Jack Eichel‘s latest return to Buffalo is about more than just Jack Eichel.
The Sabres‘ former captain is a headline. What’s happening in Buffalo this season goes beyond the surface.
When the league-leading Vegas Golden Knights drop in to duel on Thursday, it will be the second time Eichel has faced his old team since their messy divorce was finalized in November 2021. That trade of the club’s second overall pick in 2015 signaled the start of its next — and hopefully best — chapter, a slow-but-steady build back to being a contender.
Executing that vision has been Buffalo’s mission this season through a respectable 7-6-0 start. It’s what makes Thursday night important for the Sabres — not as a game against Eichel, but a game of genuine significance for them.
“I think we embrace it. Like, let’s embrace this game,” Buffalo captain Kyle Okposo said. “It’s a big game, and we haven’t been in big games in the last 10 years because we haven’t been in the playoffs. Let’s try and build something to where we can play in these games and have them mean something and rise to the occasion like the few times we did last year. Let’s continue that. I don’t think there’s any more pressure, but let’s rise to the challenge.”
Buffalo was in a different place when that first Eichel circus made landfall on March 10. The Sabres ranked in the bottom five of the standings at 19-32-8 while Vegas had a middle-of-the-pack 32-23-4 record. Still, the hometown team took care of business in a 3-1 victory which included Eichel being resoundingly booed by Sabres’ faithful — and that was just during his tribute video.
Whether it was the poor reception or lousy result, Eichel didn’t hold back in postgame comments fans are bound to remember come Thursday night.
“It was the loudest I’ve heard this place ever,” Eichel opined last spring. “Really. It only took seven years and me leaving for them to get into the game.”
And those boo birds?
“They must just [have been] booing because they wish I was still here.”
Eichel is long gone from Buffalo after a turbulent six-year relationship and a bitter split. The Sabres had high hopes when they selected him, envisioning a surefire superstar center to lead the franchise’s rejuvenation. That never happened. During Eichel’s tenure — including three seasons as captain — the Sabres failed to finish above .500, let alone make a postseason appearance.
The lack of on-ice results was frustrating enough. Both sides’ breaking point was more personal. It stemmed from Eichel’s neck injury in early 2021; he wanted to repair the disc issue with an artificial replacement surgery never performed before on an NHL player. Buffalo wouldn’t allow that, and Eichel wouldn’t budge, so Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams stripped Eichel of the captaincy in September 2021 and then traded him to the Golden Knights in exchange for a package that included Alex Tuch and Peyton Krebs.
Vegas immediately gave Eichel the green light to have his procedure. Following a long rehab, Eichel debuted with the Golden Knights in February. A month later, he was leaving Buffalo with zero points and a minus-one rating against his old club.
Eichel’s successful start to this season — six goals and 15 points in 14 games — tracks with how good the Golden Knights have been, producing their current eight-game win streak and rising to the top of the NHL standings at 11-2-0. His hot hand could add extra spice to the impending matchup.
Buffalo has been streaking in the opposite direction, dropping three in a row after going 7-3-0 out of the gate. It’s another reason why Thursday carries so much weight. The Sabres remember how Eichel was greeted last time; that passion plays into their hands. But it’s going head-to-head with the NHL’s best that could be the ultimate slump buster.
“Everybody knows what happened last year,” Okposo said. “We’re just going to play it by ear and try to feed off the crowd. We know that people are obviously excited for this game. And we’re excited to get to our game and show that we can compete and that we can play with some of the top teams in the league. Make no mistake about it, that’s what these guys are and they’re playing extremely well and they’re the No. 1 team in the league. So we’ve got a big test and hopefully use that energy from the crowd.”
DON GRANATO COULD feel the trap coming.
He didn’t like how the Sabres practiced on Monday after losing games on the road to Carolina and Tampa Bay. Buffalo had Arizona in town Tuesday before its matchups against Vegas and Boston. It would be easy, Granato knew, to overlook the Coyotes. And the Sabres did, losing 4-1 to create a season-long three-game spiral.
Which, conveniently, leads directly into facing the Pacific and Atlantic Division leaders back-to-back.
“I didn’t like it,” Granato said of the Arizona game’s place in the schedule. “Now, did me not liking it, did I carry any negative energy into that? That’s something for me to look at too. You can go back after that game and you can probably say, ‘I told you so,’ because it played out the way it played out. That is one that we wish we would have had a better performance in.”
Hard lessons are part of the learning process. So is creating — and then sticking to — an identity. Granato’s focus is downloading that into his players, so it becomes second nature regardless of whether their opponent is rising or reeling.
Vegas is unquestionably in the former category. Eichel has been a major contributor in making it so. Granato, much like Okposo, thinks those are positive things for the Sabres. It gives Buffalo a jolt to shake off some current stagnation.
“We don’t know what the environment will be [on Thursday], but it could be pretty energized,” Granato said. “That’s great. That’s exciting. It’s good for our guys. You have to acknowledge that you are two teams who made a big trade with really good hockey players going both ways. Anybody that plays against their old team always wants to do well. It breaks the monotony of an [82-game season]. But the outcome is going to be decided by who can get to their game and play it. I believe our guys are fully committed and focused to that. I think the other side of it is just added fun and flavor.”
The Eichel trade did allow for one true homecoming, and that was Tuch’s. The player from central New York grew up a Sabres fan. This season he’s tracking towards a potential career year already, with seven goals and 11 points in 13 games. Meanwhile, the 21-year-old Krebs is coming along slowly with two assists in 11 games. It’s all part of the process.
Granato didn’t know what to expect from either Tuch or Krebs when Eichel was traded. Looking back, he has no complaints about how that trade panned out, or what they’ve added since.
“I’m real happy with where they are,” Granato said. “I can’t recollect my expectations from when we first got them, but I feel that they’ve contributed a lot to our team and to the direction we’re going and they’re both players that are going to grow with our group that’s there.”
“I try not to focus on all that [hysteria],” he said. “Our thing is just to focus on the game, what we’ve got to do to win. Outside noise is just outside noise. It’s a good challenge, and I think we’re ready for it.”
Eric Comrie agrees. The Sabres’ netminder could feel it during Wednesday’s practice. Buffalo’s swagger was making an appearance. Comrie was pleased to welcome it back.
“You start to see the confidence building,” he said. “And the morale gets coming back a little bit, everyone starts getting more positive, and that’s when things start clicking again. It’s always that, at first, your attitude starts to dip and then all of a sudden, your play starts to dip and then all of a sudden, your attitude starts coming back and your play starts coming back. So I think it’s a big correlation between positivity and positive things happening on the ice.”
All Buffalo has to do now is translate that against Vegas. The Sabres have dealt with a few injures of late, including to Rasmus Dahlin (who missed the Tampa Bay game with an upper-body ailment), Mattias Samuelsson (lower-body) and Henri Jokiharju (facial fracture). This recent stretch has given Buffalo its first taste of adversity this season. It won’t be the last.
But the Sabres haven’t forgotten their identity and don’t plan to either, regardless of which former friends are now waiting in the wings.
“I think we’ve got a really good team,” Thompson said. “I think everyone here believes that too. So I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone in this room that we were going to come out hot. We’re going through a little bit of a slump right now, but we’ve got a good opportunity [against Vegas] to get back in the win column, so we’ve just got to turn the page and move forward.”
BOSTON — The Red Sox activated All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman from the 10-day injured list before Friday’s game against Tampa Bay.
Bregman, who has been sidelined since May 24 with a right quad strain, returned to his customary spot in the field and was slotted in the No. 2 spot of Boston’s lineup for the second of a four-game series against the Rays. He sustained the injury when he rounded first base and felt his quad tighten up.
A two-time World Series winner who spent the first nine seasons of his big league career with the Houston Astros, Bregman signed a $120 million, three-year contract in February. At the time of the injury, he was hitting .299 with 11 homers and 35 RBI. Those numbers led to him being named to the American League’s All-Star team for the third time since breaking into the majors with the Astros in 2016.
Bregman missed 43 games with the quad strain. Earlier this week, he told reporters that he was trending in a direction where he didn’t believe he would require a minor league rehab assignment. With three games left before the All-Star break, the Red Sox agreed the time was right to reinstate a player to a team that entered Friday in possession of one of the AL’s three wild-card berths.
“He’s going to do his part,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said before Friday’s game. “Obviously, the timing, we’ll see where he’s at, but he’s been working hard on the swing … visualizing and watching video.”
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.