How NASCAR returned to North Wilkesboro after 26 years of ruin
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
Nine-thousand, seven-hundred and thirty-one days.
When the NASCAR All-Star Race drops the green flag on Sunday evening, that’s how long it will have been since the cars of its premiere division, the Cup Series, raced for cash and prizes at North Wilkesboro Speedway.
Three-hundred nineteen months and 23 days.
That’s so many calendar pages ripped off and thrown away that the 25-year-old kid who won that last race, Jeff Gordon, victor of the Tyson Holly Farms 400 of Sept. 29, 1996, is now seven years into retirement and vice chairman of the team he was driving for when he held off Dale Earnhardt for the 19th of his eventual 93 victories.
Twenty-six years, seven months and 23 days.
So long ago that 34 of the 37 drivers in the field with Gordon on that day are all retired from Cup Series racing. The other three are no longer with us. Neither are a huge chunk of the sponsors that were on track that day, from Hayes Modems to PrimeStar. So long ago that seven of the drivers entered in this weekend’s event weren’t yet born and at least that many were still in diapers.
Two-hundred thirty-three-thousand, five-hundred forty-four hours. That’s 14,012,640 minutes or 840,758,400 seconds, or, in North Wilkesboro Speedway stopwatch time, roughly 45,446,400 laps run.
No American sports venue has ever hosted a big league team or series, been offline for this long and then had that team or series return. Sure, RFK Stadium lost the Washington Senators in 1971 and MLB didn’t return with the Nationals until 2005, but those 34 years were occupied by no less than eight other franchises, from the NFL to the NASL. And yes, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was closed during World War II, but that was for only four years.
For the vast majority of 1,390 weeks, the North Wilkesboro Speedway was shuttered. Padlocked. Draped with “No Trespassing” signs. As its grandstands rusted, roofs collapsed and fences were devoured by vines, any other building in its condition would have been condemned long ago. But no one in Wilkes County, North Carolina, with that kind of authority could bring themselves to do it. To put the misshapen .625-mile bullring out of its misery, because pulling that plug would have been like pulling the aorta from their hearts.
“I give the people of that area a lot of credit, because they never gave up hope that the place might come alive again,” says Marcus Smith, CEO of Speedway Motorsports and now a bona fide Wilkes County hero, despite being begat from the most hated man in these moonshine-soaked parts to never wear a revenuer’s badge. “No matter how far-fetched the idea of returning might have felt, no matter how far away actually running a NASCAR Cup Series event seemed, they never gave up hope. And now here we are.”
Just how far away did it get? Depending on who you ask and where along that 9,731-day timeline one looks, North Wilkesboro’s rock bottom is a matter of personal perspective.
BP’s dream
For Terri Parsons, the furthest away this Sunday ever felt was August 2011. I know because I ran into her, accidentally, in a Wilkesboro, North Carolina, hotel lobby. I had stopped there in the middle of the night, too tired to make it all the way down the mountain home to Charlotte after covering a night race at Bristol Motor Speedway. I hit the lobby looking for breakfast and there was my friend Terri, widow of NASCAR Hall of Famer Benny Parsons, my former ESPN coworker and mentor.
Parsons died of lung cancer in January 2007, only weeks before the completion of Rendezvous Ridge, a winery, event venue and homeplace they had together built in the hills where Benny grew up, just a few hollers over from the racetrack. It was part of BP’s grand plan to resurrect the area and, eventually, the racetrack where he had grown up watching his stock car racing heroes before spending his entire adult life racing and broadcasting at that same bullring, including the final race in ’96.
“All I know to do is try and help the people who helped me,” Parsons told me the one time I paid a visit to Rendezvous Ridge amid its construction. “It hurts my heart every single time I drive by that racetrack.”
It had indeed hurt my heart when I drove by it on Highway 421, coming and going to Bristol via the Benny Parsons Highway that very weekend. Only three months earlier, I had stood on the frontstretch doing live TV, interviewing a man named Alton McBride, who was part of a group of racing promoters who managed to kill enough frontstretch weeds and convince enough local leaders to allow them to run a full slate of Labor Day weekend races in 2010, including an event won by a 14-year-old kid named Chase Elliott.
The plan was to do it all again the following two years and perhaps beyond, but funding that had been promised never materialized and McBride was gone weeks later. North Wilkesboro Speedway was chained up once again.
That same summer Rendezvous Ridge was struck by lightning twice during a wedding rehearsal dinner and burned to the ground. That’s why Terri Parsons was in the hotel lobby with me that morning. She was living there.
“I carry around a handwritten list of goals that Benny had, that he gave me, and reopening the racetrack is at the top the list,” she told me that morning over bad hotel coffee, robe and all. She walked me through the failure of McBride’s efforts. She talked about the valiant efforts of the Save the Speedway foundation. We smiled as we recalled her “Moonshiners & Revenuers” reunions that had bootlegging legends sitting on rocking chairs and telling tall tales alongside Junior Johnson and even NASCAR president Mike Helton.
I am digging through all my old North Wilkesboro files and just found this. The Moonshiners & Revenuers Reunion from 2010, held at Benny Parsons’ place in Wilkes County. Yes, that’s Junior Johnson doing donuts in a 1940 Ford. Shot it on my FlipCam! #NASCAR75 pic.twitter.com/CPBaNHHjb3
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) May 17, 2023
She still beamed with pride when talking about her 2010 convincing of Richard Childress to bring Kevin Harvick to the abandoned track for a test run. After turning laps on a surface that took 800 gallons of Roundup to clear of weeds, Harvick exclaimed, shocked, “Do not touch this racetrack! It’s perfect.” Then she rattled off a list of all the ideas, schemes and plans that had been brought to her since Benny’s death.
“So much momentum was happening and then, poof, it’s gone,” she said. “Everyone around here has become very jaded, and you can’t blame them. Everyone who has ever gotten their hopes up has either lied to them or disappeared. You should have been at the county commissioners meeting when Bruton Smith stormed out.”
Oh yeah, Bruton Smith …
Returning to the Earth
The way most people want to remember it now is that the furthest away this Sunday ever got was on the very day of that last Cup race in 1996. Gordon’s win came in North Wilkesboro Speedway’s 93rd Strictly Stock/Grand National/Winston Cup Series event, going all the way back to when it hosted the finale of that series’ inaugural season on Oct. 16, 1949.
The reality for those who were there that day was a little different.
“Honestly, I think when we left that day, we all truly believed we’d be back sooner than later,” remembers Danny Lawrence, then an engine tuner at Richard Childress Racing and longtime member of Dale Earnhardt’s famed “Flying Aces” pit crew. “That was an era when NASCAR was growing so fast and it was chasing dollars all over the country, in places like Vegas and Texas and California, so it was inevitable that Wilkesboro would lose races. But the idea of it never coming back there, that just didn’t seem possible. But then the years kept ticking by, didn’t they?”
To understand what happened to the racetrack you have to understand the context of Lawrence’s remembrance. In 1994 there were 18 racetracks on the Winston Cup Series schedule, sharing 31 race dates. Only two of those tracks were located outside the eastern time zone and seven facilities hosting 14 races were essentially in the same neighborhood, a three-state triangle stretching from Darlington, South Carolina, north to Richmond, Virginia, and east to Bristol, Tennessee.
By 2001, that portfolio had expanded to 23 racetracks spread out from coast to coast, including six new speedways. The owner of six of those 23 tracks was Bruton Smith, a longtime thorn in NASCAR’s side but a billionaire who was also responsible for fueling a large part of the sport’s ridiculous momentum as it entered the new millennium.
As stock car racing exploded its way toward that shift in corporate culture, North Wilkesboro was becoming the old man’s house from the movie “Up” — a quaint, outdated little house surrounded by rising glass skyscrapers. With a finite number of covered Cup Series races available, track owners started snooping around to buy older facilities, not for the tracks themselves but for the dates that came with them.
On Jan. 23, 1995, a man named Enoch Staley died at the age of 77, following a massive stroke. Staley was the man who built North Wilkesboro Speedway in 1947. He was a son of Wilkes County and a businessman who saw an opportunity in constructing a speedway where brother Gwyn and others who’d piloted souped-up machines for running ‘shine in the nearby hills could come and see once and for all who had the fastest revenuer-outrunning rides. His co-investor was one of those bootleggers, Charlie Combs, whose brother Jack Combs would eventually take over as track co-owner. They had enough cash to plow a dirt oval on Combs’ land just east of town, but not enough to even it out, thus the downhill frontstretch and uphill backstretch that will still befuddle racers this weekend just as it did in ’47.
Staley became a confidant to NASCAR founder Bill France and later Bill France Jr. As long as those ties existed, North Wilkesboro Speedway felt safe. The moment Staley died, in the words of son Mike, “The buzzards came swooping in.”
Days after Staley’s death, Bruton Smith knocked on the Combses’ front door and offered Jack $6 million. Jack Combs, knowing he had no shot holding off the new NASCAR futurist machine, sold. Mike Staley says that Smith immediately showed up at his office to announce that he was their new business partner, like it or not. Knowing that Smith was going to take one of North Wilkesboro’s races and send it west to his sparkling new $250 million Texas Motor Speedway, Staley courted another track owner in need of a Cup race, New Hampshire Motor Speedway owner Bob Bahre, who bought the Staley half of the track for $8 million.
Smith, who never needed much encouragement to hold a grudge, was livid. In Wilkes County, he was already so despised among the locals that he was told by police not to attend the track’s final race in ’96 because they would not be able to guarantee his safety. But instead of working to repair his image among the people of North Wilkesboro, he went full downhome Darth Vader. By 2007, he had purchased Bahre’s racetrack business and held full ownership of their little mountain racetrack.
For the next two decades, whenever he was asked about the possibility of reopening the little racetrack in the mountains, he scoffed. He joked. He made fun. When he did seem to flirt with the idea, talking with potential buyers, investors or local government officials, he also seemed to take joy in pulling the rug out from underneath them.
It was Bruton Smith who famously said when asked for an update on the status of North Wilkesboro Speedway, “I suppose it’s returning to the earth.”
That was late summer 2009. Racing at North Wilkesboro Speedway certainly seemed a long way away after that.
A toilet problem
The furthest this Sunday night ever felt for me personally was a decade earlier, on a rainy December day in 1999. I was riding in the jump seat of a too-tight pickup truck cab. The rear window had a leak in the seal and there was cold water dripping down the back of my neck. But I didn’t care. Because the man riding shotgun right in front of me was Tom Higgins, aka the greatest NASCAR beat writer who ever lived. And the man driving the truck was Junior Johnson, aka The Last American Hero.
I was with “Pap” and Junior working on a TV story about Johnson’s upcoming book, co-authored by Higgins and Steve Waid. We’d shot an interview at Junior’s house that morning, where he had handed me a Mason jar of cherry-infused moonshine (“The real stuff,” he grumbled. “So be careful with it”). We had ridden into Wilkesboro and had lunch at Harold’s Restaurant, owned by Harold Call, he of the shine-running Calls. Harold sat with us for a little while, and when the topic turned to the racetrack, he pointed to a wall over a booth and a framed photo of two huge, nasty hogs.
“We call one of them Bob Bahre and we call the other one Bruton,” Call said. We all laughed. Call did not.
Inspired by the conversation, Johnson announced that we were going to the racetrack. The place where he had first fallen in love with racing.
He told the story about his first start behind the wheel. He was 17 and plowing the cornfield at home in Ingle Hollow, a crossroads about 10 miles from the spot where Enoch Staley and Jack Combs had built their new speedway. It was summer 1949, the track was preparing to host NASCAR’s new Strictly Stock series. Way more people had showed up than expected, so Staley needed drivers to stage a series of preliminary races he’d just added to the schedule. Johnson parked his plow mule, ran up to the house to get some shoes (yes, he was barefoot) and that afternoon he finished second in his very first race. The winner was Gwyn Staley.
As Johnson told us the story 50 years later, the Winston-red brick building over North Wilkesboro Speedway’s first turn rose into view. After only three years of sitting empty, it already looked awful.
Johnson said, “I don’t think many people have been out there since that race. I know I haven’t. I didn’t go to the last race. I couldn’t make myself do it. The Staleys didn’t go. The Combs didn’t go, and hell, they lived on the property. It’d just been too sad for them and for me.”
We stopped by another next door house, occupied by another member of the Call family, Paul, and got the key to unlock the gate. We walked into the infield and into the driver’s lounge. It was like a time capsule. Scorecards still sat on the desk. The blue and brown country print couches were still something right out of someone’s grandmother’s living room. The hydraulic lift that carried Jeff Gordon’s car from the ground to the rooftop Victory Lane still worked, but little else did.
The grandstands were rotting. The windows of the press box were smashed. And there was a smell.
“That’s the plumbing,” Johnson explained. “It didn’t work worth a damn in ’96, so you know it don’t work now. That alone is why it’s going to be hard to ever open this up again. Inspectors around here looked the other way for so long, they can’t do that now. This place has got a toilet problem.”
Johnson slapped Higgins on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. This is making me sadder than hell. They ain’t ever opening this up again.”
Just how far away did it get?
Over the next 20 years, every single time I saw Johnson, he’d repeat that line to me again. He said it to me after he took his son Robert there to run some test laps in 2010. He said it to me at those Moonshiners & Revenuers Reunions. He even said to me at Disney-Pixar HQ, when I was chatting with him about his role in “Cars 3,” in which he plays Junior “Midnight” Moon. During production he’d even had the director and animators over to his house and took them out to the racetrack so they could sketch and take notes. When director Brian Fee asked if the place might be reopened, Johnson told them what he always told me.
“That place has got a toilet problem.” Then he added, “To fix that racetrack up it’s going to take someone with a lot money, a lot of guts and maybe not a lot of common sense.”
Enter Marcus Smith.
“Yeah,” the 50-year-old CEO confesses after hearing that quote, laughing. “I guess that’s pretty much me, isn’t it?”
As the 2010s neared their end, Marcus Smith transitioned into the leadership position at Speedway Motorsports. He is smart like his father, but he is also much easier to navigate in a boardroom. All the Smith business sense without Bruton’s emotional baggage. Among those who called on the more approachable new boss was Terri Parsons. That was in 2018. When silence followed over the next two years, the good people of Wilkes County assumed it was just another verse of the same sad, silent song.
Then came 2020, when a pandemic-forced change of mindset opened the door for NASCAR to be more creative with its scheduling, and a surge in online gaming opened the door for Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the designers at iRacing to clean up the track and digitally scan it. Then came March 2021, when Marcus Smith said on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s podcast that he wanted to talk about North Wilkesboro Speedway. Then North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper allocated money to refurbish racetracks throughout the state, which Smith used to start paving and lighting. Then Smith looked at laying dirt on the track … then was talked out of it … then floated the idea of maybe, possibly a NASCAR Trucks race to Lesa France Kennedy … who jumped at the idea … and Trucks became Cup, which became the All-Star Race and … well …
So far away suddenly became not far away at all. Now 9,731 days are about to tick down to zero.
Terri Parsons will be there. So will the Staleys. So will the Combs, finally ready to make that walk across the field, this week to watch one of their own, Dylan Wilson, great-grandson of Jack Combs, race his Late Model machine against Dale Junior. So will so many Calls, along with hundreds of other Wilkes County residents who swore they’d never come back until the Cup cars came back.
Junior Johnson won’t be there. He died December 2020. Benny Parsons won’t be there, either, gone for more than 16 years. But just last week, both had newly refurbished grandstands named in their honor. Bruton Smith will also not be among the expected crowd of 25,000. He died one year ago at the age of 95, believed to be the oldest-ever Fortune 500 CEO.
“I think as someone who loves the history of this sport, I love the places where you can feel the presence of those who came before you, who built these places and NASCAR as whole,” Marcus Smith says, beaming. “That past isn’t perfect, but that builds character. It’s just like that racetrack itself. North Wilkesboro Speedway is far from perfect. It’s never been perfect. But man, there is so much character.”
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David Schoenfield
We’re past due to hand out some midseason grades, so let’s hand out some midseason grades.
As we pass the 90-game mark in the 2025 MLB season, my team of the first half isn’t the well-rounded Detroit Tigers, who do get our highest grade for owning MLB’s best record, or the explosive Chicago Cubs or Shohei Ohtani‘s Los Angeles Dodgers, but a team most baseball fans love to hate: the Houston Astros. They lost their two best players from last season and their best hitter has been injured — and they’re playing their best baseball since they won the 2022 World Series.
Let’s get to the grades. As always, we’re grading off preseason expectations, factoring in win-loss record and quality of performance, while looking at other positive performances and injuries.
Jump to a team:
AL East: BAL | BOS | NYY | TB | TOR
AL Central: CHW | CLE | DET | KC | MIN
AL West: ATH | HOU | LAA | SEA | TEX
NL East: ATL | MIA | NYM | PHI | WSH
NL Central: CHC | CIN | MIL | PIT | STL
NL West: ARI | COL | LAD | SD | SF
Tarik Skubal is obviously the headline act, but the Tigers are winning with impressive depth across the entire roster.
Javier Baez is putting together a remarkable comeback season after a couple of abysmal years and will become the first player to start an All-Star Game at both shortstop and in the outfield. Former No. 1 overall picks Casey Mize and Spencer Torkelson have put together their own comeback stories, while Riley Greene has matured into one of the game’s top power hitters.
Given their deep well of prospects and contributors at the MLB level, no team is better positioned than the Tigers to add significant help at the trade deadline.
I heard someone refer to them as the Zombie Astros, which feels apropos. Alex Bregman left as a free agent, they traded Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez has been injured and has just three home runs, and the Jose Altuve experiment in left field predictably fizzled.
But here they are, fighting for the best record in the majors and holding a comfortable lead in the AL West. They’re getting star turns from Hunter Brown, Framber Valdez and Jeremy Pena, while the risky decision to start Cam Smith in the majors with very little minor league experience has paid off, as he has now become their cleanup hitter.
If we ignore the COVID-19 season, the Astros look on their way to an eighth straight division title.
This could be at least a half-grade higher based on everything that has gone right: Pete Crow-Armstrong‘s attention-grabbing breakout, Tucker doing everything expected after the big trade, Seiya Suzuki‘s monster power numbers and Matthew Boyd‘s All-Star turn in the rotation. The Cubs are on pace for their most wins since their World Series title season in 2016.
There have been a few hiccups, however, especially in the rotation with Justin Steele‘s season-ending injury and Ben Brown‘s inconsistency, plus rookie third baseman Matt Shaw has scuffled, and the bench has been weak aside from their backup catchers.
Still, this is a powerhouse lineup, and the Cubs will seek to improve their rotation at the deadline.
They just keep winning of late, going from 25-27 and seven games behind the Yankees on May 25 to taking over first place from the slumping Bronx Bombers, a remarkable turnaround over just 36 games. They went 27-9 over a 36-game stretch ending with their eighth win in a row on Sunday.
George Springer‘s recent surge has been fun to watch, a reminder of how good he was at his peak, and Addison Barger has been mashing over the past two months.
Some of the stats don’t add up to the Blue Jays being this good — they’ve barely outscored their opponents — but there might be more offense in the tank from the likes of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and a healthy Anthony Santander, and the bullpen, a soft spot, is the easiest area to upgrade.
Their success is best summed up by the fact that Freddy Peralta is their lone All-Star, but they have a whole bunch of players who have contributed between 1 and 2 WAR.
Brandon Woodruff looked good Sunday in his first start in nearly two years, so that could be a huge boost for the second half.
I’m curious to see how Jackson Chourio performs as well. While his counting stats — extra-base hits, RBIs — are fine, his triple-slash line remains below last season, especially his OBP. He had a huge second half in 2024 (.310/.363/.552), and if he does that again, the Brewers could find themselves back in the postseason for the seventh time in eight seasons.
The Rays started off slow, with a losing record through the end of April, but then went 33-22 in May and June to claw back into the AL East race — as the Rays usually do, last year being the recent exception.
Two key performers have been All-Star third baseman Junior Caminero, who has a chance to become just the third player to hit 40 home runs in his age-21 season, and All-Star first baseman Jonathan Aranda.
Due to the league wanting the Rays to play more home games early in the season, the July and August slate will be very road-heavy, so we’ll see how the Rays adapt to a difficult two-month stretch, especially since their pitching isn’t quite as deep as it has been in other seasons.
No, they’re not going to be the greatest team of all time. But they might win 100 games — even though Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki, their huge offseason acquisitions, have combined for just two wins in 10 starts.
The lineup, of course, has been terrific, with Ohtani leading the NL in several categories and Will Smith leading the batting race. By wRC+, it’s been the best offense in Dodgers history.
If they can get some combo of Snell, Sasaki and Tyler Glasnow healthy, plus Ohtani eventually ramped up to a bigger workload on the mound, the Dodgers still loom as World Series favorites.
They are on pace for 95 wins, mainly on the strength of Zack Wheeler, Ranger Suarez and Cristopher Sanchez, who are a combined 23-7 with 11.8 WAR. Jesus Luzardo‘s ERA is bloated due to that two-start stretch when he allowed 20 runs, but he has otherwise been solid as well.
But, overall, it hasn’t always been the smoothest of treks. The bullpen has imploded a few times and the offense has lacked power aside from Kyle Schwarber. Bryce Harper is back after missing three weeks, and they need to get his bat going. Look for some bullpen additions at the trade deadline — and perhaps an outfielder as well.
The Cardinals have been a minor surprise — perhaps even to the Cardinals themselves. St. Louis was viewing this as a rebuilding year of sorts — not that the Cardinals ever hit rock bottom and start completely over. They had a hot May, winning 12 of 13 at one point, but the offense has been fading of late, with those three straight shutout losses to Pittsburgh and six shutout losses since June 25.
The starting rotation doesn’t generate a lot of swing and miss, with both Erick Fedde and Miles Mikolas seeing their ERAs starting to climb. Brendan Donovan is the team’s only All-Star rep, and that kind of sums up this team: solid but without any star power. That might foretell a second-half fade.
All-Star starting pitchers Logan Webb and Robbie Ray, plus a dominant bullpen, have led the way, although after starting 12-4, the Giants have basically been a .500 team for close to three months now. Rafael Devers hasn’t yet ignited the offense since coming over from Boston, and the Giants have lost four 1-0 games.
These final three games at home against the Dodgers before the All-Star break will be a crucial series, as Los Angeles has slowly pulled away in the NL West.
This was an “A-plus” through June 12, when the Mets were 45-24 and owned the best record in baseball, even though Juan Soto hadn’t gotten hot. Soto finally got going in June, but the pitching collapsed, and the Mets went through a disastrous 1-10 stretch.
The rotation injuries have piled up, exacerbating the lack of bullpen depth. Recent games have been started by Justin Hagenman (who had a 6.21 ERA in Triple-A), journeyman reliever Chris Devenski, Paul Blackburn (7.71 ERA) and Frankie Montas, who has had to start even though he’s clearly not throwing the ball well. The Mets need to get the rotation healthy, but also could use more offense from Mark Vientos and their catchers (Francisco Alvarez was demoted to Triple-A).
At times it has felt like Cal Raleigh has been a one-man team with his record-breaking first half. But he will be joined on the All-Star squad by starting pitcher Bryan Woo, closer Andres Munoz and center fielder Julio Rodriguez, who made it on the strength of his defense, as his offense has been a disappointment.
The offense has been one of the best in the majors on the road, but the rotation has been nowhere near as effective as the past couple of seasons, with George Kirby, Logan Gilbert and Bryce Miller all missing time with injuries. They just shut out the Pirates three games in a row, so maybe that will get the rotation on a roll.
They’re just out of the wild-card picture while hanging around .500, so we give them a decent grade since that exceeds preseason expectations. It feels like a little bit of a mirage given their run differential — their record in one-run games (good) versus their record in blowout games (not good) — and various holes across the lineup and pitching staff.
But they’ve done two things to keep them in the race. One, they hit a lot of home runs. Two, they’re the only team in the majors to use just five starting pitchers. The rotation hasn’t been stellar, but it’s been stable.
The Padres are probably fortunate to be where they are, given some of their issues. As expected, the offensive depth has been a problem.
Not as expected, Dylan Cease has struggled while Michael King‘s injury after a strong start has left them without last year’s dynamic 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation (although Nick Pivetta has been one of the best signings of the offseason). Yu Darvish just made his season debut Monday, so hopefully he’ll provide a lift.
The Padres haven’t played well against the better teams, including a 2-5 record against the Dodgers, but they did clean up against the Athletics, Rockies and Pirates, going 16-2 against those three teams.
For now, the Reds are stuck in neutral. Leave out 2022, when they lost 100 games, and it’s otherwise been a string of .500-ish seasons: 31-29 in 2020, 83-79 in 2021, 82-80 in 2023, 77-85 in 2024 and now a similar record so far in 2025.
The hope was that Terry Francona would be a difference-maker. Maybe that will play out down the stretch, but the best hope is to get the rotation clicking on all cylinders at the same time. That means Andrew Abbott continuing his breakout performance, plus getting Hunter Greene healthy again and rookie Chase Burns to live up to the hype after a couple of shaky outings following an impressive MLB debut.
Throw in Nick Lodolo and solid Nick Martinez and Brady Singer, and this group can be good enough to pitch the Reds to their first full-season playoff appearance since 2013.
The Yankees have hit their annual midseason swoon — which has been subject to much intense analysis from their disgruntled fans — and that opening weekend sweep of the Brewers, when the Yankees’ torpedo bats were the big story in baseball, now seems long ago.
Going from seven up to three back in such a short time is a disaster — but not disastrous. Nonetheless, the Yankees will have to do some hard-core self-evaluation heading to the trade deadline.
The offense wasn’t going to be as good as it was in April, when Paul Goldschmidt, Trent Grisham and Ben Rice were all playing over their heads. So, do they need a hitter? Or with Clarke Schmidt now likely joining Gerrit Cole as a Tommy John casualty, do they need a starting pitcher? Or both?
From the book of “things we didn’t expect,” page 547: The Marlins are averaging more runs per game than the Orioles, Padres, Braves and Rangers, to name a few teams. They’re averaging almost as many runs per game as the Mets, and last time we checked, the Marlins weren’t the team to give Soto $765 million.
An eight-game winning streak at the end of June has the Marlins going toe-to-toe with the Braves for third place in the NL East even though the starting rotation has been a mess, with Sandy Alcantara on track to become just the fourth qualified pitcher with an ERA over 7.00.
Heading into the season, I thought that if any team was going to challenge the Dodgers in the NL West, it would be the Diamondbacks. The offense has once again been one of the best in the majors, but the pitching issues have been painful.
After the aggressive move to sign Corbin Burnes, he went down with Tommy John surgery after 11 starts. Meanwhile, Zac Gallen, Eduardo Rodriguez and Brandon Pfaadt each have an ERA on the wrong side of 5.00. Rodriguez was better in June before a shellacking on July 4, while Gallen remains homer-prone, so it’s hard to tell if improvement is on the horizon. Their playoff odds are hovering just under 20%, so there’s a chance, but they need to get red-hot like they did last July and August.
It feels like it has been more soap opera than baseball season in Boston, with the Devers drama finally ending with the shocking trade with the Giants.
If you give added weight that this is the Red Sox, a team that should be operating with the big boys in both budget and aspirations and instead seemed to only want to dump Devers’ contract, then feel free to lower this grade a couple of notches, even if the Red Sox are close in the wild-card standings.
On the field, the heralded rookie trio of Kristian Campbell, Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer hasn’t exactly clicked, with Campbell returning to the minors after posting a .902 OPS in April. A big test will come out of the All-Star break, when they play the Cubs, Phillies, Dodgers, Twins and Astros in a tough 15-game stretch.
After last season’s surprise playoff appearance, it’s been a frustrating 2025 — although I’m not sure this result is necessarily a surprise.
There were concerns about the offense heading into the season and those concerns have proven correct. They were getting no production from their outfield, so they rushed Jac Caglianone to the majors to much hype, but he has struggled and might need a reset back in Triple-A. Even Bobby Witt Jr., as good as he has been (on pace for 7.5 WAR), has seen his OPS drop 140 points.
On the bright side, Kris Bubic emerged as an All-Star starter and Noah Cameron has filled in nicely for the injured Cole Ragans, so maybe they trade a starter for some offense.
Coming off a catastrophic 2024 season, nobody was expecting anything from the White Sox. Indeed, another 121-loss season loomed as a possibility. While they’re on pace to lose 100 again, they’ve at least played more competitive baseball thanks to their pitching.
Rookie starters Shane Smith and Sean Burke have shown promise, while rookie position players Kyle Teel, Edgar Quero and now Colson Montgomery are getting their initial taste of the majors.
There has been the mix of calamity: Luis Robert Jr. has been unproductive and is probably now untradable, and former No. 3 overall pick Andrew Vaughn hit .189 and was traded to the Brewers.
The Twins are one organization that might like a do-over of the past five seasons. It feels like they’ve had the most talent in the division, but all they’ve done is squeeze out one soft division title in 2023. Now, the Tigers have passed them in talent and other factors, such as payroll flexibility.
There’s still time for the Twins to turn things around in 2025, but outside of that wonderful 13-game winning streak, they haven’t played winning baseball.
Overall, it’s been yet another bad season, despite Paul Skenes‘ brilliance. Really, do we talk enough about him? Yes, we do talk about him, but he has a 1.95 ERA through his first 42 career starts. Incredible.
Here’s an amazing thing about baseball. The Pirates are not a good team, but they recently put together one of the best six-game stretches in history. That’s not stretching the description. First, they swept the Mets — a good team — by scores of 9-1, 9-2 and 12-1. Then they swept the Cardinals — a good team — with three shutouts, 7-0, 1-0 and 5-0. They became the first team since at least 1901 to score 43 runs or more and allow four runs or fewer in a six-game stretch. And then they promptly got shut out three games in a row, making them the first to win three straight shutouts and then lose three straight shutouts.
Eighteen of our 28 voters picked them to win the AL West before the season, but it’s looking more and more like the 2023 World Series might be a stone-cold fluke in the middle of a string of losing seasons. That year, nearly everyone in the lineup had a career year at the plate, and the pitching got hot at the right time.
This year’s Rangers, though, have struggled to score runs, and while some have pointed to the offensive environment at Globe Life Field, they’re near the bottom in road OPS as well. It’s been fun seeing Jacob deGrom back at a dominating level, and Nathan Eovaldi should have been an All-Star.
Put it this way: If the Rangers can somehow squeeze into the postseason, you don’t want to face the Rangers in a short series. Indeed, if any team looms as an October upset special, it might be the Rangers.
The Nationals received superlative first-half performances from James Wood and MacKenzie Gore, while CJ Abrams is on the way to his best season. But there remains a lack of overall organizational progress, which finally led to the firings on Sunday of longtime GM Mike Rizzo and longtime manager Dave Martinez. A 7-19 record in June sealed their fate, as the rotation has been bad and the bullpen arguably the worst in baseball.
Until the Nationals figure out how to improve their pitching — or, better yet, find an owner who wants to win — they will be stuck going nowhere.
That fell apart in a hurry. Sunday’s loss was Cleveland’s 10th in a row, a stretch that remarkably included five shutouts. Indeed, the Guardians have now been shut out 11 times; the franchise record in the post-dead-ball-era (since 1920) is 20 shutouts in 1968.
There’s nothing worse than watching a team that can’t score runs, so that tells you how exciting the Guardians have been. Last year, the Guardians hit exceptionally well with runners in scoring position, keeping afloat what was otherwise a mediocre offense. That hasn’t happened in 2025 (trading Josh Naylor didn’t help either). Throw in some predictable regression from the bullpen, and this season looks lost.
We can’t give this a complete failing grade due to the emergence of All-Star shortstop Jacob Wilson (the Athletics’ first All-Star starter since Josh Donaldson in 2014) and slugging first baseman Nick Kurtz, who have a chance to finish 1-2 in the Rookie of the Year voting. Plus, we have Denzel Clarke‘s circus catches in center field.
But otherwise? Ugh. The Sacramento gamble already looks like a disaster, three months into a three-year stay. The team is drawing well below Sutter Health Park’s 14,000-seat capacity, with many recent games drawing under 10,000 fans. Luis Severino bashed the small crowds and the lack of air-conditioning.
The A’s had a groundbreaking ceremony for their new park in Vegas, renting heavy construction equipment as background props. Maybe they should have spent that money on more pitching help.
Based on preseason expectations, the Braves have clearly been the biggest disappointment in the National League — fighting the Orioles for most disappointing overall.
What’s gone wrong? They haven’t scored runs, as the offense continues its remarkable fade from a record-setting performance just two seasons ago. The collapses of Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies lead the way, with lack of production at shortstop and left field playing a big role as well. Closer Raisel Iglesias has struggled, and the team is 11-22 in one-run games. Spencer Strider hasn’t yet reached his pre-injury level and Reynaldo Lopez made just one start before going down.
The Braves haven’t missed the playoffs since 2017, but that run is clearly in jeopardy.
The Orioles have a similar record to the Braves but have played much worse, including losses of 24-2, 19-5, 15-3 and two separate 9-0 shutouts.
They will spend the trade deadline dealing away as many of their impending free agents as possible, and then do a lot of soul-searching heading into the offseason. After making the playoffs in 2023 and 2024, will this season just be a blip? While the pitching struggles aren’t necessarily a big surprise, what has happened to the offense? Are some of their young players prospects or suspects?
After two months of Cleveland Spiders-level baseball, it would be easy to make fun of the Rockies. Especially since they recently announced Walker Monfort — son of the owner — was promoted to executive VP and will replace outgoing president and COO Greg Feasel.
On the other hand, the Rockies are doing something right: They just drew 121,000 for a three-game series against the White Sox.
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Jorge Castillo
NEW YORK — The Yankees designated two-time batting champion DJ LeMahieu for assignment Wednesday, presumably ending the infielder’s seven-year tenure with the organization despite being owed $22 million through next season.
“Tough decisions,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said. “In the end, it ultimately comes down to how this roster sits and what’s best. You want to provide your manager with enough chess moves to deal with on a day-in and day-out basis in-game.”
Manager Aaron Boone explained that the move resulted from “an evolving conversation” in recent days that included multiple meetings with LeMahieu, a respected veteran in the Yankees’ clubhouse.
It comes a day after Boone announced that Jazz Chisholm Jr. would shift back to playing second base every day from third base, bumping LeMahieu from the team’s everyday second baseman to a bench role. Boone acknowledged LeMahieu took the demotion “not necessarily great” but emphasized that LeMahieu did not ask for his release.
“It’s been a tough couple of days,” Boone said. “Some hard conversations. And then ultimately coming to this decision, conclusion, obviously not easy for [who’s] been a great player. He’s done a lot of great things for this organization. So, difficult, but at the end [we] feel like this is the right thing to do at this time.”
LeMahieu, who turns 37 on Sunday, batted .266 with a .674 OPS in 45 games this season after starting the season on the injured list with a strained calf. He has been better since June 1, hitting .310 with a .754 OPS in 96 plate appearances as the Yankees’ primary second baseman, but Cashman ultimately decided the production wasn’t enough to offset his defensive liabilities.
The Yankees signed LeMahieu to a six-year, $90 million contract before the 2021 season — fresh off LeMahieu hitting .364 during the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign to become the first player to win a batting title in both leagues in the modern era — envisioning him as an everyday utility player bouncing between infield positions.
LeMahieu made 36 of his 55 starts last season at third base before going on the injured list in early September with a right hip impingement for the remainder of the year. That injury, according to Cashman, inhibited LeMahieu’s ability to play third base, and led to LeMahieu informing him that he couldn’t physically handle playing the position anymore.
“He was always just sharing that the recovery was really difficult,” Cashman said. “The physical toll on him to tee up at that position was a problem and so therefore that position is a problem.”
The limitation was cemented during spring training when LeMahieu strained his left calf in his first Grapefruit League game playing third base, forcing the Yankees to conclude that LeMahieu was no longer an option at the position. He only played second base in his nine rehab games before making his season debut May 13 as a second baseman with Chisholm on the injured list with an oblique strain.
Three weeks later, Chisholm, who started the season as the team’s everyday second baseman, came off the injured list to play third base despite LeMahieu’s range at second base being glaringly limited. Chisholm, who feels most comfortable at second base, accepted the assignment and returned to third base, a position he picked up last season after the Yankees acquired him from the Miami Marlins at the trade deadline through the World Series.
The calculus changed Sunday when Chisholm, with the Yankees in the midst of a six-game losing streak, told reporters that he hurt his shoulder making a throw from third base three weeks earlier and the injury impacted his throwing. Two days later, Chisholm, who had made three throwing errors in his final four starts at third base, was the Yankees’ starting second baseman again.
With Chisholm, an All-Star this season, stationed at second base, former MVPs Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger entrenched at first base and Giancarlo Stanton occupying the DH spot, playing time would have been sparse for LeMahieu.
Factoring in that the Yankees’ options at third base behind Oswald Peraza, who is also the team’s backup shortstop, would have been catcher J.C. Escarra, Cashman determined that LeMahieu’s presence hampered the team’s flexibility to an extent that would have handcuffed Boone’s in-game decision-making. Infielder Jorbit Vivas, a light-hitting versatile defender, was called up from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to replace LeMahieu on the roster.
“I wouldn’t say he’s unwilling to still make the attempt and maybe spell over there,” Cashman said of LeMahieu. “But it was something that he was without sharing that was steering clear of to the extent he could.
“Because, again, like anything else, he’s got a lot of pride. He’s a great player. He wants to contribute to the team. He loves this team. He loves this organization. But he felt that was an avenue that was no longer a realistic avenue and that kind of ties our hands a little bit more moving forward.”
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