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Here’s a real-life truth that no one understands until they find their lives standing squarely in the middle of that very truth. Being the wisest person in the room isn’t about being the smartest person in that space. It’s about being the person who has been in that room the longest. The one with the most experience. The owner of the largest scrapbook of memories and moments, and the lessons learned from both. Smart enough to appreciate it all.

“I think that’s a natural life progression, right?” said Kevin Harvick, who at 47 and now in his 23rd and final season in the NASCAR Cup Series finds that he is now, more often than not, that person in most every room of racers he’s standing in. He is the procurer of quite the collection of experiences and the wisdom that comes with them. “You know, life progression is hopefully maturing as you go through time. To be able to do things in a better way and learn from what you did before. So, every moment matters.”

This weekend will mark not simply one of those moments, but a genuine milestone in a career packed with them. Sunday’s GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway will be his 800th start at stock car racing’s highest level. In 75 years of NASCAR, only 10 drivers have hit that mark, and only four of them reached it at a younger age than Harvick. If he finishes out the season having started every race, he will retire with 826 Cup starts, eighth all-time. His 1,272 starts across all three NASCAR national series already ranks first. His 60 Cup Series wins rank 10th. His 62 second-place finishes rank sixth. His 258 top-five finishes rank … OK, you get the idea.

The complete list of Harvick’s all-time top-10 rankings would take up more space than this story has been given. Besides, you can read them all on his NASCAR Hall of Fame plaque when he is no doubt voted in on his first year of eligibility, now less than three years away.

Right now, he’s too busy trying to win a second Cup Series title to spend much time looking in the rearview mirror. More than a third of the way into the 26-race “regular season,” he sits third in the championship standings, only 15 points behind leader Christopher Bell. So yes, Harvick’s final career numbers have yet to be determined, but when every weekend presents another milestone or another rung climbed on all of those all-time lists, avoiding the topic of career summation is impossible — especially since the preseason announcement of his intention to retire at season’s end.

“I think honestly when we got to 60 [career wins] that that kind of put it in perspective,” Harvick confesses, speaking of his Richmond victory Aug. 14, 2022. “Really, for me, when you start hearing your competitors talking about it. I’ll never forget Cliff Daniels [crew chief at rival Hendrick Motorsports] walking up to me when I had my 750th consecutive start [this Feb. 26 at Auto Club Speedway], the things that he said that day really helped put it into perspective for me. Because when you gain the respect of your competitors on the racetrack, but also the people in the garage, that to me is really the rewarding part of the body of work.”

The earliest days of Harvick’s career — heck, the first decade of his career — weren’t filled with such praise from peers. Nor was he one to send cheer and good tidings in the direction of others in the paddock, whether they be the competition or even those with whom he worked. Just look at that consecutive starts streak. It currently sits at 757, third all-time, and should he finish out the season uninterrupted, it will end at 784, a scant 13 races short of Jeff Gordon‘s all-time iron man streak. The only reason he won’t own that record outright is because he missed the eighth race of 2002, his second season, parked by NASCAR at Martinsville Speedway for a tantrum thrown in a Truck Series race the day before.

That’s how Harvick rolled back then. Angry. He feuded with veterans such as Bobby Hamilton. He famously leaped off the roof of a Busch Series car onto the head of Greg Biffle during postrace interviews at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Thrust into a Cup ride earlier than planned, an into-the-deep-end experience that will never be replicated, pushed into NASCAR’s most famous ride because of the death of Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500, Harvick impossibly won in only his third Cup start in The Intimidator’s Chevy, edging Gordon by .006 seconds at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Oh, and he also got married in the middle of those three races.

From there, the 20-something Californian raced with guard up and his fists clenched. In 13 seasons driving for Richard Childress Racing, he won 24 times, including the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400, but also endured three winless years and failed to win a championship. His increasingly heated in-race radio exchanges with Childress became must-hear entertainment for race fans seeking drama on a Sunday afternoon.

That’s how one earns the decidedly and deliberately ironic nickname “Happy.”

“We are both people who have no problem speaking our minds, even when we should keep those thoughts to ourselves, especially on the radio when everyone in the grandstands can hear us,” Childress recently said of those days, chuckling. “But that fire is also what you want in a race car driver. Sometimes that fire is going to burn some stuff down. And we did.”

“It was always just, you know, ‘He’s mad. He’s angry,'” Harvick recalled this week when looking back on his tumultuous tenure at RCR. “When I was driving the 29 car and you look back, I told Richard this, I said, ‘Man, I wish I could have done it this way. The way I do things now, with maturity, experience. You know, things might have been a little bit different.’ I would handle things a lot differently, how we did all of that. But, you know, everything just leads to the next step.”

The next step was the second half of that career and the next phase in his life as a man. He moved to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014 to join friend and fellow anger-management student Tony Stewart and immediately won that long-elusive Cup Series championship. Harvick has added another 37 wins. He has gotten out of NASCAR team ownership, opting to expand his sports management business, and has shifted his focus toward being a father of two, with 10-year-old son Keelan now behind the wheel.

“It’s really been two different parts of my career,” Harvick replied when asked the impossible question of identifying the single most memorable moment among his first 799 Cup Series starts. “The announcement that you’re going to drive your first Cup race was bigger than any moment that you’ll ever have in your career. Then your first win was bigger than any win that you’re ever going to have. So, all of these things that you had to go through and face, the rest of it, that felt like a cakewalk to be honest, because you never had something that was that big again.”

This is year 10 at SHR, always behind the wheel of the same car and, against all known NASCAR natural laws, always with the same crew chief, Rodney Childers.

“It all shifted in 2014 because everybody said, ‘OK, now is he going to be able to succeed at a new team and can he get along with people?’ And here we are 10 years later, with the same crew chief, same organization and a championship. You look at that Homestead win that won that championship, and that was a huge moment. The biggest moment in the second part of my career. It’s of comparable importance, but not really a comparable experience, to that very first win.”

That ability to compare experiences, moments and even eras, that is the gift of wisdom. The well-earned byproduct of an unparalleled multidecade career. In our youth, we all fall into the same trap that ensnared Harvick so many years ago: believing that we know more than we actually do. Only via the hindsight of experience does anyone truly understand the value of genuine perspective.

Say, the latest Next Gen race car.

The tide of praise for NASCAR’s 2022 one-size-fits-all machines officially began to turn last summer, when Harvick began speaking up with concerns about safety. After his playoffs started with a 33rd-place finish due to a fire in his Ford, he said on live television, “What a disaster for no reason. We didn’t touch the wall. We didn’t touch a car and here we are in the pits with a burned-up car and we can’t finish the race during the playoffs because of crappy-ass parts.”

Just this week, he responded to a tweet reporting that NASCAR teams believed parts for 2024 needed to be ordered now to head off supply chain issues, posting “1000 HP spec. Order it …”

“Honestly, the communication between the teams and NASCAR is as good as it’s ever been. The problem is that the process of making changes is just as slow as it’s ever been,” Harvick said when asked about his call for more horsepower. He also suggested quicker tire wear before adding, again, the kind of nuanced take that can only be informed via experience.

He recalled 2007, when the sanctioning body rolled out the so-called Car of Tomorrow. Like today’s Next Gen machines, the CoT was largely a spec car. Those who were around back then have mentioned the CoT a lot in the past year. It’s just that there are fewer and fewer around now who were also around then. Harvick, then at the height of his Happy days, is one of them.

“It’s the same process. It’s no different. We already went through this. With the CoT and whenever NASCAR has started changing rules,” he said. “In the very beginning nobody knows anything about the car, and once everybody figures out the car, things change. The style of racing changes. It always does. It always will. So, yeah, I think communication is there, but I think the process is as slow as it’s ever been, unfortunately, to be able to make changes because of how much red tape there is to jump through because the teams aren’t in charge of the cars.”

Call him Happy, call him The Closer, call him old man, whatever you want, Harvick’s opinions are no less pointed than they’ve ever been. His intensity is the same now as it was 799 Cup starts ago. These days he simply yells less. He keeps his volume knob somewhere in the middle instead of breaking it off to be stuck at 11. But now the kid whom every veteran of the Cup Series garage used to either bash or avoid altogether has become the veteran whom today’s kids seek out for advice and a point of view that could only come from a racer who started his career in a world sponsored by cigarettes, racing against men who have already been enshrined in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

You know, wisdom.

“I think at that particular time, starting out, you really don’t even know what that means, right?” Harvick said. “But I’ve been here for so long, through so many generations of cars with so many people, I think putting that body of work together, that is for me very rewarding. Through the years, the ups and downs, we’ve always figured out how to get things going again and be able to be competitive and run upfront.

“I was just a kid going to the racetrack having a good time, driving whatever I could race just to get on the racetrack. Now, 800 Cup starts later, all these years later … that’s something you can be proud of.”

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O’s Henderson off IL; will make ’25 debut vs. KC

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O's Henderson off IL; will make '25 debut vs. KC

Baltimore Orioles All-Star shortstop Gunnar Henderson was activated from the 10-day injured list and will make his season debut Friday night against the Kansas City Royals.

Henderson has been sidelined with a right intercostal strain and missed the first seven games of the big league campaign.

The 23-year-old Henderson will lead off and play shortstop against the host Royals.

Henderson was injured during a spring training game Feb. 27. He was fourth in American League MVP voting last season when he batted .281 and racked up career bests of 37 homers and 92 RBIs.

Henderson completed a five-game rehab stint at Triple-A Norfolk on Wednesday. He batted .263 (5-for-19) with two homers and four RBIs and played four games at shortstop and one as the designated hitter. He did commit three errors.

“I think everybody’s looking forward to having Gunnar back on the team,” Baltimore manager Brandon Hyde said Thursday. “The rehab went really, really well. I talked to him a couple days ago, he feels great swinging the bat. The timing came, especially the last few days. He just had to get out there and get some reps defensively and get some games in, and it all went well.”

Baltimore optioned outfielder Dylan Carlson to Triple-A Norfolk to open up a roster spot. The 26-year-old was 0-for-4 with a run and RBI in two games this season.

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Life after OMG: Can 2025 Mets replicate their 2024 vibes?

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Life after OMG: Can 2025 Mets replicate their 2024 vibes?

When New York Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns attempted to assemble the best possible roster for the 2025 season this winter, the top priority was signing outfielder Juan Soto. Next was the need to replenish the starting rotation and bolster the bullpen. Then, days before pitchers and catchers reported for spring training, the lineup received one final significant reinforcement when first baseman Pete Alonso re-signed.

Acquiring a player with a singing career on the side didn’t make the cut.

“No, that is not on the list,” Stearns said with a smile.

Stearns’ decision not to re-sign Jose Iglesias, the infielder behind the mic for the viral 2024 Mets anthem “OMG,” was attributed to creating more roster flexibility. But it also hammered home a reality: The scrappy 2024 Mets, authors of a magical summer in Queens, are a thing of the past. The 2025 Mets, who will report to Citi Field for their home opener Friday, have much of the same core but also some prominent new faces — and the new, outsized expectations that come with falling two wins short of the World Series, then signing Soto to the richest contract in professional sports history.

But there’s a question surrounding this year’s team that you can’t put a price tag on: Can these Mets rekindle the magic — the vibes, the memes, the feel-good underdog story — that seemed to come out of nowhere to help carry them to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series last season?

“Last year the culture was created,” Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor said. “It’s a matter of continuing it.”

For all the success Stearns has engineered — his small-market Milwaukee Brewers teams reached the postseason five times in eight seasons after he became the youngest general manager in history in 2015 — the 40-year-old Harvard grad, like the rest of his front office peers knows there’s no precise recipe for clubhouse chemistry. There is no culture projection system. No Vibes Above Replacement.

“Culture is very important,” Stearns said last weekend in the visiting dugout at Daikin Park before his club completed an opening-weekend series against the Houston Astros. “Culture is also very difficult to predict.”

Still, it seems the Mets’ 2024 season will be all but impossible to recreate.

There was Grimace, the purple McDonald’s blob who spontaneously became the franchise’s unofficial mascot after throwing out a first pitch in June. “OMG,” performed under Iglesias’ stage name, Candelita, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Latin Digital Songs chart, before a remix featuring Pitbull was released in October. Citi Field became a karaoke bar whenever Lindor stepped into the batter’s box with The Temptations’ “My Girl” as his walk-up song. Alonso unveiled a lucky pumpkin in October. They were gimmicks that might have felt forced if they hadn’t felt so right.

“I don’t know if what we did last year could be replicated because it was such a chaos-filled group,” Mets reliever Ryne Stanek said. “I don’t know if that’s replicable because there’s just too many things going on. I don’t know if that’s a sustainable model. But I think the expectation of winning is really important. I think establishing what we did last year and coming into this year where people are like, ‘Oh, no, that’s what we’re expecting to do,’ makes it different. It’s always a different vibe whenever you feel like you’re the hunter versus being the hunted.”

For the first two months last season, the Mets were terrible hunters. Lindor was relentlessly booed at Citi Field during another slow start. The bullpen got crushed. The losses piled up. The Mets began the season 0-5 and sunk to rock bottom on May 29 when reliever Jorge Lopez threw his glove into the stands during a 10-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers that dropped the team to 22-33.

That night, the Mets held a players-only meeting. From there, perhaps coincidentally, everything changed. The Mets won the next day, and 67 of their final 107 games.

This year, to avoid an early malaise and to better incorporate new faces like Soto and Opening Day starter Clay Holmes, players made it a point to hold meetings during spring training to lay a strong foundation.

“At the end of the day, we know who we are and that’s the beauty of our club,” Alonso said. “Not just who we are talent-wise, but who each individual is as a man and a personality. For us, our major, major strength is our collective identity as a unit.”

Organizationally, the Mets are attempting a dual-track makeover: Becoming perennial World Series contenders while not taking themselves too seriously.

The commemorative purple Grimace seat installed at Citi Field in September — Section 302, Row 6, Seat 12 in right field — remains there as part of a two-year contract. Last week, the franchise announced it will feature a New York-city themed “Five Borough” race at every home game — with a different mascot competing to represent each borough. For a third straight season, USA Today readers voted Citi Field — home of the rainbow cookie egg roll, among many other innovative treats — as having the best ballpark food in baseball.

In the clubhouse, their identity is evolving.

“I’m very much in the camp that you can’t force things,” Mets starter Sean Manaea said. “I mean, you can, but you don’t really end up with good results. And if you wait for things to happen organically, then sometimes it can take too long. So, there’s like a nudging of sorts. It’s like, ‘Let’s kind of come up with something, but not force it.’ So there’s a fine balance there and you just got to wait and see what happens.”

Stearns believes it starts with what the Mets can control: bringing positive energy every day and fostering a family atmosphere. It’s hard to quantify, but vibes undoubtedly helped fuel the Mets’ 2024 success. It’ll be a tough act to follow.

“It’s fluid,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “I like where guys are at as far as the team chemistry goes and things like that and the connections and the relationships. But it’ll continue to take some time. And winning helps, clearly.”

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Hunter marks quiet day at Colorado Showcase

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Hunter marks quiet day at Colorado Showcase

BOULDER, Colo. — A horde of NFL talent evaluators headed for the mountains Friday for the Colorado Showcase, where Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter was one of the big draws.

However, it was going to be a limited look at best as Hunter was not seen when players’ heights and weights were taken or for the jumps and 40-yard dash.

Hunter, who is expected to be a top-five selection in this year’s draft and is the No. 1 player on Mel Kiper Jr.’s Big Board, was initially not expected to participate in any on-field work, but Friday morning some scouts in attendance said they expected the two-way star to run routes as a receiver for quarterback Shedeur Sanders‘ throwing session.

Hunter did not work out at the scouting combine or Big 12 pro day but did meet with teams in Indianapolis. Sanders, one of the top quarterbacks on the board and Kiper’s No. 5 player overall, also did not work out at the combine.

Sanders’ brother, Colorado safety Shilo Sanders, measured in at 5-foot-11⅞, 196 pounds, but he did not participate in the jumps or bench press that opened the workout, citing a right shoulder injury.

The highly attended event — by scouts, coaches and personnel executives as well as fans packing small bleachers — had a festive atmosphere. Colorado coach Deion Sanders named it the “We Ain’t Hard 2 Find Showcase,” completed with a large lighted “showcase” sign next to the drills.

Hunter, who has said he wants to play offense and defense in the NFL, won the Chuck Bednarik (top defensive player) and Biletnikoff (top receiver) awards, in addition to the Heisman. He said whether he would primarily be a wide receiver or cornerback in the NFL “depended on the team that picks me.”

He had 96 catches for 1,258 yards and 15 touchdowns as a receiver last season to go with 35 tackles, 11 pass breakups and four interceptions at cornerback. In the Buffaloes’ regular-season finale against Oklahoma State, he became the only FBS player in the past 25 years with three scrimmage touchdowns on offense and an interception in the same game, according to ESPN Research.

Hunter played 1,380 total snaps in Colorado’s 12 regular-season games: 670 on offense, 686 on defense and 24 on special teams. He played 1,007 total snaps in 2023.

With all NFL eyes on the Colorado campus to see Sanders throw, one player who made the most of it was wide receiver Will Sheppard, who was not invited to the combine. Sheppard, who measured in at 6-2¼, 196 pounds, ran his 40s in 4.56 and 4.54 to go with a 40½-inch vertical jump and a 10-foot-11 in the broad jump.

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