Connect with us

Published

on

WHEN HARRISON BADER found out that his childhood dream was coming true, his first reaction was unexpected: disappointment.

St. Louis, where he’d spent the past five and a half seasons as a member of the Cardinals, had become home. The team drafted Bader out of Florida in 2015, and when he was called up in 2017, he became a fan favorite. As the Cardinals ownership and front office told him that he was part of their roster’s core and the team’s future, Bader planted roots in the community. He was named the King of St. Louis Mardi Gras. He befriended local politicians like Missouri state senator Brian Williams and was working with him to bring a PGA golf event to St. Louis.

But on Aug. 2 of this season, when his phone rang four minutes before the trade deadline with a call from Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, Bader knew his time in St. Louis was over.

“Say it ain’t so, Mo,” Bader said to Mozeliak.

The trade was to New York, 11 miles from where Bader grew up in Bronxville, New York. Bader had idolized Derek Jeter and the Core Four, attending the Yankees’ 2009 playoff run — and when the team hoisted the World Series trophy that year, he imagined one day doing the same. As the news of his new home leaked out on Twitter, Bader’s phone flooded with text messages from friends he graduated with at Horace Mann, a private school in the Bronx. To most of his high school friends, Bader expressed excitement about returning to play for the hometown team.

But to his best friend, Nick Wiener, whom he met in second grade, he expressed frustration.

“I understand why they did it,” Bader told Wiener. “But I’m gonna make them see this was a bad decision.”

There were other complicating factors. Before he ever played a game in pinstripes, Bader faced skepticism from the same fans he once rooted alongside, who wondered why the front office would trade left-handed starting pitcher Jordan Montgomery for Bader, then on the IL with plantar fasciitis and wearing a walking boot.

It didn’t help that the Yankees struggled after the deal, posting a 10-18 record in August, hitting .221/.297/.354 over that span and watching their lead in the division shrink from 15.5 games to four. Montgomery flourished early for St. Louis, allowing just one run in his first 25⅔ innings, good for a 0.35 ERA over four starts.

Meanwhile, all Bader could do was wait to heal — and show up to play when it counted most, down the stretch and into October.

He’s come through. Since making his debut Sept. 20, Bader has won over skeptical Yankees fans, flashing Gold Glove defense in center field. In a hard-fought ALDS that goes to a deciding Game 5 on Monday night in the Bronx, Bader has smacked solo blasts in Game 1 and Game 3 against the Cleveland Guardians before hitting a two-run homer in Game 4, joining Bernie Williams and Mickey Mantle as the only Yankee center fielders with three home runs in a single postseason. They were also his first three home runs as a Yankee.

“Coming to New York,” Bader said, “I felt like I pressed the reset button.”


HARRISON BADER REALLY loved his long hair. He initially grew out his mane in 2018, inspired by players he watched in the NHL, whose flow is visible from underneath their helmets. He loved that his hair made him recognizable. He loved that when he made diving plays in the outfield, it waved around out of his hat like a cape hanging off of Superman. The fans loved it too, with a Twitter account dedicated to his signature locks.

But playing for the Yankees means adhering to the franchise’s infamous grooming policy, which prohibits all players, coaches and male executives from displaying facial hair other than mustaches and growing their hair below the collar.

For Bader, it was symbolic. Hitting the reset button meant cutting off his hair.

“There was not even a thought about it,” Bader said. “It was great, happy to do it. I had a great time on and off the field in St. Louis, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but in many ways, this was emblematic of the page turning.”

But even after the haircut, it took weeks for Bader to really process how his life had changed. He sold his home in St. Louis; his mom came and helped pack his life up to move back north. He walked into the Yankee clubhouse for the first time, but still Bader did not fully feel the weight of it all until he finally healed from his injury and returned to the field Sept. 20, the day Aaron Judge hit his 60th homer of the season and the Yankees came back from four runs down in the ninth inning against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“I don’t think he really processed it until he started going to batting practice and putting on the Yankee uniform,” Wiener said. “He didn’t fully process it until he was out there and making his debut.”

The postseason success has felt like validation for Bader, proof of why he deserves to wear pinstripes, why the Yankees thought it wise to trade for him despite his injury. While Yankees general manager Brian Cashman told Bader that he expected the outfielder to be an impact player for New York, Bader knew fans had questions, and they weren’t the only ones. Montgomery was popular in the Yankees clubhouse, and Bader knew it would take time for him to win over his new teammates, especially given his inability to join them on the field right away.

But Bader knew focusing on things outside of his control would only hamper his ability to succeed on the field.

“You focus on the next thing, the next opportunity,” Bader said. “Then, you kind of relieve yourself of all of the other anxiety.”


IT’S HARD TO miss Bader in the clubhouse. He often dresses like he’s another 20-something New Yorker walking around the streets of SoHo, wearing bright graphic T-shirts and hyped sneakers like the Nike Ben & Jerry’s collaboration Chunky Dunkys, which resell on the secondary market for as much as $5,000. Bader’s new teammates describe him as outgoing, someone who’s always saying hi to the folks around him.

Yankees ace Gerrit Cole noticed Bader’s presence immediately once he joined the team.

“He’s electric, really,” Cole said. “An electric player, impact player. Like, got moxie, got baseball awareness. Gets after the ball on defense. A lot of good things to say about that guy.”

When he joined the Yankees, he also made a mission to get to know fellow outfielder Aaron Judge. While the two needed to get to know each other in order to communicate while roaming for fly balls, Bader also admired the way Judge carried himself on and off the field.

“Bro, not in a weird way, but I want to get close to him and do what he does,” Bader told Wiener. “I’m spending every minute I can next to that man.”

While Bader carried a fiery approach to the game in St. Louis, he saw Judge’s mature and calm demeanor and wanted to adopt it for himself.

“I wanted to surround myself with him and his energy,” Bader said last week. “We move as a unit out there and he’s part of that. It was a conscious decision to just be like, we’re going to be working next to each other so let’s talk. Let’s see where we’re at and just be the best version of ourselves for this team.”

He’s also settled back into New York life, returning to his high school routine of getting a bacon, egg and cheese on a blueberry bagel in the morning, grabbing a slice from his favorite pizza joint (Best Pizza, on First) and attending the wedding of a high school friend, something he would not have been able to do if he was still in St. Louis. He returned to local favorites like Caridad Express, a Dominican restaurant in the Bronx that he goes to with his off-season training partner, Andy Camilo.

Usually on the field, though, Bader tries to show as little emotion as possible, hoping that bottling up his feelings will help propel him to play better. But as his first home run as a Yankee sailed over the left-field fence in Game 1 of the ALDS, Bader couldn’t help but relish the moment, something he spent time visualizing to prepare himself.

“You don’t want to detract from anything that might come later in the game, but it was really hard when everybody was cheering,” Bader said. “It was a great moment. I enjoyed it, and again, as soon as it was over, it’s right back to locking in.”

Bader said this strategy dates back to his time at the University of Florida, where coach Brad Weitzel preached the mindset of “be the baseball,” telling his players that the baseball doesn’t have any emotion, doesn’t take the situation into account, doesn’t care how many fans are in the stands.

“It is totally emotionless,” Bader said. “So I try to act that way.”

Bader knows it’s easy to get distracted wanting to be the hero, hit the big home run, come through in a big moment — especially while playing for your childhood team. Keeping his mind off all that helps Bader on the field — and also helped him off of it, particularly back in August, when he was the new guy who couldn’t help his team win.

“The reality of the situation was that I wasn’t ready to play,” Bader said. “If I was going to force playing, if I was chasing that exact emotion, it wouldn’t have been a version of myself that would have been effective for myself and my teammates. Coping with that reality allowed me to continue to work.”

Even as the Yankees face possible elimination in Game 5, Bader is controlling those emotions again. He doesn’t want to dwell on accomplishing his childhood fantasy for too long.

“It’s a conscious decision every day to not get too high and not get too low,” Bader said. “Everything is just the next opportunity. You have to be completely still and just relax and be emotionless for when that next opportunity arises.”

For Bader and the Yankees, that opportunity is now.

Continue Reading

Sports

Gundy calls out Ducks’ budget; Lanning fires back

Published

on

By

Gundy calls out Ducks' budget; Lanning fires back

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and Oregon coach Dan Lanning are unexpectedly giving the Week 2 matchup between their teams some extra juice.

While speaking on his radio show Monday, Gundy said Oklahoma State spent “around $7 million” on its team over the past three years before referring to how much the Ducks have spent on their roster in recent years.

“I think Oregon spent close to $40 [million] last year alone,” Gundy said. “So, that was just one year. Now, I might be off a few million.”

Gundy made several other comments about Oregon’s resources — he said “it’ll cost a lot of money to keep” Ducks quarterback Dante Moore and that he believes Oregon’s budget should determine the programs they schedule outside of the Big Ten.

“Oregon is paying a lot, a lot of money for their team,” Gundy said. “From a nonconference standpoint, there’s coaches saying they should [play teams with similar budgets].”

On Monday night during his weekly news conference, Lanning responded.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning. We spend to win,” Lanning said when asked about Gundy’s comments. “Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t. … I can’t speak on their situation; I have no idea what they got in their pockets over there.”

Lanning added that he has “a lot of respect” for Gundy and praised how Gundy has consistently led his team to winning seasons over his 20-year tenure in Stillwater. Both teams are 1-0 this season; the Ducks are ranked No. 7 and are expected to be vying for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

“Over the last three to five years, they’ve elevated themselves. They have a lot of resources,” Gundy said. “They’ve got them stacked out there pretty good right now.”

Last year, Georgia coach Kirby Smart referenced Oregon’s resources, saying at SEC media days that he wishes he could get “some of that NIL money” that Oregon alum and Nike founder Phil Knight “has been sharing with Dan Lanning.”

“I think it’s impressive that guys like Kirby have been signing the No. 1 class in the nation without any NIL money this entire time,” Lanning said jokingly in response to Smart during Big Ten media days last year. “Obviously, Coach Smart took a little shot at us. But if you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better have great support. We have that.”

While Smart’s and Lanning’s barbs had the tone of two coaches who have worked together (Lanning was Georgia’s defensive coordinator from 2019 to 2021), the back-and-forth with Gundy on Monday was unexpected.

“I’m sure UT-Martin maybe didn’t have as much as them last week, and they played,” Lanning said of Oklahoma State. “So, we’ll let it play out.”

Continue Reading

Sports

Belichick: Heels ‘better than what we were tonight’

Published

on

By

Belichick: Heels 'better than what we were tonight'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If Bill Belichick were still in New England, still helming a team he’d coached for a quarter-century, where he’d won six Super Bowls, he could have shrugged off Monday’s debacle against TCU as just a hiccup on a long road to somewhere better, answering his critics with his now ubiquitous retort: On to the next game.

In Chapel Hill on Monday, with a sell-out crowd eager to get its first glimpse of a new era of North Carolina football under the tutelage of one of the game’s all-time greats, what happened couldn’t be shrugged off so easily.

Belichick’s Tar Heels were embarrassed, with TCU rolling to a 48-14 win in which UNC didn’t simply look like the lesser team, but one that often appeared utterly unprepared for the moment.

“We’re better than what we were tonight but we have to go out there and show that and prove it,” Belichick said. “Nobody’s going to do it for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Through the first drive of Belichick’s tenure as a college coach, everything had gone right.

Crowds filled the bars and restaurants along Franklin Street in Chapel Hill hours before kickoff. A pregame concert, headlined by country star and UNC alum Chase Rice, set the stage for a star-studded event. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm were all in attendance as the Belichick era at North Carolina finally kicked off.

And then the Tar Heels delivered a flawlessly executed 83-yard touchdown drive, and the packed house at Kenan Stadium exploded.

This was the dream when UNC shocked the college football world by landing Belichick, and suddenly Belichick’s promise of bringing a national championship to a program that hasn’t even won an ACC title in more than half a century felt entirely plausible.

Then TCU delivered one cold dose of reality after another, and by midway through the third quarter, after Devean Deal‘s scoop-and-score on a Gio Lopez fumble put the Horned Frogs up by 34, the once-frenetic stands emptied out and the hope for something magical in Chapel Hill seemed a distant memory.

“They out-played us, out-coached us, and they were just better than we were tonight,” Belichick said. “It’s all there was to it. They did a lot more things right than we did.”

Belichick turned over the bulk of North Carolina’s roster in one offseason, bringing in 70 new players — nearly half of whom arrived after spring practice. The transformation of the roster along with Belichick’s famously guarded approach to media meant few outside of North Carolina’s locker room had a clear vision of just what this squad would look like.

By the time the bludgeoning was over, the mantra from the Tar Heels’ perspective was that this performance hardly showcased what they’d seen on the practice field for the past six weeks.

“I thought we were prepared for the game,” backup quarterback Max Johnson said. “We prepared for a week and a half for TCU specifically, but we’ve been working on our fundamentals for a year now. We need to do a better job executing.”

After the opening touchdown drive, North Carolina went three-and-out on five of its next six drives. Lopez went more than two hours of real time between completions. UNC failed to convert its first six third-down tries, and Lopez threw a pick-six late in the first half that seemed to be the last gasp for the Tar Heels. The defense was equally catastrophic. TCU racked up 542 yards of total offense and ran for 258 yards, including a 75-yard scamper by Kevorian Barnes, and the Heels missed one tackle after another after another.

“Too many three-and-outs, too many long plays on defense, two turnovers for touchdowns. You can’t overcome that,” Belichick said. “We just can’t perform well doing some of the things we did. We’ve got to be better than that. We had too many self-inflicted wounds we have to eliminate before we can even worry about addressing our opponent.”

Johnson came on in relief of Lopez, who left after his sack-fumble with a lower back injury, and he delivered a touchdown drive that at least offered some spark of life for the Heels’ offense. Belichick said it was unclear whether Lopez would be able to play Saturday at Charlotte, but he left open the possibility that the QB competition could be re-opened.

“We’ll see how Gio is,” Belichick said. “Max came in after being off for a long time and hung in there and made some plays in a tough situation. We’ll take a look at it and see where things are at and go from there. It’s too early to tell now.”

Before the game, Belichick spent nearly a half-hour on the field watching both teams go through warm-ups. He chatted with dignitaries and appeared to bask in the moment, but the magic quickly evaporated.

The 48 points scored by TCU in Belichick’s first career game as a college coach are more than his teams allowed in any of his 333 NFL games, and for as much as he’d worked to sell North Carolina as “the 33rd NFL team,” Monday’s disaster felt like a reminder that, regardless of his success in the pros, this was new territory.

His response to the loss, however, was largely in line with what fans have come to expect of the understated coach — simple, succinct and emphatic.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “We’ll get at it.”

For a fan base that had waited nine months for this moment, however, it could be harder to turn the page. Belichick never promised a quick fix, but there were reasonable assurances that this team would play with physicality and fundamentals, that UNC wouldn’t be out-coached or out-schemed.

By halftime Monday, the veil had been lifted. Belichick has six Super Bowl rings, but this was a bigger job than perhaps any he’d assumed before.

The excitement that reached its apex after the opening touchdown drive perfectly showcased what this experiment could look like. The question now is whether UNC’s reality will ever match the dream or if Belichick’s first drive as a college coach will be remembered as the pinnacle of his tenure here.

“Don’t lose hope,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward, continue to work and trust in each other.”

Continue Reading

Sports

FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

Published

on

By

FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

Florida State freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was shot Sunday night and is hospitalized in critical but stable condition in intensive care at a Tallahassee-area hospital, the school said Monday.

According to the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office, Pritchard was inside a vehicle outside an apartment building when the shooting happened Sunday night in Havana, Florida, which is about 16 miles from Tallahassee, near the Georgia state line. An investigation into the shooting is ongoing.

In its statement, Florida State said Pritchard was visiting family at the time he was shot.

“The Pritchard family is thankful for the support from so many people, as well as the care from first responders and medical professionals, and asks that their privacy be respected at this time,” the FSU statement said.

Pritchard, who is from Sanford, Florida, enrolled at Florida State in January but did not play in the Seminoles’ season-opening victory against Alabama.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Continue Reading

Trending