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Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of an attempted sexual assault.

ON A STUNNING Saturday morning in March, Justin Herron decides to go for a walk. Lifting or running is out of the question — his whole body is run down from the grueling offseason work he’s doing at LeCharles Bentley’s offensive-line camp in Chandler, Arizona. But Herron is somebody who keeps moving, keeps grinding. He doesn’t take many days off — a walk instead of a run is about the best he can do.

Herron started six games for the New England Patriots last year, after the Pats picked him in the sixth round last year following a solid career at Wake Forest. But he knows he’ll be fighting for playing time again this year — he began the 2021 season as a swing guy on the line behind tackles Trent Brown and Isaiah Wynn — so he’s determined to make the most out of every day of his offseason.

On sore days, Kiwanis Park, near his home in Tempe, is the perfect place for Herron. It’s isolated enough — there is just the right amount of people to not feel alone, but still find solitude amongst the trees, sports fields and the lake in the middle of the park.

At 11 a.m. on this spectacular spring day of sun and mid-70s weather, Herron is winding down his walk when he hears yelling. He can’t make out what the words are, or where they’re coming from, but he pulls out his earbuds and starts to scan the park. Eventually he zeroes in on a man and woman about 75 yards from him.

He’s not sure exactly what he is seeing, but his eyes lock with the woman’s. Herron pauses a long time as he tells this part of the story. “There was a moment that I don’t really want to get into,” he says. “There was just one moment when I realized how bad it was, but I don’t want to talk about it. It’s private.”

In that moment, he knows his walk is over. It’s time to run.


BACK IN 2018, right before Wake Forest’s spring football season began, Herron anxiously awaited the voting results for team captain. He was a redshirt junior offensive lineman for the Demon Deacons, and he was sure he’d done everything right — he’d started his entire career, done countless extra hours of film work, chosen to double major in psychology and communication. Teammates had watched him work his way up from being a lightly recruited late-bloomer in high school to a reliable, All-ACC-level tackle. To make this next step, to be recognized as one of the most valuable leaders on his team, would mean something — everything — to him.

But when the votes were tallied, Herron’s teammates picked six other players, including two offensive linemen not named Justin Herron.

It tore him up. He just couldn’t fathom what his teammates didn’t see in him. After a week of letting it gnaw at him, Herron went and met with head coach Dave Clawson. “Coach, I do everything right,” Herron said. “I get there early. I watch more film than anybody. I do everything right. Why didn’t I get elected as a captain? What else can I do?”

“Justin, you do do everything right,” Clawson told him. “We always see you doing extra work. You’re a tremendous competitor and a very good player. But football is a team sport. You need to set a good example and bring other guys with you.”

Herron realized Clawson was right. He was a perfectly competent guy to line up alongside, but he wasn’t a giver. On a talented (all five starters ended up in the NFL) and very competitive Wake line, he tended to keep to himself. He often did workouts and film study alone. Clawson told him that the best leaders — the best people, really — weren’t just singular, widely respected talents; they knew how to lift others up at the same time. “That changed me,” Herron says.

He headed into the 2018 season on a mission to be a better teammate. He had never been selfish but he wanted to be selfless now. That August, he started mentoring the guys competing for his position. As Wake’s season kicked off, away at Tulane, coaches were seeing a new Herron. Then, in that first game, Herron suffered an ACL tear and was out for the year. Coaches weren’t sure how Herron would respond. “Everybody sulks for a while after a season-ending injury,” Clawson says.

But a week later, right after the surgery, Herron began to show up at every meeting, film session and practice. He started producing typed-up weekly breakdowns of upcoming opponents for his teammates. The younger linemen began to gravitate toward him, and Herron became an unofficial assistant coach.

Herron considered leaving Wake after that year for the NFL draft (he’d graduated already). But he ultimately returned for a final season as a grad student in 2019, and he won the team’s Deacon House of Pancakes (DHOP) award for most wipeout blocks. But most importantly, in the months leading to his last year, he got the call he wanted most. “Congratulations, Justin,” Clawson said. “Your teammates have named you a team captain.”

As Herron hung up the phone, he thought about the gut punch he’d felt a year earlier and the good that had come of it. “I really applied that to my life ever since then,” Herron says. “And it’s definitely paid off.”


ON THAT MARCH morning at Kiwanis Park, she feels a push in the back, hears a strange man telling her to be quiet, and then she starts screaming. She screams over and over again, but nobody comes. People are around — she can see 10 or so bystanders in her peripheral vision — but her screams are just faint enough, just far enough off in the distance, that no one moves.

And then she makes eye contact with someone she calls her angel. “People need to know what an amazing person Justin is,” says the woman, who wanted to remain anonymous but agreed to an interview with ESPN to describe Herron’s involvement. “He couldn’t have known if that man had a weapon. He just did it spontaneously. Justin has given me hope for the rest of my life. I love him for it.”

Since she’d retired a few years earlier, the former elementary school teacher had gone for a walk almost every day. She loved her job but it had been long, hard days for 39 years, teaching different grades. She especially enjoyed the last stretch of her career, when she was working with fifth-graders. They were the perfect age group for her — old enough to have real conversations with her, yet still young enough to be kids.

She would often daydream about someday retiring and living a tranquil existence, full of walks and parks. She’d spent most of her past four decades around Tempe, often visiting with her daughter that lives in the area, but sometimes traveling to Texas, where her other daughter works as a doctor. Through it all, she always made sure to get her walks in and built a small community of joggers and dogsitters and fellow park walkers that she would see every day. “Walks were my treat once I stopped teaching,” she says.

That morning, she is already shaken after a disturbing start to her outing: a soccer game on pause as a player in distress lays on the field. First responders frantically try to revive the man as worried teammates crowd around. She can’t hear what they’re saying. She can just feel the fear in the air as the man fights for his life. She cries and says a little prayer for the man, and before she leaves, she breathes a sigh of relief: The man had sat up. He appears to be okay, and he’s loaded into an ambulance and taken away.

A few minutes later, she’s still thinking about the player on the soccer field when a man approaches from behind and attacks her. She doesn’t know how long she screams and fights but it feels like forever. “Time went so slow,” she says now.

That’s when her eyes connect with another man almost a football field away. “I saw her,” Herron says, and his words slow down. “And she saw me. And… I think… I felt like when I got there… we had a moment of eye contact. And then… the situation did de-escalate quickly and then it stopped, right there and then…”

Herron goes silent for a second, and then finally finishes his sentence. “Right after the eye contact,” he says.

Herron remembers making the decision to run, but he doesn’t remember actually running. He is suddenly just there, next to the man, a local homeless man named Kevin Caballero. When he gets to Caballero and puts his giant 8.88-inch hands on him, Herron is able to latch onto him and drive him, hard, into a heap across from the woman. Caballero tries to wobble back to his feet but Herron is making loud noises that he can hardly believe are coming from within him. His voice is guttural and terrifying, even to him. “Don’t move,” Herron yells.

Around that time, Murry Rogers arrives. He’d been preparing for his teen daughter’s birthday party 30 yards away, putting ice in the coolers and hanging balloons, when he hears the screams. “I didn’t think it was what it was,” he says. When he sees Herron in a sprint toward the man, he begins to run, too, and he arrives a few seconds later.

As Herron comforts the woman, Caballero is insisting that she had initiated the assault. (Later, when detectives interview him about the incident, Caballero says he believes the woman telepathically communicated to him and told him that she wanted to have sex. He admits to pushing her down and attempting to sexually assault her.) Herron eventually tells the woman, “You don’t have to listen to this guy anymore,” and they walk out of ear shot from the man as Rogers stands guard with Caballero.

“Don’t let him go,” the woman says over her shoulder to Rogers, who has his hand on Caballero’s shoulder. “Just don’t let him go.” Caballero continues to mumble, mostly incoherently, but he doesn’t move. “I think he just knew, ‘This was going to be way more trouble if I start running from this guy,'” Herron says.

Police arrive within a few minutes and take Caballero away. (He’s ultimately charged with attempted sexual assault and kidnapping. His public defender — who did not respond to calls and emails from ESPN — argued that Caballero had never been convicted of a felony and had been off his mental health medications, and the court agreed to release him to the custody of a relative. The trial is scheduled for sometime this fall.)

Herron does his best to soothe the woman while the detectives interview witnesses and the police cars pull away. She gives Herron and Rogers one more hug each, and then she’s loaded into an ambulance and driven off.

Herron and Rogers watch as she pulls away, and then they’re the only people still there, standing in the park, staring at each other, as people wander past with no idea that a sexual assault had been prevented a half-hour earlier.

“It’s just… over now?” Rogers says to Herron.

“I guess so,” Herron says.

Rogers goes back to setting up his daughter’s birthday party. Guests begin arriving soon after, and Rogers can’t help but sit amongst all the laughing and balloons and presents and think about the way something can happen — something really bad, something really traumatic — but the world just hurtles forward.

As Herron leaves the park, he calls his mom to tell her what happened. “You’re never going to believe this,” he tells her. “I saved this woman from getting raped in the park.”

“What if the guy had had a gun or a knife?” she asks. Herron lies and says that he could tell immediately Caballero didn’t have any weapons. He didn’t know, though. He just knew he had to start running.


A FEW DAYS after the attack, Herron and Rogers were asked if they’d come back to the Tempe town hall for a ceremony to honor them for their good deeds. The woman was notified but not expected to attend.

Herron and Rogers arrived to a crowded hallway of Tempe police commissioners and officers, with media cameras set up outside. The two men were chitchatting with everybody, and football kept coming up. Most of the people there were Cardinals fans, but a Patriots fan or two made sure to remind the room of the significant gap in success between the two franchises. Everybody laughed.

And then the group went quiet. A retired schoolteacher and her daughter turned the corner and began to approach. They walked side-by-side for a bit but then the mom sped a few steps ahead. “I wanted to hug my angels,” she says.

The hug began as a low-speed collision between Herron and the teacher, and they both peeled off one arm apiece to make room for Rogers. All three bowed their heads, and almost no words were exchanged. They just hugged and cried, and pretty soon, all those old grizzled cops were dabbing at their eyes, too.

About a minute later, the small huddle broke, and Herron told Rogers and the woman that he would get them to a Patriots game this fall. “For sure, that is a given,” says Herron, who will be splitting snaps at right tackle as starter Trent Brown deals with a calf injury. “There is no way that isn’t happening. We’ve established a relationship that will never be forgotten. Our paths will definitely cross again in some way shape or form. I don’t know when that is. But it will be a wonderful reunion.”

Now it was time to speak to the media outside. Rogers and Herron waved goodbye, and the woman’s daughter handed them each a thank-you letter she’d written. Herron really wanted to open his but he didn’t have time — he put the note in his pocket and headed for the exit.

But as he got to the doors, he looked back once more at the woman he’d saved. She was watching him the whole time as he walked away, so Herron gave her one final wave and smile. He was surprised — happily surprised — that she came that morning.

The truth is, she had to go. She says in the weeks after the attack, the only visual she had in her mind was the face of her attacker. She needed to stare at Herron and Rogers that morning for as long as she could. “I wanted to take in their faces,” she says. “I didn’t want to only see that man’s face for the rest of my life. And now I can — I only see Justin and Murry now when I think back on it. I will carry their faces forever.”

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2025 MLB Home Run Derby: The field is set! Who is the slugger to beat?

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2025 MLB Home Run Derby: The field is set! Who is the slugger to beat?

The 2025 MLB All-Star Home Run Derby is fast approaching — and the field is set.

Braves hometown hero Ronald Acuna Jr. became the first player to commit to the event, which will be held at Truist Park in Atlanta on July 14 (8 p.m. ET on ESPN). He was followed by MLB home run leader Cal Raleigh of the Seattle Mariners, James Wood of the Washington Nationals, Byron Buxton of the Minnesota Twins, Oneil Cruz of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Junior Caminero of the Tampa Bay Rays, Brent Rooker of the Athletics and Jazz Chisholm Jr. of the New York Yankees.

On Friday, however, Acuna was replaced by teammate Matt Olson.

With all the entrants announced, let’s break down their chances at taking home this year’s Derby prize.

Full All-Star Game coverage: How to watch, schedule, rosters, more


2025 home runs: 17 | Longest: 434 feet

Why he could win: Olson is a late replacement for Acuna as the home team’s representative at this year’s Derby. Apart from being the Braves’ first baseman, however, Olson also was born in Atlanta and grew up a Braves fan, giving him some extra motivation. The left-handed slugger led the majors in home runs in 2023 — his 54 round-trippers that season also set a franchise record — and he remains among the best in the game when it comes to exit velo and hard-hit rate.

Why he might not: The home-field advantage can also be a detriment if a player gets too hyped up in the first round. See Julio Rodriguez in Seattle in 2023, when he had a monster first round, with 41 home runs, but then tired out in the second round.


2025 home runs: 36 | Longest: 440 feet

Why he could win: It’s the season of Cal! The Mariners’ catcher is having one of the greatest slugging first halves in MLB history, as he’s been crushing mistakes all season . His easy raw power might be tailor-made for the Derby — he ranks in the 87th percentile in average exit velocity and delivers the ball, on average, at the optimal home run launch angle of 23 degrees. His calm demeanor might also be perfect for the contest as he won’t get too amped up.

Why he might not: He’s a catcher — and one who has carried a heavy workload, playing in all but one game this season. This contest is as much about stamina as anything, and whether Raleigh can carry his power through three rounds would be a concern. No catcher has ever won the Derby, with only Ivan Rodriguez back in 2005 even reaching the finals.


2025 home runs: 24 | Longest: 451 feet

Why he could win: He’s big, he’s strong, he’s young, he’s awesome, he might or might not be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. This is the perfect opportunity for Wood to show his talent on the national stage, and he wouldn’t be the first young player to star in the Derby. He ranks in the 97th percentile in average exit velocity and 99th percentile in hard-hit rate, so he can still muscle the ball out in BP even if he slightly mishits it. His long arms might be viewed as a detriment, but remember the similarly tall Aaron Judge won in 2017.

Why he might not: His natural swing isn’t a pure uppercut — he has a pretty low average launch angle of just 6.2 degrees — so we’ll see how that plays in a rapid-fire session. In real games, his power is primarily to the opposite field, but in a Home Run Derby you can get more cheapies pulling the ball down the line.


2025 home runs: 20 | Longest: 479 feet

Why he could win: Buxton’s raw power remains as impressive as nearly any hitter in the game. He crushed a 479-foot home run earlier this season and has four others of at least 425 feet. Indeed, his “no doubter” percentage — home runs that would be out of all 30 parks based on distance — is 75%, the highest in the majors among players with more than a dozen home runs. His bat speed ranks in the 89th percentile. In other words, two tools that could translate to a BP lightning show.

Why he might not: Buxton is 31 and the Home Run Derby feels a little more like a younger man’s competition. Teoscar Hernandez did win last year at age 31, but before that, the last winner older than 29 was David Ortiz in 2010, and that was under much different rules than are used now.


2025 home runs: 16 | Longest: 463 feet

Why he could win: If you drew up a short list of players everyone wants to see in the Home Run Derby, Cruz would be near the top. He has the hardest-hit ball of the 2025 season, and the hardest ever tracked by Statcast, a 432-foot missile of a home run with an exit velocity of 122.9 mph. He also crushed a 463-foot home run in Anaheim that soared way beyond the trees in center field. With his elite bat speed — 100th percentile — Cruz has the ability to awe the crowd with a potentially all-time performance.

Why he might not: Like all first-time contestants, can he stay within himself and not get too caught up in the moment? He has a long swing, which will result in some huge blasts, but might not be the most efficient for a contest like this one, where the more swings a hitter can get in before the clock expires, the better.


2025 home runs: 23 | Longest: 425 feet

Why he could win: Although Caminero was one of the most hyped prospects entering 2024, everyone kind of forgot about him heading into this season since he didn’t immediately rip apart the majors as a rookie. In his first full season, however, he has showed off his big-time raw power — giving him a chance to become just the third player to reach 40 home runs in his age-21 season. He has perhaps the quickest bat in the majors, ranking in the 100th percentile in bat speed, and his top exit velocity ranks in the top 15. That could translate to a barrage of home runs.

Why he might not: In game action, Caminero does hit the ball on the ground quite often — in fact, he’s on pace to break Jim Rice’s record for double plays grounded into in a season. If he gets out of rhythm, that could lead to a lot of low line drives during the Derby instead of fly balls that clear the fences.


2025 home runs: 19 | Longest: 440 feet

Why he could win: The Athletics slugger has been one of the top power hitters in the majors for three seasons now and is on his way to a third straight 30-homer season. Rooker has plus bat speed and raw power, but his biggest strength is an optimal average launch angle (19 degrees in 2024, 15 degrees this season) that translates to home runs in game action. That natural swing could be picture perfect for the Home Run Derby. He also wasn’t shy about saying he wanted to participate — and maybe that bodes well for his chances.

Why he might not: Rooker might not have quite the same raw power as some of the other competitors, as he has just one home run longer than 425 feet in 2025. But that’s a little nitpicky, as 11 of his home runs have still gone 400-plus feet. He competed in the college home run derby in Omaha while at Mississippi State in 2016 and finished fourth.


2025 home runs: 17 | Longest: 442 feet

Why he could win: Chisholm might not be the most obvious name to participate, given his career high of 24 home runs, but he has belted 17 already in 2025 in his first 61 games after missing some time with an injury. He ranks among the MLB leaders in a couple of home run-related categories, ranking in the 96th percentile in expected slugging percentage and 98th percentile in barrel rate. His raw power might not match that of the other participants, but he’s a dead-pull hitter who has increased his launch angle this season, which might translate well to the Derby, even if he won’t be the guy hitting the longest home runs.

Why he might not: Most of the guys who have won this have been big, powerful sluggers. Chisholm is listed at 5-foot-11, 184 pounds, and you have to go back to Miguel Tejada in 2004 to find the last player under 6 foot to win.

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Reds’ Fraley to play through partially torn labrum

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Reds' Fraley to play through partially torn labrum

CINCINNATI — Cincinnati Reds right fielder Jake Fraley was activated from the 10-day injured list on Saturday.

He had injured his right shoulder while trying to make a diving catch June 23 against the New York Yankees.

An MRI revealed a partially torn labrum that will eventually require surgery. Fraley received a cortisone shot and will try to play through it for the rest of the season.

The Reds were 7-4 in his absence.

Christian Encarnacion-Strand, who hasn’t played since Noelvi Marte returned from the IL on July 4, was optioned to Triple-A Louisville.

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Royals P Lorenzen (illness) scratched from start

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Royals P Lorenzen (illness) scratched from start

Kansas City Royals right-hander Michael Lorenzen was scratched from Saturday’s start due to an illness.

Left-hander Angel Zerpa replaced Lorenzen for the game against the visiting New York Mets.

Lorenzen, 33, is 5-8 with a 4.61 ERA through 18 starts this season.

Zerpa, 25, is 3-1 with a 3.89 ERA in 40 appearances out of the bullpen this season. His last start was in August 2023.

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