Brodie Butterfield, a tech worker in Australia, walked into his job one day and saw a colleague in a vintage Dale Earnhardt Sr. shirt. Earnhardt Sr., who won seven championships in the top-level NASCAR Cup Series before his fatal crash in the 2001 Daytona 500, transcended the sport in his iconic No. 3 car. Butterfield thought he’d found a fan, greeting his colleague with: “Raise hell, praise Dale!”
It didn’t land.
“He looked at me like I had two heads,” Butterfield told ESPN. “I knew he was a casual Formula One fan, so I thought maybe he’d broadened his horizons. After probing, [it] turned out he had a tenuous grasp on what NASCAR even was.”
NASCAR streetwear is in. The challenge is bringing NASCAR along with it.
“The idea that Drake even mildly knows who my dad is, is cool to me,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. told ESPN. “I got a chance to interview him at the Kentucky Derby last year, and I don’t think he knew who I was. He still might not know who I am, but he’s wearing the jacket.
“I’m certain somebody said, ‘Hey, here’s who Dale Earnhardt was.’ He might have gotten at least a two-minute refresher course on what the jacket was all about. I think if that’s all it is, that’s great. But if Drake ends up coming to a race and wanting to learn more, I think that will encourage a lot of people outside of that NASCAR bubble to come check us out.”
Earnhardt Jr. said that’s always been the challenge: making NASCAR and its personalities mainstream, like his father or Jeff Gordon. If doing that means playing into nostalgia, the Y2K renaissance is the perfect time.
“It’s funny,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “We kind of shift from decade to decade. We were obsessed with the ’80s. Before that, the ’70s. Now, everybody’s going: ‘Oh man, everything was better in the ’90s.’
“I think we should absolutely lean into the imagery and pop culture, but also what was happening in our own sport. Jeff Gordon was becoming a national — if not a global — icon, and I think we peaked around 2004. The ’90s was the buildup to that.”
Much like pop culture, modern NASCAR is trending toward the ’90s. North Wilkesboro Speedway — a beloved North Carolina track that hosted NASCAR’s top divisions from 1949 to 1996 — is back on the schedule after sitting in decay, thanks in large part to Earnhardt Jr.’s efforts to revive it. Meanwhile, the people behind some of NASCAR’s most iconic apparel are dialing back the years on their work.
Ryan Williams, a designer for Earnhardt Jr.’s JR Motorsports race team, remembers how his father wore giant NASCAR shirts and jeans when he was growing up. Back then, he hated it.
“I would be like, ‘I’m so embarrassed for him to pick me up from school or be walking around in the Home Depot with him. What is he doing?'” Williams said. “Now, it’s so fashionable to wear your dad’s clothes, and wear these big, goofy NASCAR tees. I’m so fortunate that’s a thing, because it’s my entire wardrobe.”
It also inspires Williams’ work for JR Motorsports. The team’s website is full of shirts that have throwback cues or follow a theme, like one with driver Justin Allgaier‘s car getting abducted by aliens in a cornfield. The sponsor on the shirt, Brandt, sells agricultural products.
“I’ll usually get on a kick where I’ll watch a movie or something, then in the shower later, I’ll come up with the idea of doing a shirt around it,” Williams said. “I think I watched ‘Signs,’ and then I was like: ‘Brandt. Professional agriculture. Crop circles. That sounds like a good idea.'”
Themeswerecommon back in the day. They’re also what inspire Harris Lue and Emily Butler, who design graphics and apparel for NASCAR drivers and teams through their firm, Lue Creative.
“I think the beauty of the old merch is, there were so many people doing it,” said Lue, who wore a ’90s space-themed “Yates Rocket” NASCAR shirt while we spoke. The shirt had a starscape background, blue beams of light all over and Robert Yates Racing driver Ernie Irvan‘s No. 28 car depicted as a hovercraft in the center.
“There were so many different vendors and printers that everything was unique,” Lue continued. “[If] they were designing for Robert Yates and the 28 car, they were coming up with things just for them. Now, everything has become so streamlined that a lot of it is templated. You can buy the same Ross Chastain shirt as you can the Brad Keselowski shirt.”
“Now, they can just take a photo and plop it in,” added Butler, who sat next to Lue in her own space-themed shirt based on a ’90s Bill Elliott car. “To a lot of people, that’ll get the job done. But it’s art, and it should be art. People like when the work has been put in. There’s an effort behind it, and it’s really authentic and made special for them. I think that’s the difference between modern art and retro art.”
“In the long run,” Lue said, “if you make something cool enough, people who aren’t even into NASCAR might buy it.”
Lue and Butler saw that happen with a shirt they designed for Bubba Wallace and his sponsor, McDonald’s. The shirt showed Wallace celebrating with a fountain drink in hand, his upper body hovering over his 23XI Racing car as it spilled out from a carton of fries.
“It sold out because it was cool,” Lue said. “It was full blast, and it was fully McDonald’s.”
“We saw those everywhere,” Butler added. “[Lue] was at some random concert, and they were everywhere.”
For as often as NASCAR gets criticized for racing “rolling billboards,” Lue and Butler think for some buyers, it’s the branding that sells.
“The way that ’90s and 2000s NASCAR blended branding and racing, there’s never been anything like it that I’ve seen,” Lue said. “All the ball sports now, they’re putting logos on jerseys, but NASCAR and racing pioneered that. We found a way to sell every sellable space, and the merchandise itself — I mean, people buy M&M’s stuff and have no clue who Elliott Sadler, Ken Schrader or Ernie Irvan are. They just see M&M’s.”
That was the case for Flasch, a 25-year-old musician and content creator in Los Angeles who goes by just their first name. They started collecting throwback-style NASCAR jackets after visiting Japan and seeing them “in a bunch of stores.” When they got home, they found a brown M&M’s one for $20.
“I thought they were super cool,” Flasch told ESPN. “I got the brown one because it was my first one I saw in the USA, but I really liked the neutrality of it. I love the M&M’s branding and all the logos. To be honest, I don’t really care who the race-car driver is.”
Flasch, whose favorite jacket is a bright-blue Oreo one, almost went to a NASCAR race for their birthday last year. The plans fell through because of COVID.
“I would totally love to go to a NASCAR event in person,” they said. “I don’t really watch any sports, but I think race cars are cool even though I don’t really like driving in real life. I even have a lyric in my most recent song called ‘Popstar.’ The chorus is, ‘I wanna be a pop star, so I can drive a race car.'”
For some, vintage NASCAR is about the brands. For others, it’s about the designs. For Earnhardt Jr., it’s often about appreciating the past — the sport’s, the world’s and his own.
“We have a habit of thinking that everything in the past was better,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “We do that with music, we do that with fashion, and in NASCAR, a lot of those things remind me of my childhood. They remind me of a more innocent time, or what felt like an easier time. It was probably anything but easy.
“For me, there’s this part of the history of the sport that I never got to experience, and that was in anything from the ’70s on earlier. There’s always this pursuit of trying to get as close as you can to knowing what it would’ve been like to be there, and there’s also this never-ending quest of learning about my father — learning new stories and little anecdotes, and filling in the gaps of things about his career that I don’t know.”
Butterfield, meanwhile, keeps running into colleagues wearing vintage NASCAR merch. It remains to be seen if they’ll become fans.
“[Since the Earnhardt Sr. shirt], I’ve had two additional similar experiences with colleagues; one wearing a Kyle Petty shirt and the other wearing what I assume is a bootleg official’s jacket,” he said. “Both admitted to being fans of the ‘Cars’ film franchise, but neither followed racing of any kind.
“None of the three culprits could shed any light on why, other than: ‘It looks cool.’ I agree.”
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
NEW YORK — Giancarlo Stanton, one of the first known adopters of the torpedo bat, declined Tuesday to say whether he believes using it last season caused the tendon ailments in both elbows that forced him to begin this season on the injured list.
Last month, Stanton alluded to “bat adjustments” he made last season as a possible reason for the epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, he’s dealing with.
“You’re not going to get the story you’re looking for,” Stanton said. “So, if that’s what you guys want, that ain’t going to happen.”
Stanton said he will continue using the torpedo bat when he returns from injury. The 35-year-old New York Yankees slugger, who has undergone multiple rounds of platelet-rich plasma injections to treat his elbows, shared during spring training that season-ending surgery on both elbows was a possibility. But he has progressed enough to recently begin hitting off a Trajekt — a pitching robot that simulates any pitcher’s windup, arm angle and arsenal. However, he still wouldn’t define his return as “close.”
He said he will first have to go on a minor league rehab assignment at an unknown date for an unknown period. It won’t start in the next week, he added.
“This is very unique,” Stanton said. “I definitely haven’t missed a full spring before. So, it just depends on my timing, really, how fast I get to feel comfortable in the box versus live pitching.”
While the craze of the torpedo bat (also known as the bowling pin bat) has swept the baseball world since it was revealed Saturday — while the Yankees were blasting nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers — that a few members of the Yankees were using one, the modified bat already had quietly spread throughout the majors in 2024. Both Stanton and former Yankees catcher Jose Trevino, now with the Cincinnati Reds, were among players who used the bats last season after being introduced to the concept by Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-educated physicist and former minor league hitting coordinator for the organization.
Stanton explained he has changed bats before. He said he has usually adjusted the length. Sometimes, he opts for lighter bats at the end of the long season. In the past, when knuckleballers were more common in the majors, he’d opt for heavier lumber.
Last year, he said he simply chose his usual bat but with a different barrel after experimenting with a few models.
“I mean, it makes a lot of sense,” Stanton said. “But it’s, like, why hasn’t anyone thought of it in 100-plus years? So, it’s explained simply and then you try it and as long as it’s comfortable in your hands [it works]. We’re creatures of habit, so the bat’s got to feel kind of like a glove or an extension of your arm.”
Stanton went on to lead the majors with an average bat velocity of 81.2 mph — nearly 3 mph ahead of the competition. He had a rebound, but not spectacular, regular season in which he batted .233 with 27 home runs and a .773 OPS before clubbing seven home runs in 14 playoff games.
“It’s not like [it was] unreal all of a sudden for me,” Stanton said.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone described the torpedo bats “as the evolution of equipment” comparable to getting fitted for new golf clubs. He said the organization is not pushing players to use them and insisted the science is more complicated than just picking a bat with a different barrel.
“There’s a lot more to it than, ‘I’ll take the torpedo bat on the shelf over there — 34 [inches], 32 [ounces],'” Boone said. “Our guys are way more invested in it than that. And really personalized, really work with our players in creating this stuff. But it’s equipment evolving.”
As players around the majors order torpedo bats in droves after the Yankees’ barrage over the weekend — they clubbed a record-tying 13 homers in two games against the Brewers — Boone alluded to the notion that, though everyone is aware of the concept, not every organization can optimize its usage.
“You’re trying to just, where you can on the margins, move the needle a little bit,” Boone said. “And that’s really all you’re going to do. I don’t think this is some revelation to where we’re going to be; it’s not related to the weekend that we had, for example. Like, I don’t think it’s that. Maybe in some cases, for some players, it may help them incrementally. That’s how I view it.”
Eovaldi struck out eight and walked none in his fifth career complete game. The right-hander threw 99 pitches, 70 for strikes.
It was Eovaldi’s first shutout since April 29, 2023, against the Yankees and just the third of his career. He became the first Ranger with multiple career shutouts with no walks in the past 30 seasons, according to ESPN Research.
“I feel like, by the fifth or sixth inning, that my pitch count was down, and I feel like we had a really good game plan going into it,” Eovaldi said in his on-field postgame interview on Victory+. “I thought [Texas catcher Kyle Higashioka] called a great game. We were on the same page throughout the entire game.”
In the first inning, Wyatt Langford homered for Texas against Carson Spiers (0-1), and that proved to be all Eovaldi needed. A day after Cincinnati collected 14 hits in a 14-3 victory in the series opener, Eovaldi (1-0) silenced the lineup.
“We needed it, these bats are still quiet,” Texas manager Bruce Bochy said of his starter’s outing. “It took a well-pitched game like that. What a game.”
The Reds put the tying run on second with two out in the ninth, but Eovaldi retired Elly De La Cruz on a grounder to first.
“He’s as good as I have seen as far as a pitcher performing under pressure,” Bochy said. “He is so good. He’s a pro out there. He wants to be out there.”
Eovaldi retired his first 12 batters, including five straight strikeouts during one stretch. Gavin Lux hit a leadoff single in the fifth for Cincinnati’s first baserunner.
“I think it was the first-pitch strikes,” Eovaldi said, when asked what made him so efficient. “But also, the off-speed pitches. I was able to get some quick outs, and I didn’t really have many deep counts. … And not walking guys helps.”
Spiers gave up three hits in six innings in his season debut. He struck out five and walked two for the Reds, who fell to 2-3.
The Rangers moved to 4-2, and Langford has been at the center of it all. He now has two home runs in six games to begin the season. In 2024, it took him until the 29th game of the season to homer for the first time. Langford hit 16 homers in 134 games last season during his rookie year.
Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
USC secured the commitment of former Oregon defensive tackle pledge Tomuhini Topui on Tuesday, a source told ESPN, handing the Trojans their latest recruiting victory in the 2026 cycle over the Big Ten rival Ducks.
Topui, ESPN’s No. 3 defensive tackle and No. 72 overall recruit in the 2026 class, spent five and half months committed to Oregon before pulling his pledge from the program on March 27. Topui attended USC’s initial spring camp practice that afternoon, and seven days later the 6-foot-4, 295-pound defender gave the Trojans his pledge to become the sixth ESPN 300 defender in the program’s 2026 class.
Topui’s commitment gives USC its 10th ESPN 300 pledge this cycle — more than any other program nationally — and pulls a fourth top-100 recruit into the impressive defensive class the Trojans are building this spring. Alongside Topui, USC’s defensive class includes in-state cornerbacks R.J. Sermons (No. 26 in ESPN Junior 300) and Brandon Lockhart (No. 77); four-star outside linebacker Xavier Griffin (No. 27) out of Gainesville, Georgia; and two more defensive line pledges between Jaimeon Winfield (No. 143) and Simote Katoanga (No. 174).
The Trojans are working to reestablish their local recruiting presence in the 2026 class under newly hired general manager Chad Bowden. Topui not only gives the Trojans their 11th in-state commit in the cycle, but his pledge represents a potentially important step toward revamping the program’s pipeline to perennial local powerhouse Mater Dei High School, too.
Topui will enter his senior season this fall at Mater Dei, the program that has produced a long line of USC stars including Matt Leinart, Matt Barkley and Amon-Ra St. Brown. However, if Topui ultimately signs with the program later this year, he’ll mark the Trojans’ first Mater Dei signee since the 2022 cycle, when USC pulled three top-300 prospects — Domani Jackson, Raleek Brown and C.J. Williams — from the high school program based in Santa Ana, California.
Topui’s flip to the Trojans also adds another layer to a recruiting rivalry rekindling between USC and Oregon in the 2026 cycle.
Tuesday’s commitment comes less than two months after coach Lincoln Riley and the Trojans flipped four-star Oregon quarterback pledge Jonas Williams, ESPN’s No. 2 dual-threat quarterback in 2026. USC is expected to continue targeting several Ducks commits this spring, including four-star offensive tackle Kodi Greene, another top prospect out of Mater Dei.