NASCAR’s North Wilkesboro return excited drivers, fans alike
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
NORTH WILKESBORO, N.C. — The 2023 NASCAR All-Star Race at the back-from-the-dead North Wilkesboro Speedway wasn’t great. Kyle Larson led 145 of 200 laps and defeated runner-up Bubba Wallace by 4.5 seconds.
The traffic getting out of the little .625-mile moonshiners’ bullring, located on farmland with only one road in and out — Speedway Road — wasn’t nearly as bad as feared, but it wasn’t exactly zooming, either. As Larson wrapped up his lengthy Victory Lane celebration on the roof of an infield building, carried there by hydraulic lift just as it last did his Hendrick Motorsports boss, Jeff Gordon, nearly 27 years ago, endless lines of red taillights still illuminated the Brushy Mountains under the sliver of a razor-thin crescent moon.
Yet, no one was mad. Not even close. From the crawling cavalcade of cars and the sold-out hillside campgrounds to the front porches of Wilkes County locals watching those roads and hills, so long abandoned, now covered in a parade of pickups and sedans, so many adorned with slanted No. 3 stickers, everyone was too busy smiling, laughing and, sure, some weeping, but with joy.
Even in the North Wilkesboro Speedway garage area, where 23 teams packed up their machines and equipment after having been pile-driven by Larson for the better part of two hours, the collective expression on their faces was that of a bunch of kids at Chuck E. Cheese.
Final from Wilkesboro. #AllStarRace pic.twitter.com/cRxmGRMH6H
— North Wilkesboro Speedway (@NWBSpeedway) May 22, 2023
“I don’t think you’ll ever see a bunch of guys so excited after getting their butts kicked,” Chase Elliott said jokingly after finishing a respectable fifth but yet a whopping half-lap behind his Hendrick Motorsports teammate. “I think to all of us, this whole weekend felt like real racing. No frills. Just short-track racing, tires getting eaten up, no fancy garage, just guys working shoulder to shoulder. All the stuff that people thought maybe they were tired of back then, they ended up kind of missing it.”
That’s what nearly 27 years of absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder will do to people.
For the racers and their teams, imperfect race or not, there was a relief in the return to that feeling. For the people of Wilkes County and the surrounding areas, that sense of relief was much deeper. It was a returning of their identity.
All weekend long, those people could be found returning themselves, back to the routines and locations they had been forced to give up when NASCAR gave up on their racetrack. Habits and practices honed over five decades and nearly 100 Cup Series races hosted. They dusted off old ball caps, laundered T-shirts to get 30 years of mothball smell out of them and pulled the covers off old Winnebagos that had been parked behind their houses since ’96. They returned to riverside campgrounds and old-school diners, curious to see if maybe the same old couple ran the place, and perhaps the same old items were still on the menu.
“As soon as I got here, I just drove around to see if I could get my bearings straight,” said NASCAR Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip, a 10-time North Wilkesboro Speedway winner, who earned the bulk of those wins driving for Junior Johnson, the moonshine-running, NASCAR-driving, championship team-owning demigod of Wilkes County, who died in December 2019. “I looked for where [my wife] Stevie and I would go eat. I looked for the farm we almost bought up here. I looked for Junior’s house. I couldn’t find any of it. It’s been so long, and stuff around here hasn’t changed much, but also it has. Maybe just my old-man memory has.”
Then DW, who finished 27th in that final race run in ’96, leaned out over the railing of the speedway’s rooftop. The NASCAR All-Star Race co-grand marshal (with 15-time North Wilkesboro winner Richard Petty) took a big drag off the morning air, sucking up a sample of the sunrise cloud of smoke that wafted in from the campgrounds.
“But you smell that? That’s bacon frying. Real bacon. And sausage,” Waltrip said. “When I drove for Junior, I had a room at his house and on race mornings he’d wake me up at like 5 a.m., in the kitchen cooking breakfast. Then we’d come over here and win the race.”
A few miles away, over on River Street in downtown Wilkesboro, dozens of people were marinating in that same scent, sitting down at rows of picnic tables as part of the overflow crowd at Glenn’s Restaurant, although locals still call it Glenn’s Tastee Freeze. It’s been here since 1963, opened sometime between the races won that year over at the racetrack by Petty and Marvin Panch. On race mornings, they were open for breakfast only. The rest of the week, they were open from dawn until the last customer was served, most wrestling with which of the 50 milkshakes to order, from simple vanilla and strawberry to The Intimidator, a Dale Earnhardt-inspired mixture of red velvet, brownies and chocolate ice cream.
“We started coming here in 1981, the same year they laid down that asphalt that they are racing on this weekend,” explained Charles Lane of Knoxville, Tennessee, sitting alongside his son and two grandchildren, both of them way too busy throwing down on biscuits and gravy to listen to their pawpaw. “I promised my wife I would take the same photo of them that we took of my son here and his brother when we brought them here in the ’80s. He was their age then. We brought the old photo with us to make sure we get it right.”
There was a lot of that at North Wilkesboro Speedway over the weekend. People posing in just the right spot, wearing just the right clothes, taking photos and then checking to make sure it looked just right. In ’95, Kayla Knight was an elementary school student, and her mother, Christy, snapped a pic of her little girl up against the backstretch catchfence in jean shorts and yellow socks, with a hand on that fence as she watched Gordon & Co. roll by during driver introductions. On Sunday, they found the same spot and the now-30-something woman posed for the same photo.
“I even went and bought some yellow socks,” the King, North Carolina, native said proudly, mom and daughter having just polished off a plate of chopped pork at Little Richard’s Barbecue just a few exits down the Benny Parsons Highway from the racetrack.
Along that same refurbished fence, the one that was entwined in jungle-thick kudzu not so long ago, fans mingled in what looked like a NASCAR costume party. There was a man in the 1993 Maxx Trading Cards Rookie of the Year T-shirt. There was a woman in an Earnhardt “5-Time Winston Cup Series Champion” T-shirt — signed by the man himself — that she said was taken out of a picture frame in her living room just to wear this weekend. Fans posed with JB Rader, a local moonshine concocter made famous in recent years on cable television. They sipped ‘shine in the stands, some legally bought and mixed with various juices and flavors at racetrack concession stands, and at least that much also carried from the mountains outside in via cooler.
“The store-bought stuff is good — I mean, it’s made from Willie Clay Call’s recipe,” explained Thomas Pratt, who was born in Wilkes County and now resides in nearby Boone. He held up a Yeti cup decorated with a Dale Earnhardt Jr. Sun-Drop soda sticker and motioned to take a whiff. “But this here is original recipe. You can tell because if you smell it too hard your nose hairs will catch fire.”
From the Moravian Falls Family Campground to the Airstreams parked at Rick’s Lazy Acres along Monroe Road across from the track to the people who tired of not moving in postrace traffic and decided to pull over, pop the tailgate and crack open another cold one by the LED light of the old, resurrected racetrack atop the hill above, no one cared that Larson had gone full Hulk vs. Loki, Tyson vs. Spinks, or, for that matter, Petty vs. the field. No one was asking what the future of the track might be (“I’m definitely thinking that way,” said owner Marcus Smith of a future Cup race). No one cared that it might be a while before they got home, like early morning, or that their boss was going to give them a dressing-down when they showed up late for work a few hours later.
No one cared. At all. About any of that. Hell, about anything. Because North Wilkesboro Speedway was back. And if it can come back after all those years and all that rust and all those weeds and all that hope lost, anything is possible.
“You just give up on stuff, right?” said a man who would only refer to himself as Cornbread, despite multiple requests to expound upon that identification. “We had companies give up on us. NASCAR gave up on us. So, I gave up on the racetrack, too. And damn, man, here we are …
“You want a beer?”
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Bradford Doolittle
CLEVELAND — For two games and five innings, the Detroit Tigers’ offense was constantly knocking but when it mattered most, no one seemed to answer. Finally, Dillon Dingler opened the door to a clinching win.
Dingler’s sixth-inning homer off Cleveland lefty Erik Sabrowski broke a 1-1 deadlock, igniting a late Tigers rally that put the Tigers into the ALDS with a 6-3 win at Progressive Field on Thursday.
The victory not only gave the Tigers a 2-1 AL wild-card series win over the rival Guardians , it avenged last year’s loss to Cleveland in the ALDS.
“We were able to flip it right there, and we had a huge (seventh) inning, able to score some runs and be in the driver’s seat a little bit,” said Dingler, a northeast Ohio native playing in a ballpark he visited as a youth. “It was a big one.”
Before Dingler’s homer, the Tigers had managed just four runs in the series — through two games and five innings — and were a maddening 3-for-28 with runners in scoring position, putting their season in peril despite outplaying Cleveland for the most part. Two of the runs they scored were unearned.
Enter Dingler, a second-year catcher playing in his first postseason. He had started his playoff career 0-for-9 at the plate until he connected against Sabrowski, sending a changeup up in the zone into the seats in left-field, putting Detroit ahead.
“I was scratching and crawling a little bit,” Dingler said. “I was able to get a pitch to hit and do a little damage. Momentum, I feel like the momentum in the series was the biggest thing.”
And how. The aftermath of Dingler’s homer had the aspect of a boiler’s release valve being turned on, allowing bursts of steam to escape into the air.
In the seventh, with the Guardians rolling out a parade of relievers from one of baseball’s best bullpens, the Tigers finally started spinning the merry-go-round, racking up one clutch hit after another.
The rally started when Parker Meadows beat out what was meant to be a sacrifice bunt after Javier Baez led off with a double. Gleyber Torres was retired on a comebacker to a pirouetting Hunter Gaddis, then Kerry Carpenter was intentionally walked, his fourth time reaching base in the game, to load the bases.
This was exactly the kind of the spot the Tigers had faced, and failed, throughout the series. Not this time.
Wenceel Perez, Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene followed with RBI singles, plating four runs in all, and giving the Tigers a commanding lead. Up to that point, the trio had gone 1-for-13 combined with runners in scoring position during the series.
That’s what momentum looks like.
“I don’t know why in baseball it seems like one good thing happens and then two, three, four, five at-bats in a row were exceptional,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “We wanted to get even more greedy and do more, but it was nice to separate and breathe a little bit, knowing they weren’t going to give in.”
The loss brought a sudden halt to Cleveland’s building Cinderella story, one that saw them overcome a 15 1/2-game deficit to Detroit to win the AL Central, then force Thursday’s Game 3 after dropping the series opener. While coming back from the brink again and again, the Guardians forged an identity of a never-say-die team. As glorious as the run may have been, losing to the Tigers doesn’t hurt any less.
“There’s no ending of the season,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “It doesn’t end gradually, it just halts. We’ve been with each other every day for eight months. More time with each other than our family. Working together, laughing together, crying together, yelling together, you name it. Now it stops, and I had so much fun with this group.”
With the series win, the Tigers are building a budding comeback story of their own. For much of the season, Detroit was poised to land the AL’s top overall seed but a second-half slump capped by a 7-17 September landed them in Cleveland, as the road team in a wild-card series.
Now the Tigers are on their way to play the Seattle Mariners in the ALDS, beginning Tuesday, and if you had any doubts about it entering the wild-card round, you can now safely assume that the Tigers have turned the page on their lackluster finish.
“It only gets better from here,” Hinch said. “And I’m proud of our group for continuing to learn and grow and mature and fight off some of the negative thoughts that come along the way when people doubt you or you start struggling a little bit. You’ve got to stay in there.”
Last weekend delivered an action-packed, wire-to-wire college football slate. In Week 6, the sport’s collective attention is centered on a pair of rather distinct but equally intriguing ranked matchups: Alabama–Vanderbilt and Florida State–Miami.
It has been nearly 365 days since the Commodores downed then-No. 1 Alabama in a stunning upset last October. No. 16 Vanderbilt, still led by quarterback Diego Pavia, appears to be even more formidable this fall as coach Clark Lea leads the Commodores to Bryant-Denny Stadium (3:30 p.m. ET, ABC) this weekend. But they visit Alabama to face a Crimson Tide team led by a surging quarterback in Ty Simpson and a team that has only improved since the program’s Week 1 defeat at Florida State.
No. 18 Florida State hosts No. 3 Miami after suffering its first loss in a back-and-forth, overtime thriller at Virginia in Week 5. Florida State and a shaky Seminoles defensive front will run into an even stiffer test at the line of scrimmage Saturday night (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC) against a Hurricanes rushing attack led by Mark Fletcher Jr. with ACC title race and postseason implications hanging over this early fall meeting of in-state conference rivals.
With a pair premier matchups ahead Saturday, our college football experts broke the matchups between Alabama-Vanderbilt and Florida State-Miami, reveal five freshman newcomers who have impressed in the first month of the 2025 season and recap the best quotes of Week 6. — Eli Lederman
Jump to:
In-state showdown | Vanderbilt-Alabama
Five freshman to know
Quotes of the week
What do Miami and Florida State need to focus on to win?
Miami: Given what Virginia did to Florida State on the ground last week in a thrilling 46-38 double-overtime win, Miami should focus on controlling the line of scrimmage and dominating on the ground. Good thing for the Hurricanes, they have plenty of experience doing that this season. Take their last game against Florida, for example. In the second half, they wore down the Gators up front and took control by continuing to run the ball. Miami rushed for 184 yards as Mark Fletcher Jr. went over 100 yards rushing for the second straight game. Last year against Florida State, Fletcher rushed for 71 yards and scored a touchdown, only days after his father, Mark Fletcher Sr., died unexpectedly.
Fletcher said this week he plays with his dad in mind every week, so this week is no different. But his play has sparked the Miami run game, as he has become the featured back after Jordan Lyle was injured in the opener. CharMar Brown has emerged to form a solid 1-2 punch out of the backfield.
“Mark is hard to tackle,” offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson said. “He’s very big, very strong, very physical, and he runs with passion. He’s a great example for that room, because they’re all running that way right now, which is good to see.”
Miami expects Lyle to be ready to go against Florida State. If Lyle is back to 100%, his speed and shiftiness will provide a nice counter to the power with which Fletcher has been running this season. Miami has the type of balance that coach Mario Cristobal has wanted since his arrival with the Hurricanes. He has preached building his team from the inside out, and against Florida State, the Hurricanes will have a chance to show that again. — Andrea Adelson
Florida State: Florida State’s defensive front figured to be among the best in the ACC, led by behemoth tackle Darrell Jackson Jr. and Nebraska transfer James Williams. The unit certainly looked the part in the Seminoles’ Week 1 win over Alabama, completely stifling the Tide’s ground game to the tune of only 87 yards on 29 carries.
But was all of that a mirage?
Alabama’s rushing attack hasn’t improved by leaps and bounds in the weeks since, and last week’s FSU loss to Virginia can be traced back, in many ways, to a failure to stifle the Cavaliers’ ground game.
“They made plays throughout, and they were able to do a good job in the run game against us,” coach Mike Norvell said after his team coughed up 211 yards and four touchdowns on the ground. “Virginia did a good job of staying multiple in what they did with a lot of different run schemes. They’re a good offense. We have to do better. They were able to create some seams. There were times when we weren’t all on the same page from where we needed to be, and they exposed that.”
Miami’s ground game can be every bit as dynamic but unlike the Hoos, who were down several of their top O-linemen — seven of their top 10 were injured or out for the game — the Hurricanes feature arguably the best offensive line in the country.
Still, for all of FSU’s struggles in containing Virginia, the Seminoles actually ran for more yardage than the Cavaliers. So stopping Miami is a necessity, but the Canes will be faced with a similar task. The team that slows the ground attack better is likely to be the one on the winning side Saturday. — David Hale
What do Vanderbilt and Alabama need to capitalize on?
1:42
Vandy’s Clark Lea looks to replicate last year’s success vs. Bama
Lea looks to make the game about the No. 16 Commodores, focusing on eliminating the crowd as he highlights the No. 10 Crimson Tide’s strengths they need to minimalize.
Vanderbilt: The Commodores aren’t going to surprise anyone this season, especially the Crimson Tide. Last year, Vanderbilt beat Alabama for the first time in 40 years with a 40-35 upset of the No. 1 Tide in Nashville.
If the Commodores are going to do it again, they might want to follow the same recipe: convert third downs, control the clock and keep Alabama’s offense off the field. Vanderbilt converted 12 of 18 third-down plays and had the ball for more than 42 minutes in 2024. The Commodores rank No. 2 in the SEC with 223.4 rushing yards per game, and they’ve got three good options to carry the ball in quarterback Diego Pavia and running backs Sedrick Alexander and Makhilyn Young.
Alabama had problems stopping the run in last week’s 24-21 win at Georgia. The Bulldogs averaged 6.9 yards per carry and piled up 227 yards on the ground. But the Crimson Tide defense did a good job of stopping Georgia’s offense when it mattered; the Bulldogs were just 2-for-8 on third down and 0-for-1 on fourth. — Mark Schlabach
Alabama: Aside from getting Kadyn Proctor more involved in the passing game? His catch and bulldozing run against Georgia will certainly make an all-time college football highlight reel, but that play is an example of what is working well now for Alabama.
Over the past three games, the Crimson Tide have been able to keep teams off balance with their offensive play selection — particularly in the passing game. Ty Simpson has grown more comfortable as the season has progressed, and is equally adept at finding his receivers on crossing routes as he is launching deep balls to Ryan Williams and Germie Bernard.
Though Alabama could use more consistency in its run game, the way the Crimson Tide are playing on third down, and the way Simpson is converting those third downs with good decision-making, is a big step forward from Week 1 against Florida State. Vanderbilt, it should be noted, has given up a conference-high nine touchdowns through the air. So, in short, keep throwing the ball. — Adelson
Five freshman who impressed in the first month of the season
Malik Washington, QB, Maryland Terrapins
The 6-foot-5, 231-pound quarterback has thrown for 1,038 yards across a 4-0 start, trailing only Jayden Daniels (Arizona State) for the second-most passing yards by a freshman through four games since 2019. Washington enters Week 6 level with Cal’s Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele for the FBS freshmen passer touchdown lead (eight), and ESPN’s No. 3 dual-threat passer in the 2025 class is also taking good care of the football (two turnovers). Washington accounted for three touchdowns in his Big Ten debut at Wisconsin on Sept. 20, powering the Terps to their first Big Ten road win since Nov. 2023. With its talented freshman under center, Maryland has already matched its win total from a year ago and has a chance to go 5-0 for only the 10th time in program history when the Terps host Washington on Saturday (3:30 p.m. ET, BTN).
Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, QB, California Golden Bears
A late-riser last fall who bounced in, then out and back into the Bears’ 2025 class after signing with Oregon, Sagapolutele has delivered from the jump this fall. He leads freshmen passers with 1,242 passing yards and ranks second among FBS freshmen in completion percentage (59.5%). The left-handed Sagapolutele showed off his arm strength in early-season wins over Oregon State and Minnesota, then flashed maturity and late-game poise at Boston College in Week 5 when he led a nine-play, 88-yard, fourth-quarter scoring drive to complete a comeback win that improved Cal to 4-1. Sagapolutele’s four turnovers are a problem so far, but only five games into his college career, he stands among the sport’s most exciting quarterback talents and has already turned the Bears back into late-night appointment viewing.
Malachi Toney, WR, Miami Hurricanes
After reclassifying from the 2026 cycle, Toney arrived an under-the-radar, three-star recruit in Miami’s 2025 class. But there has been nothing understated about his emergence with the Hurricanes this fall. Through four games, Toney led FBS freshmen with 22 receptions and 268 receiving yards. The speedy, 5-foot-11 receiver announced himself with six catches for 82 yards — headlined by a 28-yard touchdown grab — in the Hurricanes’ Week 1 win over Notre Dame, and Toney enters Week 6 as quarterback Carson Beck‘s most targeted downfield option (28) so far. His next opportunity comes Saturday when Miami hits the road to visit Florida State (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC).
Sidney Stewart, DE, Maryland Terrapins
Two Terps on one list? Indeed. Stewart, a three-star recruit from Joppa, Maryland, has been the most productive freshman pass rusher in the country over the first month of the season. His four sacks through four games lead first-year defenders and leave Stewart tied for fifth nationally. Per ESPN Research, Stewart has created 11 pressures so far; for context, Maryland teammate Zahir Mathis and Syracuse’s Antoine Deslauriers trail behind him in second among freshman defenders in the category with five pressures each. Stewart and an aggressive Terps defensive line could be in line for another productive Saturday in Week 6 facing a Washington offensive line that has given up 12 sacks in 2025, 21st-most nationally.
Dakorien Moore, WR, Oregon Ducks
ESPN’s No. 1 wide receiver in the 2025 class, Moore has been an immediate factor in the Ducks’ passing game and early favorite for Oregon quarterback Dante Moore this fall. No FBS freshman pass catcher has been thrown to more often (29 targets) than the 5-foot-11, 195-pounder from Duncanville, Texas, and he enters Week 6 pacing all first-year skill players with 296 receiving yards. Moore’s most impressive performance was his most recent one, when he led the Ducks in catches (seven) and yards (89) in Oregon’s 30-24 overtime win over Penn State in Week 5. A contributor from day one in 2025, Moore already looks like a difference-maker on a potential national-title contender, and his role in the Ducks’ downfield attack should only grow as the season progresses. — Lederman
Quotes of the Week
“It’s just an absolute coaching failure. I don’t know another way to say it. And I’m not pointing the finger, I’m pointing the thumb. It starts with me, because I hired everybody, and I empower everybody and equip everybody.” — Dabo Swinney on Clemson 1-3 start
“That’s not indicative of who we are. Our student body, our kids, are phenomenal. So don’t indict us just based on a group of young kids that probably was intoxicated and high simultaneously. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that as well, but the truth is going to make you free. But BYU, we love you. We appreciate you and we support you.” — Deion Sanders on Colorado’s fans disparaging BYU.
“The No. 1 thing is, you have to get used to change. You know, your whole life there’s going to be change. So how we handle that, our attitude on how we handle that, will determine how quickly we improve.” — Bobby Petrino, on reorienting Arkansas after taking over as interim head coach.
It’s win-or-go-home Thursday in the MLB wild-card round!
After losing their series openers, the Cleveland Guardians, San Diego Padres and New York Yankees all rebounded with Game 2 wins on Wednesday — setting up a dramatic day with three winner-take-all Game 3s. It’s only the second time in baseball history to host three winner-takes-all playoff games in one day.
Who has the edge with division series berths on the line? We’ve got you covered with pregame lineups, sights and sounds from the ballparks and postgame takeaways as each matchup ends.
Key links: Megapreview | Passan’s take | Bracket | Schedule
Jump to a matchup:
DET-CLE | SD-CHC | BOS-NYY
3 p.m. ET on ESPN
Game 3 starters: Jack Flaherty vs. Slade Cecconi
One thing that will decide Game 3: Perhaps it’s a wide brush, but Detroit’s ability to get the ball in play and convert scoring opportunities into actual runs — or not — is likely to decide Thursday’s game. The Tigers have managed to get quality at-bats early in innings and generate plenty of traffic on the bags, but they’ve been completely unable to turn those scoring chances into runs. Their 15 runners left on base in Game 2 was a record for a franchise whose postseason history dates back to 1907. Over three potential elimination games going back to last year’s ALDS matchup, the Tigers are a combined 3-for-38 (.079) with runners in scoring position. That must change or Detroit will be done. — Bradford Doolittle
Lineups
Tigers
TBD
Guardians
TBD
5 p.m. ET on ABC
Game 3 starters: Yu Darvish vs. Jameson Taillon
One thing that will decide Game 3: Look, this is going to be a battle of the bullpens. Yu Darvish and Jameson Taillon are both going to be on a very quick hook, even if they’re pitching well. But the difference might be which of those starters can get 14 or 15 outs instead of 10 or 11, especially for the Padres given that Adrian Morejon and Mason Miller both pitched in Games 1 and 2 and might have limited availability.
Darvish had a reputation early in his career as someone who couldn’t handle the pressure of a big game, but he has turned that around and has a 2.56 ERA in his six postseason starts with the Padres. Taillon, meanwhile, was terrific down the stretch with the Cubs, with a 1.57 ERA in six starts after coming off the IL in August. This looks like another low-scoring game in which the team that hits a home run will have the edge. — Schoenfield
Lineups
Padres
TBD
Cubs
TBD
8 p.m. ET on ESPN
Game 3 starters: Connelly Early vs. Cam Schlittler
One thing that will decide Game 3: Whether Connelly Early can give the Red Sox some length. Alex Cora’s aggressive decision to pull the plug on Brayan Bello’s start after just 28 pitches in Game 2 led to him using six Red Sox relievers. Garrett Whitlock, Boston’s best reliever not named Aroldis Chapman, threw 48 pitches. Chapman didn’t enter the game but warmed up for the possibility. Left-hander Kyle Harrison, a starter during the regular season, and right-hander Greg Weissert were the only pitchers in Boston’s bullpen not used in the first two games. Early doesn’t need to last seven innings. Harrison, who hasn’t pitched since last Friday, could cover multiple innings. But a quick departure would make the night very difficult for the Red Sox’s bullpen against a potent Yankees lineup. — Jorge Castillo
Lineups
Red Sox
TBD
Yankees
TBD
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