers took a 2-0 lead into the bottom of the sixth inning in a crucial game against the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday only to see their ace fall apart on the mound in several different and dramatic ways.

“We did a lot of uncharacteristic things, and it’s hurting us,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said after the Tigers’ 5-2 loss.

First, Tarik Skubal tried to flip a bunted ball through his legs with his back to first base, only to see it sail over teammate Spencer Torkelson‘s head, putting runners on second and third. It was the second of two consecutive bunts by the Guardians, who came into the night trailing the Tigers by just one game after being down as many as 10½ on Sept. 1.

After a third bunt in the inning went awry — Skubal’s 99 mph fastball struck designated hitter David Fry in the face, and Fry had to be carted off — Skubal threw a wild pitch and then balked. Both of those led to runs.

Game. Set. Match. The Tigers have been caught in the American League Central.

“There’s some frustration,” Skubal said. “Losing isn’t fun, and we’ve been losing a lot.”

Hinch added: “He chose to do the emergency flip [through his legs], which is not easy to do and didn’t produce a good play. That is an example of an uncharacteristic mistake piling up on us at the worst time.”

That’s an understatement. The AL’s best team in the first half has fallen hard, losing seven in a row. Not only did the Guardians catch Detroit in the standings, but they also secured the tiebreaker, in case the teams match records when the regular season ends later this weekend. Nothing is going right for the Tigers.

“We didn’t play our game tonight,” catcher Dillon Dingler said. “I know that’s redundant to say over the last two weeks.

“We’ve been this way for a couple series now. We definitely feel some of the pressure. We have to eliminate it. We have to find ways to stay loose and home in on what we have to do and go out there and do it.”

The Tigers played that part of being loose before the series opener: Skubal was working on his crossword puzzle, others were playing pingpong, while Hinch was advocating a positive perspective. Who wouldn’t want to be playing meaningful games and control their own destiny, he opined in the dugout several hours before first pitch. But then the game started, and a win once again slipped through their hands.

And if those sixth-inning miscues weren’t enough, the Tigers also struck out 19 times. That tied a franchise record for Cleveland pitchers.

“They won the strike zone on both sides tonight,” Hinch said. “They dominated tonight. We didn’t.”

The days are running dangerously low for Detroit to turn things around. Cleveland has all the momentum. Playing at home didn’t help the Tigers last week, nor did a change of scenery Tuesday with their ace on the mound. But they still control their destiny even though their future is as muddied as ever. A wild-card berth or perhaps a stunning ouster altogether from the postseason are growing possibilities.

“Have to show up tomorrow and win a baseball game,” outfielder Riley Greene said. “We believe in each other. We have to play better baseball and we have to win. That’s what it comes down to.”

Continue Reading

Sports

Cubs’ Horton exits after 3 IP ‘as a precaution’

Published

8 hours ago

on

September 24, 2025

By

Cubs' Horton exits after 3 IP 'as a precaution'

  • Bradford DoolittleSep 23, 2025, 09:58 PM ET

    Close

      • MLB writer and analyst for ESPN.com
      • Former NBA writer and analyst for ESPN.com
      • Been with ESPN since 2013

CHICAGO — Right-hander Cade Horton was removed after three innings of his start in the Chicago Cubs‘ game against the New York Mets on Tuesday because of back tightness. The club said Horton was removed “as a precaution” after throwing just 29 pitches.

Horton, a leading NL Rookie of the Year candidate, allowed a leadoff homer to New York’s Francisco Lindor but settled down and looked sharp for the remainder of his short outing. Horton allowed two hits, struck out two and departed with the Cubs leading 5-1.

After the Cubs extended the advantage to 6-1, New York rallied against the Chicago bullpen, scoring five unearned runs against Michael Soroka to tie the game and later grabbing the lead in a matchup with playoff implications for both clubs.

Horton, 24, is 11-4 on the season with a 2.67 ERA over 118 innings. The win total leads all rookie pitchers and the ERA leads rookies who have logged at least 100 innings.

Continue Reading

Trending