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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — On the back wall of Gus’ Good Times Deli, an iconic eatery on the University of Tennessee campus, hangs an oversized banner that has been in place for at least two decades and serves as a stark reminder to the rest of the college football world.

And while the distinct Tennessee orange shade of the banner might have faded slightly over time, the anger behind the sentiment has not.

Don’t Blame Us. We Voted For Manning.

In these parts, they don’t refer to the award for the top player in college football as the Heisman Trophy. They refer to it, if they refer to it at all, as the “Heistman.”

The Vols faithful — from message-board posters to Hall of Fame coaches — remain angry and bewildered that favorite son Peyton Manning lost out on the 1997 Heisman to Michigan’s Charles Woodson, the first and only primarily defensive player to win the award.

But beyond that, they are convinced of foul play. They believe the national media engineered a campaign to promote Woodson at the expense of Manning.

To make their case, Tennessee partisans point out that Manning was completely left off 110 ballots, meaning 110 voters didn’t place the future No. 1 draft pick and NFL Hall of Famer first, second or third. (Woodson was left off 88 ballots.) Woodson won the vote by 272 points and won every region but the South.

“How does that happen unless you’re trying to make sure that one guy wins it and another guy doesn’t?” said former Tennessee offensive tackle Trey Teague, who roomed with Manning in college and played nine seasons in the NFL.

“I haven’t paid attention to [the Heisman] or really cared about it since that night in New York City,” then-Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer told ESPN this fall. “It’s nothing against [Woodson], either. He was a great player. But as you look back, there were all kinds of dynamics that went into it. ABC and ESPN weren’t carrying the SEC back then. They were carrying the Big Ten.

“The bottom line is the best player in college football didn’t win it that year, and nobody in Tennessee has forgotten or ever will forget.”

Five hundred miles north, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a different conspiracy surrounding Tennessee and 1997 lingers.

After Woodson won the Heisman, the Wolverines entered the postseason unbeaten and No. 1 in both the Associated Press and USA Today Coaches polls. Michigan beat No. 8 Washington State 20-16 in the Rose Bowl to finish 12-0. The next day, No. 2 Nebraska — also unbeaten — throttled No. 3 Tennessee 42-17.

In the last year of a pre-BCS world, when polls determined the national title, Michigan remained No. 1 in the AP poll. But Nebraska leapfrogged the Wolverines to finish No. 1 in the coaches poll and claimed a split championship.

The way the 62-person balloting broke down, the Cornhuskers earned 32 first-place votes (up from 8½ in the pre-bowl poll) and 30 seconds. Michigan received 30 firsts but not 32 seconds. Based on the final tally of points, the Wolverines either fell to third on two ballots or all the way to fourth on one. One extra first-place vote would have meant at least a tie for No. 1 in the coaches poll.

The suspicions of many Michigan fans turned to Fulmer. It’s a claim the coach, who said at the time he was voting Nebraska No. 1, has repeatedly called “ridiculous” over the years.

“Yes, I’ve heard that once or twice,” Fulmer said sarcastically. “But that’s not true, none of it is. I can’t remember exactly where I did vote them, but I voted like I thought it should be, right near the top because they were one of the top teams that year.”

But even some Michigan players have wondered.

“Because he was so vocal about Peyton Manning not winning the Heisman, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out,” said Chris Howard, the leading rusher on Michigan’s 1997 team. “It just seemed like he was the most obvious person that changed their vote.”

Is there any evidence to support either side’s claims? No.

Will that stop the rampant speculation? Also no.

This year’s Heisman Trophy ceremony is Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ESPN) and neither Tennessee nor Michigan has a finalist to the dismay of both fan bases. The old wound was reopened for Volunteers fans — including Teague, who tweeted “Heisman Trophy is a joke. Since 1997” when quarterback Hendon Hooker didn’t make the cut. Wolverines running back Blake Corum won’t be in New York, either.

But in a season in which both schools made a run at the College Football Playoff and flirted with the Heisman, the wild year of 1997 and its aftermath was never far from the surface.


EACH YEAR WHEN the Heisman ceremony rolls around, Mike McMahan’s blood pressure rises. McMahan, a UT graduate, is the son of the late Ron McMahan, a longtime editor of the Knoxville Journal newspaper. The elder McMahan was also a teammate of Johnny Majors, who was a Heisman runner-up to Notre Dame’s Paul Hornung in 1956. Majors was a star single-wing tailback for the Vols and later became their coach.

“I was told all those stories as a kid, that Notre Dame finished 2-8 that year and Majors still didn’t win it,” McMahan recounted. “So the Peyton one hit hard.”

Manning was impressive in 1997, passing for 3,819 yards (fourth nationally) with 36 touchdowns (third) to just 11 interceptions for the one-loss Vols. He threw four touchdown passes, including a 73-yarder to Marcus Nash in the fourth quarter, during a comeback win over Auburn in the SEC championship game. He set a school record with 523 yards and tied a school mark with five touchdown passes in a win over Kentucky and Tim Couch, the nation’s second-leading passer that season. He added 304 yards and three scores in the Vols’ third consecutive win over Alabama.

James Kirkland roomed with Manning during their senior year at Tennessee. Kirkland, the student body president that year, felt it was obvious ESPN was, in his words, propping up Woodson to make the race interesting and create some drama because Manning seemed like such a shoo-in at the start of the season. Manning returned for his senior season despite being the likely No. 1 overall pick in the 1997 NFL draft.

“It just started to snowball,” Kirkland said. “I remember we’d come back to the fraternity house, and it would be the same two or three highlights of Charles Woodson over and over again on ESPN. They made him look like Superman.

“I don’t think Tennessee fans are mad at Charles Woodson. Look at what an accomplished player he was. We’re mad because of what Peyton had meant to the entire Tennessee family, the way he went out there as a senior and did everything he needed to do on the field to win it — and they found a way to take it from him.”


THE WOLVERINES ENTERED 1997 coming off four consecutive four-loss seasons. They had not won a national title since 1948 and expectations were relatively low, starting the season ranked No. 14 in the AP poll.

“Quite honestly, we had the feeling that we were letting everybody down,” said Mark Campbell, a starting tight end in ’97. But Michigan started hot, stifling No. 8 Colorado 27-3 in the season opener, and never looked back.

Woodson showed a knack for making his biggest plays — whether on offense, defense or special teams — in the biggest games.

And fairly or not, that created a contrast to Manning’s struggles against Florida. Tennessee failed to beat the rival Gators in his three years as starting quarterback, including in 1997, when the Vols’ 33-20 defeat in Gainesville was their only regular-season loss that year.

There was Woodson’s soaring one-handed interception against No. 15 Michigan State (a 23-7 win) and a 37-yard catch-and-run touchdown against No. 3 Penn State (a 34-8 rout).

“That catapulted us even more into the spotlight and Charles even more as well,” Howard said.

Then came the game against No. 4 Ohio State two weeks later. Woodson delivered in the game of the year with a 78-yard punt return score and an interception in a 20-14 triumph.

The following Monday, Michigan found itself with a decisive lead as the No. 1 team in the nation in both the Associated Press and USA Today Coaches polls. Woodson had finished the year with seven interceptions and 43 tackles for the nation’s No. 1 scoring defense (9.5 points per game), while adding three offensive scores.

He was on to New York for the Heisman ceremony.


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Michigan’s Charles Woodson is named the winner of the 1997 Heisman Trophy, the first primary defensive player to ever win the award.

STILL, WOODSON WAS an underdog.

Defensive back Marcus Ray accompanied his roommate to the ceremony. He remembers Woodson asking him, while they were getting ready: “Do you think I can win?”

“Probably not,” Ray replied. “I hope you do. But nobody has ever won on defense.”

So imagine the collective maize-and-blue euphoria when Peter Junge, president of the Downtown Athletic Club, said, “And the winner, from Michigan, Charles Woodson.”

“I screamed, and some strange energy went through my body,” Ray said. “I think you can hear me on the broadcast.”

“We lost our s—,” Howard said. “We were screaming, running out into the streets, popping champagne bottles.”

Things were decidedly more subdued on the other side.

“I was there at the [Heisman] event, and as I look back, when they announced Charles Woodson, and this isn’t to diminish Charles, but there were more media to go see the reaction of Peyton than to see the reaction of Charles,” said David Cutcliffe, who was Tennessee’s offensive coordinator at the time and remains one of Manning’s closest confidants. “I was sick to my stomach about it and still get sick about it.”

Greg Johnson, a former U.S. Marine who did seven deployments in the Middle East, was in Argentina when Woodson was announced as the winner. Johnson played football at Tennessee and was a year ahead of Manning. They were roommates during Manning’s sophomore and junior seasons. Johnson, who didn’t have a TV, sought out an internet café in Argentina to hear the “grim” news.

“I just felt wronged, that a wrong had been committed,” Johnson said. “I still say we have a recount.”

Manning rarely talks about the Heisman flap and said a few years ago he has chosen “not to go down that road.”

“My disappointment was for the University of Tennessee,” Manning told ESPN in 2017. “That’s who I hurt for, all of the great fans and all of the great people there. Tennessee has never had a Heisman winner, but four second-place finishers — Hank Lauricella, Johnny Majors, Heath Shuler and myself. I really wanted to win it for my school, so I was disappointed for that.”

Even former Florida coach Steve Spurrier, who reveled in going 3-0 against the Vols with Manning as the starter, suggests Manning might have been held to a different standard.

“Everybody knows Peyton should have won the Heisman that year. I don’t blame those Tennessee fans for being mad. I voted for him,” said Spurrier, who won the Heisman in 1966. “Yep, we beat ’em a bunch, but it wasn’t just Peyton out there playing by himself. I think some of those Midwest boys in the media just wanted a defensive player, or somebody else, to win it that year. You’d have to ask them.”

The aftermath in Knoxville hit swiftly. A radio station sold T-shirts to benefit a local charity that featured a picture of the Heisman Trophy on the front and said “Keep your stupid trophy” on the back. For several days in a row, fans lined up around the building to get them, and the station sold every shirt it had.

And a year later, as the Vols were making a run to a national championship, center Spencer Riley wore a CBS hat to Fiesta Bowl media days. Asked if he was boycotting ESPN, he snapped, “Damn right. Look at what they did to Peyton and look at the way they talk about us.”

But back in New York at the time of the Heisman announcement, Ray said that on the Vols side, “It felt like a funeral. So we knew after the Heisman, Tennessee wasn’t going to do us any favors with their football team’s game or with their coach in that Orange Bowl.”


MICHIGAN AND NEBRASKA were the lone unbeatens heading into bowl season. Since the Wolverines won the Big Ten, they were contractually obligated to play the Pac-12 champ in the Rose Bowl. The Cornhuskers, meanwhile, had an Orange Bowl date with Manning and Tennessee.

Legendary Nebraska coach Tom Osborne, now 85, told ESPN last month he called the Big Ten to ask whether there was any way Michigan and Nebraska could play each other instead.

“The answer came back they had the Rose Bowl contract, and that couldn’t be changed, and so I understood that, but it’s really a shame when you had two undefeated teams at the end that you couldn’t settle it on the field,” Osborne said.

Then-Michigan coach Lloyd Carr said that was the first he had heard of that phone call.

“I think Coach Osborne’s lucky because if we had played, I think we would have beat Nebraska and then he’d be sorry he didn’t at least get a half,” Carr said with a laugh earlier this month.

Though Michigan had a commanding lead over Nebraska in both the AP and coaches polls headed into their respective bowl games, the Cornhuskers believed there was a chance at a split championship if they played well against the Vols. Osborne was retiring after the season, and the Huskers players made it their mission to finish on top.

“I remember telling the players the door wasn’t wide open, but at least we had a crack,” Osborne said. “I think they seized on that idea.”

Michigan played first, beating Washington State on Jan. 1. In the waning seconds, Washington State quarterback Ryan Leaf — the nation’s leading passer in 1997 — spiked the ball with what appeared to be two seconds on the clock, but the referee ruled no time remained and Michigan held on to win 21-16.

In the jubilant postgame locker room, Carr told his team:

“You have left a wonderful legacy for every team that ever follows you. You … just won the national championship.”

“We celebrated like we had won the national championship,” Michigan offensive tackle Jon Jansen said.

But the polls would not come out until after Nebraska and Tennessee played in Miami the following night. Michigan players recall not paying much attention to what Nebraska did. In their minds, it hardly mattered — they were No. 1 and would stay that way.

On Jan. 2, Nebraska put on a defensive clinic against Tennessee, flustering Manning into his worst game of the season, as he went 21-of-31 for 134 yards, one touchdown and one interception. Manning had been hospitalized weeks earlier after injuring his knee in the SEC championship game. He contracted an infection in his knee and was questionable to play leading up to the game.

Nebraska rolled to a dominant 42-17 victory in the final game of Osborne’s 25-year Nebraska career. Quarterback Scott Frost seized the opportunity in his postgame remarks, talking directly at the 62 coaches who had a vote in the coaches poll. He said, in part:

“I’m so proud of this team and Coach Osborne, I don’t want to see him go out without a championship. … if you can look yourself in the mirror and say if your job depended on playing either Michigan or Nebraska to keep your job, who would you rather play? You watched the Rose Bowl and the Orange Bowl. Michigan won with a controversial play at the end. We took apart the third-ranked team in the country.

“It’s been split before. Colorado and Georgia Tech split it. Washington and Miami split it. It’s OK to split it. It should be split and it’s up to the coaches.”

“To say that Scott didn’t sway some voters with his speech after the game, I think would be crazy,” defensive end Grant Wistrom said. “Scott was one step ahead, thinking, ‘All right, we won the game, now we have to start trying to sway some voters.’ He did a great job with the passionate speech that he gave. Without that, I don’t know that we get the votes.”

Michigan players soon found out what Frost had said.

“If you have to beg and plead, then you know that you’re not the best team,” Ray said. “We didn’t do that. Nobody from our team said, ‘Hey, we should be No. 1 in both polls even if Nebraska wins.'”

There was nothing more for either team to do but wait.

The AP poll came out first. As expected, Michigan finished No. 1.

Osborne was at the team hotel in Miami Beach when he heard a roar. Then came the pounding on his door.

“I figured we had gotten the coaches vote,” Osborne said.

It was just the second time in the history of the coaches poll a team that went into bowl season No. 1, won its bowl game and did not finish No. 1.

Cue the conspiracy theories.

Jim Welch, who served as deputy managing editor for sports at USA Today at the time, oversaw all the coaches’ ballots during weekly voting. He specifically remembers scrutinizing the final ballots that season because both Michigan and Nebraska finished undefeated.

Asked specifically whether he remembered anything off about Fulmer’s ballot, Welch said, “I don’t.”

“Most of the conspiracy theories, including the Phil Fulmer one, did not hold any water at all. Believe me, I looked at every ballot. Although I wasn’t actually involved in the direct tabulation, I would ask questions and review the ballots every week, and especially gave a lot of scrutiny, certainly to the final ones.”

But Welch also said he did not have access to the final ballots to confirm one way or another who voted Michigan either No. 3 or 4.

“I don’t think a coach is playing it around in their head thinking, ‘Wow, if I drop these guys to 3, maybe the other one will come out ahead,” Welch said. “The logic of that kind of argument always defied those of us who worked on this at the newspaper.”

Carr says the way the vote turned out still bothers him.

“I don’t think about it every day, but we deserved better,” he said. “That’s what I believe.”

“At this point, I don’t know whose vote it was and if it was Fulmer’s vote that split it, that’s about as bulls— of a thing that I can think of,” Michigan linebacker Rob Swett said. “If he did it out of spite, it makes me believe we earned that championship even more. I can’t imagine that anybody could have called and said give the Heisman to Charles because we need a defensive guy to win it for a change.”

Both Osborne and Wistrom, far removed from Michigan and Tennessee, said they had no idea the Fulmer conspiracy theory existed when asked about it.

Wistrom provides a counterpoint with respect to Fulmer: “Perhaps he just saw his team, who he thought was one of the better teams he’s ever had there, just get dismantled, and realized that he faced the true national champion on that night in Miami. There’s that, too.”

Michigan recently held a 25-year anniversary reunion for the 1997 team in Ann Arbor. Nobody on the team admits to caring anymore about the title being split, or giving any thought to a conspiracy theory that still lives on among its fan base.

“I never had animosity toward the coaches poll or toward Nebraska,” Jansen said. “I look at my national championship ring, and it doesn’t say co-champs, it just says national champion.”

But they do often discuss playing Nebraska.

Like now.

“If those guys would like to suit up at this point, we can still solve this debate between Michigan and Nebraska,” Jansen said. “Let’s do it on the field. I’ve got my helmet in the truck. I’ve got shoulder pads in the office. I’m ready to go.” So, 25 years later, the debates rage on.

“I guarantee you if everybody knew that we would have to have our ballots public, nobody would have voted us 3 or 4, when we were at least 2,” Carr said. “It’s a great unknown because Nebraska and Tennessee both had reason to benefit from the way they voted, and they got away with it.”

Said Osborne: “It is worth pointing out we had a playoff game in the Big 12 at that time and went down and beat Texas A&M in their home territory decisively and I don’t believe Michigan had to play that extra game, so we played one more game than they did and it was a challenging opponent. I’m not trying to pick a fight with anybody. There’s a lot of things that went into it.”

As for Fulmer and Carr, the dueling conspiracy theories have never come up when they’ve been together.

Fulmer says Carr never asked him about the voting conspiracy theory and, “I never asked him about Woodson winning the Heisman.”

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First impressions from the Athletics’ new home opener

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First impressions from the Athletics' new home opener

A local television news crew was stationed outside the Sawyer Hotel in downtown Sacramento on Sunday night, ready to catch every nuance of the magical moment the bleary-eyed Chicago Cubs stepped off their bus to enter the lobby. This was the first time a major league baseball team had arrived in Sacramento to play a legally sanctioned regular-season game, and no story was too small. If you ever wondered what Ian Happ looks like walking toward a hotel and being surprised by the presence of a camera and a reporter, CBS-13 was the channel for you.

“That was different,” Cubs pitcher Matthew Boyd said. “But it’s the first time a big league team has come to Sacramento, and they’re excited. Baseball’s that cool thing that brings everyone together.”

It was quite a week for Sacramento — more specifically, West Sacramento, the place with the street signs declaring it “The Baseball Side of the River.” It got to host the first three games of the Athletics’ expected three-season interregnum between Oakland and Las Vegas, and it got to call a big league team its own, even if the team has decided to declare itself simply the Athletics, a geographically nonspecific generic version of a Major League Baseball team.

It’s tough to explain the vibe at Sutter Health Park for the first series. It looked like big league baseball and sounded like big league baseball; it just didn’t feel like big league baseball. The crowds were mostly sedate, maybe because there’s room for only about 14,000 fans, and maybe because the Athletics were outscored 35-9 over the course of the three games, the first and third of which could have been stopped for humanitarian reasons.

This is a team that is supposed to be better this season, and three games shouldn’t change that expectation. It spent some money nobody knew it had on a free agent contract for Luis Severino and extensions for Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler, moves that assured a payroll high enough to abide by the revenue-sharing rules of the collective bargaining agreement, but moves that improved the team nonetheless. (You’ve got to spend money to make money is an adage that, for the first time, appealed to owner John Fisher.) The A’s have a universally respected manager in Mark Kotsay, several promising young players from recent drafts and the confidence that came from playing really good baseball over last season’s second half. There is a creeping suspicion that they could be building something that could make West Sacramento proud.

It’s a long, maybe even interminable season that will contain every iteration of peak and valley. Three games can end up being the equivalent of one breath over the course of a lifetime. But still, it’s impossible to deny the Athletics brought back a lot of their old classics for their Sacramento debut: They walked 10 batters in Monday night’s home opener; they kicked the ball around enough for four unearned runs in three games; they walked seven more Wednesday afternoon. The crowds were mostly quiet; the numerous Cubs fans were noisy until it felt mean, but the A’s fans, when they found something cheer-worthy, reacted as if they were cheering for someone else’s kid at a piano recital. As first impressions go, it could have been better.

The A’s players, in their defense, are going through an adjustment period. When I asked closer Mason Miller how he likes Sacramento, he starts counting on his fingers and says, “I’ve literally spent five nights here.” They’re young, wealthy and accustomed to living in a new place every season as they progress through the minor leagues, and they’re trying to view their new home as an opportunity to bond over experiencing something together for the first time.

“We’re all new here,” rookie second baseman Max Muncy says, “so even though I’m a rookie, I can earn some cred if I find a good restaurant and let everyone know.” I mention the toughest reservation in town, a Michelin-starred, fixed-price restaurant less than 2 miles away.

“That sounds like a two-month wait,” he says.

“Not if you tell them who you are,” I joke.

“Yeah, I can’t imagine doing that,” he says. “Besides, if I say, ‘Max Muncy,’ when I show up they’ll say, ‘Oh great, we got this one.'”

The A’s bigger concern is playing the next three seasons in a minor league ballpark and sharing it with a minor league team, the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats. It’s kind of like a senior rooming with a freshman; the senior has dibs on just about everything, but he still has to deal with the roommate. For the A’s, that means wondering how the field will hold up over the course of the 155 games it’ll wear this season, and figuring out how to cope with having a clubhouse beyond the outfield wall, disconnected from the dugout.

Severino made his first home start for the A’s on Tuesday night, and he had to tweak his routine to account for the new reality: Once he left the clubhouse, there was no going back. It was cold and windy, so he had to make sure his jacket made it to the dugout with him. The notes he likes to reference during the game had to be there, too. His usual practice of popping into the clubhouse to watch the game on television while his team hits (“It looks easier and more fun on TV,” he says with a laugh) is on hold for home starts for the foreseeable future. He had to sit there with his teammates whether he pitched well or not — on Tuesday: not — and know that every one of his emotions would be picked up by at least five cameras.

“You just have to stick it out,” Severino says. “You can’t have all the stuff you have in a normal stadium. When you go out there, you have to bring everything with you. You have to try to stay warm and find out a different routine. It’s not the same, but the thing is, it doesn’t matter because it’s happening, and we need to get used to it. Just treat it like spring training, because it feels like spring training.”

Players coming off the bench to pinch-hit or play defense have nowhere to get loose. In any other park, they’d jump into the cage behind the dugout and take some swings or stretch out and run a few sprints. Here, they have to do whatever they can do within the confines of the dugout. “Just do some arm circles and maybe run in place,” Cubs infielder Jon Berti says. “Make it old-school.”

Just one of the three games sold out, an unexpected development after months of civic backslapping and grand proclamations about Sacramento cementing its status as a major league city. Tickets for Wednesday’s game, which drew 9,342 fans, were selling on the secondary market for $20 about 30 minutes before first pitch. The A’s have the highest median ticket prices — $181 — in baseball, according to data compiled by the ticket app Gametime. The idea was to employ the time-honored scarcity=demand concept to seize maximum profits from minimal opportunities, but one sellout — the opener, which also included roughly 2,000 comped tickets — in the first three games shows the A’s remain capable of straining even the most fundamental economic concepts.

It’s probably not fair to judge Sacramento’s worth as a baseball town based on its willingness to support a team that won’t be identified by the city’s name during its time here. And it’s definitely not fair to judge a region based on the number of fans eager to hand money to an owner who pulled the team out of Oakland after 57 years and is on his way to Las Vegas.

In the days after Kings/River Cats owner Vivek Ranadive joined with Fisher to bring the A’s to Sacramento, someone identified to me as “as Sacramento as it gets” sent a text that illustrates the conflict that lives within the Sacramento sports fan:

So many thoughts as I’ve been following this:

1) I hate it in that we are just bailing out Fisher

2) I hate that we are basically acting as Seattle a decade ago with regards to the Kings and poached the A’s away from Oakland. That’s an awful feeling I wish on no one

3) I am interested to see if this actually goes anywhere other than just bailing out Fisher for 3 years while he waits out whatever magic is gonna happen in LV

4) Reeeeeally wish Vivek read the room on this one

5) We could buy $30 lawn seats and catch a ball from Mike Trout or even better, [Austin] Slater, on a Wednesday night in Sac. That would be wild

The A’s are quick to point out that there weren’t many crowds of 10,000 on Tuesday nights in Oakland. (There was just one last year, during the final homestand of the season.) Still, Sacramento is a city attempting to use this three- to four-year run to audition for its own big league team. And if the A’s can’t sell out a minor league stadium in an area with established fans of the team, what does that foretell for their eventual move to Las Vegas, where the team is forecasting sellout crowds, including nearly 5,000 tourists per game — in a 33,000-seat stadium in an area with no connection to the A’s?

But that’s someone else’s problem, some other day. Three trips this week to Sutter Health — Sunday for the River Cats, Monday and Wednesday for the A’s — was a chance to watch big league baseball in a quaint, intimate ballpark. I thought it might be like venturing back in time, maybe what it felt like to watch a Philadelphia A’s game in 1907 at Columbia Park if Columbia Park had a state-of-the-art video screen that looks like an 86-inch television hanging from the wall of a studio apartment. This would be baseball back when games were just games and big league ballparks didn’t feel obligated to stock luxury suites with $300 cabernet and fist-sized prawns. Back to when every concession stand sold pretty much the same thing (at Sutter Health, each vendor has a set menu and one or two “specialty” items, like the pizza at Pizza & Pints) and fans could bring a chair or sit on the grass out in right field and dream of Mike Trout or Austin Slater.

Its charms are undeniable, but sustainable? The workers in the ballpark are all genial and helpful, thrilled with having major league baseball in their humble yard, but maybe we should check back in August. At the River Cats’ game Sunday, I spoke with an employee working in the team store who laid out the process of turning it from a River Cats’ store to an Athletics’ store over the course of roughly 24 hours. Starting at 5 p.m. Sunday, three overlapping shifts worked through the night and well into Monday, folding and packing and hauling out all the minor league gear, storing it somewhere she isn’t privy to, while hauling in all the big league gear, unpacking it, unfolding it and displaying it nicely enough that someone might feel compelled to forfeit $134.99 for an authentic JJ Bleday jersey.

As she detailed the process, and the time constraints, knowing this River Cats-to-A’s and vice versa conga will take place roughly every 10 days to two weeks over the next six months, I was beginning to feel stressed just looking at every cap, sock, T-shirt, bobblehead, Dinger the mascot doll and performance men’s half-zip pullover sweatshirt that awaited their attention.

“Will it get done?” I asked her.

She laughed.

“I guess it has to,” she said, “but I’m off tomorrow.”

And poof, just as there was no sign of the A’s on Sunday, there was no sign of the River Cats on Monday. Everything brick red and gold was replaced by something kelly green and gold. Even the sign proclaiming Sacramento’s Triple-A championships was replaced by one proclaiming the A’s nine World Series wins, five in Philadelphia and four in Oakland. But, like everything else involving the 2025 Athletics, there is no geographic designation. As the A’s know better than most, you are where you are until you’re where you want to be.

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What are torpedo bats? Are they legal? What to know about MLB’s hottest trend

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What are torpedo bats? Are they legal? What to know about MLB's hottest trend

The opening weekend of the 2025 MLB season was taken over by a surprise star — torpedo bats.

The bowling pin-shaped bats became the talk of the sport after the Yankees’ home run onslaught on the first Saturday of the season put it in the spotlight and the buzz hasn’t slowed since.

What exactly is a torpedo bat? How does it help hitters? And how is it legal? Let’s dig in.

Read: An MIT-educated professor, the Yankees and the bat that could be changing baseball


What is a torpedo bat and why is it different from a traditional MLB bat?

The idea of the torpedo bat is to take a size format — say, 34 inches and 32 ounces — and distribute the wood in a different geometric shape than the traditional form to ensure the fattest part of the bat is located where the player makes the most contact. Standard bats taper toward an end cap that is as thick diametrically as the sweet spot of the barrel. The torpedo bat moves some of the mass on the end of the bat about 6 to 7 inches lower, giving it a bowling-pin shape, with a much thinner end.


How does it help hitters?

The benefits for those who like swinging with it — and not everyone who has swung it likes it — are two-fold. Both are rooted in logic and physics. The first is that distributing more mass to the area of most frequent contact aligns with players’ swing patterns and provides greater impact when bat strikes ball. Players are perpetually seeking ways to barrel more balls, and while swings that connect on the end of the bat and toward the handle probably will have worse performance than with a traditional bat, that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make for the additional slug. And as hitters know, slug is what pays.

The second benefit, in theory, is increased bat speed. Imagine a sledgehammer and a broomstick that both weigh 32 ounces. The sledgehammer’s weight is almost all at the end, whereas the broomstick’s is distributed evenly. Which is easier to swing fast? The broomstick, of course, because shape of the sledgehammer takes more strength and effort to move. By shedding some of the weight off the end of the torpedo bat and moving it toward the middle, hitters have found it swings very similarly to a traditional model but with slightly faster bat velocity.


Why did it become such a big story so early in the 2025 MLB season?

Because the New York Yankees hit nine home runs in a game Saturday and Michael Kay, their play-by-play announcer, pointed out that some of them came from hitters using a new bat shape. The fascination was immediate. While baseball, as an industry, has implemented forward-thinking rules in recent seasons, the modification to something so fundamental and known as the shape of a bat registered as bizarre. The initial response from many who saw it: How is this legal?


OK. How is this legal?

Major League Baseball’s bat regulations are relatively permissive. Currently, the rules allow for a maximum barrel diameter of 2.61 inches, a maximum length of 42 inches and a smooth and round shape. The lack of restrictions allows MLB’s authorized bat manufacturers to toy with bat geometry and for the results to still fall within the regulations.


Who came up with the idea of using them?

The notion of a bowling-pin-style bat has kicked around baseball for years. Some bat manufacturers made smaller versions as training tools. But the version that’s now infiltrating baseball goes back two years when a then-Yankees coach named Aaron Leanhardt started asking hitters how they should counteract the giant leaps in recent years made by pitchers.

When Yankees players responded that bigger barrels would help, Leanhardt — an MIT-educated former Michigan physics professor who left academia to work in the sports industry — recognized that as long as bats stayed within MLB parameters, he could change their geometry to make them a reality. Leanhardt, who left the Yankees to serve as major league field coordinator for the Miami Marlins over the winter, worked with bat manufacturers throughout the 2023 and 2024 seasons to make that a reality.


When did it first appear in MLB games?

It’s unclear specifically when. But Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton used a torpedo bat last year and went on a home run-hitting rampage in October that helped send the Yankees to the World Series. New York Mets star Francisco Lindor also used a torpedo-style bat last year and went on to finish second in National League MVP voting.


Who are some of the other notable early users of torpedo bats?

In addition to Stanton and Lindor, Yankees hitters Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt have used torpedoes to great success. Others who have used them in games include Tampa Bay’s Junior Caminero, Minnesota’s Ryan Jeffers and Toronto’s Davis Schneider. And that’s just the beginning. Hundreds more players are expected to test out torpedoes — and perhaps use them in games — in the coming weeks.


How is this different from a corked bat?

Corking bats involves drilling a hole at the end of the bat, filling it in and capping it. The use of altered bats allows players to swing faster because the material with which they replace the wood — whether it’s cork, superballs or another material — is lighter. Any sort of bat adulteration is illegal and, if found, results in suspension.


Could a rule be changed to ban them?

Could it happen? Sure. Leagues and governing bodies have put restrictions on equipment they believe fundamentally altered fairness. Stick curvature is limited in hockey. Full-body swimsuits made of polyurethane and neoprene are banned by World Aquatics. But officials at MLB have acknowledged that the game’s pendulum has swung significantly toward pitching in recent years, and if an offensive revolution comes about because of torpedo bats — and that is far from a guarantee — it could bring about more balance to the game. If that pendulum swings too far, MLB could alter its bat regulations, something it has done multiple times already this century.


So the torpedo bat is here to stay?

Absolutely. Bat manufacturers are cranking them out and shipping them to interested players with great urgency. Just how widely the torpedo bat is adopted is the question that will play out over the rest of the season. But it has piqued the curiosity of nearly every hitter in the big leagues, and just as pitchers toy with new pitches to see if they can marginally improve themselves, hitters will do the same with bats.

Comfort is paramount with a bat, so hitters will test them during batting practice and in cage sessions before unleashing them during the game. As time goes on, players will find specific shapes that are most comfortable to them and best suit their swing during bat-fitting sessions — similar to how golfers seek custom clubs. But make no mistake: This is an almost-overnight alteration of the game, and “traditional or torpedo” is a question every big leaguer going forward will ask himself.

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St. Pete to spend $22.5M to fix Tropicana Field

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St. Pete to spend .5M to fix Tropicana Field

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The once and possibly future home of the Tampa Bay Rays will get a new roof to replace the one shredded by Hurricane Milton with the goal of having the ballpark ready for the 2026 season, city officials decided in a vote Thursday.

The St. Petersburg City Council voted 7-1 to approve $22.5 million to begin the repairs at Tropicana Field, which will start with a membrane roof that must be in place before other work can continue. Although the Rays pulled out of a planned $1.3 billion new stadium deal, the city is still contractually obligated to fix the Trop.

“We are legally bound by an agreement. The agreement requires us to fix the stadium,” said council member Lissett Hanewicz, who is an attorney. “We need to go forward with the roof repair so we can do the other repairs.”

The hurricane damage forced the Rays to play home games this season at Steinbrenner Field across the bay in Tampa, the spring training home of the New York Yankees. The Rays went 4-2 on their first homestand ever at an open-air ballpark, which seats around 11,000 fans.

Under the current agreement with the city, the Rays owe three more seasons at the Trop once it’s ready again for baseball, through 2028. It’s unclear if the Rays will maintain a long-term commitment to the city or look to Tampa or someplace else for a new stadium. Major League Baseball has said keeping the team in the Tampa Bay region is a priority. The Rays have played at the Trop since their inception in 1998.

The team said it would have a statement on the vote later Thursday.

The overall cost of Tropicana Field repairs is estimated at $56 million, said city architect Raul Quintana. After the roof, the work includes fixing the playing surface, ensuring audio and visual electronics are working, installing flooring and drywall, getting concession stands running and other issues.

“This is a very complex project. We feel like we’re in a good place,” Quintana said at the council meeting Thursday.

Under the proposed timeline, the roof installation will take about 10 months. The unique membrane system is fabricated in Germany and assembled in China, Quintana said, adding that officials are examining how President Donald Trump’s new tariffs might affect the cost.

The new roof, he added, will be able to withstand hurricane winds as high as 165 mph. Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest hurricanes ever in the Atlantic basin at one point, blasted ashore Oct. 9 south of Tampa Bay with Category 3 winds of about 125 mph.

Citing mounting costs, the Rays last month pulled out of a deal with the city and Pinellas County for a new $1.3 billion ballpark to be built near the Trop site. That was part of a broader $6.5 billion project known as the Historic Gas Plant district to bring housing, retail and restaurants, arts and a Black history museum to a once-thriving Black neighborhood razed for the original stadium.

The city council plans to vote on additional Trop repair costs over the next few months.

“This is our contractual obligation. I don’t like it more than anybody else. I’d much rather be spending that money on hurricane recovery and helping residents in the most affected neighborhoods,” council member Brandi Gabbard said. “These are the cards that we’re dealt.”

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