NASA, college football and the UCF-Houston battle for the skies
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Dave Wilson
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Dave Wilson
ESPN Staff Writer
- Dave Wilson is an editor for ESPN.com since 2010. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.
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Ryan McGee
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Ryan McGee
ESPN Senior Writer
- Senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com
- 2-time Sports Emmy winner
- 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year
ON A WARM September night last year, after a 27-10 UCF win over Georgia Tech, the crowd hung around to see something that only happens at the Bounce House.
Shortly after the game ended, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center, about 35 miles due east from campus in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at NASA’s Launch Complex 39A.
Fans in the stadium got a perfect view of the launch because, by design, UCF’s 50-yard-line sits on the same latitude as the launch pad. As Elton John’s “Rocket Man” played over the stadium speakers, the video board showed a close-up of the spacecraft as it left the Earth’s atmosphere, with fans cheering along. Just another day at SpaceU.
UCF is all-in on space. Founded in 1963 as Florida Technological University with the motto “Reach For The Stars,” it opened in 1968 with an emphasis on providing talent for America’s ambitious space program. Now, with UCF grads making up about 30% of all Kennedy Space Center employees, the university is proudly touting its space connections.
To celebrate that legacy, the football team has played a wildly popular “Space Game” every year since 2017, featuring alternate uniforms with their own distinct color — called Canaveral Blue to reflect the coastal skies and water — and a small nod to the school’s original mascot, the Citronaut, a Florida orange wearing a space suit. It’s one of the coolest modern traditions in college football.
But it did raise the eyebrows of a new conference foe.
“Some blue unis … Some Space City thing,” Houston coach Dana Holgorsen said last week during his radio show. “I thought we were Space City.”
Houston, which is playing its first season in the Big 12 alongside UCF, represents a city that has long taken pride in its role as NASA’s nerve center at Johnson Space Center. Around the same time that UCF was being constructed, Houston was building the Astrodome, home to the Astros and another newfangled invention, Astroturf. (The Houston Rockets were actually named while the franchise was based in San Diego, oddly enough.)
So you’ll forgive Holgorsen if he needs to be educated when he’s told that UCF’s claim as a space hub is due to its proximity to NASA’s Launch Control Center, when Houston is home to Mission Control, the site of one of the most famous lines in the history of the space race.
“They don’t say ‘Orlando, we’ve got a problem,'” Holgorsen said.
With the upcoming departures of Texas and Oklahoma, two of the most storied teams in college football, the Big 12 is desperately in need of some new squabbles. Arizona and Arizona State will arrive next year with the Territorial Cup on the line. BYU, a new addition this year, will reunite with Utah next year in a rivalry that’s been played 101 times.
But while UCF and Houston might not ever become a heated rivalry due to their geographic separation on Earth, there’s a whole other frontier in the heavens. There is real school pride at stake. UCF fans are still rolling their eyes over the short-lived so-called “Civil ConFLiCT” that was forced upon them by UConn and essentially ended when the trophy went missing after two games.
While Houston and UCF have played each other 10 times, none before 2005, this one means something due to their connective tissue with the space program, not to mention they’re now conference opponents.
“We’re embracing it now,” UCF coach Gus Malzahn said earlier this year. “Every one of our roads on campus is named after a galaxy. The first month I got the job, I actually spoke to NASA on leadership and they had me Zoomed in to both groups [in Florida and Texas].”
And the eye in the sky is watching them as well.
“NASA has Space Act agreements with both schools,” said Wayne Saxer, the agency’s lead for sports engagement. “We work collaboratively with universities nationwide that bring innovative solutions and fresh perspectives to some of our biggest challenges.”
To celebrate both schools’ roles supporting America’s space agency, NASA flew a newly minted medallion featuring the logos of each school on opposing sides on CRS-29, a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station a couple of months ago.
Launched from Florida, guided by Houston, the medallion will come back to Earth, where it will be framed and presented to the winning team.
Welcome to the Space Wars.
THE TENSION BETWEEN the folks in Houston and Orlando nearly predates the cities themselves. It reaches back almost a century before the United States entered space with the launch of the Explorer I satellite on February 1, 1958, from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 26.
In 1865, Jules Verne published “From the Earth to the Moon”, a tale of post-Civil War Americans who construct a spacecraft and launching device to fling a trio of travelers off this mortal coil and toward our nearest celestial neighbor. The French novelist was renowned for his imagination, but also for the research that kept his stories rooted in fact. He always included just the right amount of actual science to make his fantastical fiction seem plausible.
The book’s 10th chapter is titled “Florida and Texas.” Why? Because Verne predicted that the best location for a launch site would be between the equator and the 28th parallel, keeping it best in line with the Moon’s orbital path. Plus, the launch site would need to be built alongside a large body of water, so that debris wouldn’t fall into populated areas in the case of an accident.
With all that in mind, Verne writes about sparring would-be locations in Galveston Bay and “Tampa Town,” complete with lobbying of the government to land the launch pad, protests and rallies in the streets and barbs publicly traded between the two states.
Verne imagined Florida newspapers writing of Texas: “A fine bay; half-choked with sand!” And Texas responding: “Choked yourselves!”
Everything Verne wrote from his home in northern France became a reality nearly 100 years later and 5,000 miles away. NASA was founded after that Explorer I launch and established its primary launch location at the Cape, where the first version of Mission Control was housed in bunkers around the spaceport.
“It was basically a bunch of monitors and microphones in a pillbox,” John Glenn, an original seven Mercury astronaut-turned-U.S. Senator, recalled in 2014. “When we were assigned to CapCom, to talk to our colleague inside the spacecraft, to be in there at the Cape and feel those rockets going up right there and then in front of you, it was remarkable on every level. But it was cramped for space. And yes, I realize the irony of using that word just now.”
On Sept. 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy doubled down on a challenge that he had first pitched to a joint session of Congress one year earlier, that an American should set foot on the Moon before decade’s end. He said those words — in Houston — while standing on the field at Rice Stadium, famously adding: “But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Once Kennedy announced his moonshot, a literal overnight fight began regarding the location of NASA’s new HQ, the spot for Mission Control. Those already living in Florida believed it should stay there — NASA could simply construct some new buildings — but they found themselves battling dozens of cities for NASA’s favor. Cities from St. Louis to Langley, Virginia, to San Francisco to Shreveport, Louisiana, submitted HQ proposals.
“My favorite was Bogalusa, Louisiana,” says Rick Houston, NASCAR sportswriter-turned-NASA historian and co-author of “Go, Flight! The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control.” “Can you imagine that one? ‘Bogalusa, we’ve have a problem.'”
As part of the region’s push to prove its worthiness, Florida governor Farris Bryant signed into law Senate Bill No. 125, creating a new state university in east central Florida with the goal of supporting the Cape. The school was named Florida Tech, and though it had no sports teams yet, it did have a mascot, a helmet-wearing Jetsons-inspired spaceman with a Florida orange for a body. They called him the Citronaut.
“I love the Citronaut,” confesses Tennessee athletic director Danny White, who served in the same capacity at the school Florida Tech became, UCF, from 2015 to 2021. White, who moved his office into the football stadium where he could watch rocket launches going up from the Cape, greenlit the Citronaut’s return for UCF’s first Space Games in 2018 and ’19. “The instant you see him, you feel like you’re back in the 1960’s Space Age.”
The end result was a punt. Launch operations would remain at the Cape and with it Launch Control at Kennedy Space Center. But that setup didn’t last for long. Beginning with the Gemini 4 flight of June 1965, communication and control shifted to Mission Control, located on the seemingly endless grounds of Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas, directly in between Houston and Jules Verne’s Galveston Bay. What made the shift happen? A lot of, well, space that was handed to NASA for free via a donation by the same school where JFK’s speech is still memorialized on a plaque that hangs in the stadium where JT Daniels will spend his weekend fighting for a sixth win and bowl eligibility against Florida Atlantic.
“I mean, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade here, but if we are talking about space schools, then there’s really one, right?” astronaut Shannon Walker half-joked earlier this year. Walker is a Houston native who has spent 330 days in orbit and holds three degrees from Rice, one of the school’s 13 astronauts. “Go Owls.”
When asked if there is still beef between the Cape and Houston about the decision to move Mission Control west, Rick Houston audibly huffs. “When I was working on my book and interviewing all of the NASA legends, the Florida guys all said the same thing to me. ‘Now, when are you going to write a book about the real Mission Control?'”
HOUSTON, OF COURSE, has a problem with this.
For more than 50 years, the university system has partnered with NASA, including creating a campus in Clear Lake adjacent to Johnson Space Center since its opening in 1961 “to meet a vital demand for trained engineers, physicists and mathematicians to join the U.S. space program,” according to the university.
Last year, Houston chancellor Renu Khator signed an extension with NASA for all the system’s universities to extend a partnership to “advance human spaceflight.”
“Houston is ‘Space City,’ so it’s important for students and faculty in relevant disciplines across the UH system to have opportunities to engage in and be exposed to real-world space flight-related research and technology development with NASA,” Khator said.
Dr. Olga Bannova, formerly an architect in Moscow, is the director of Houston’s Sasakawa Center for Space Architecture, the only master’s level program of its kind in the world.
“It’s obviously about human spaceflight, but also about psychology,” Dr. Bannova said. “It’s about understanding human needs and providing and thinking about the ways how we can make a human life not only sustainable in space, but also really rewarding, you know?”
One of those ways, Bannova says, is to provide “a complementary countermeasure against all these negative effects on the human physiology and psychology that’s associated with microgravity conditions.”
For those of us who don’t speak scientist, basically that means one component is the possibility of sports in space.
Adam Doll, one of Bannova’s graduate students, is already an engineer for NASA in Houston who does astronaut training and when he’s not pondering spacesuit development, is working on his master’s thesis on the idea of collaborative sports in some interstellar habitat. Nothing too rowdy. Think a collaborative rock climbing-type course with an objective to complete it as fast as possible. Not a future Cougars-Knights battle in the cosmos.
“You don’t want the games to get too competitive in space,” Doll said.
But down here, it’s all fair game.
“I don’t even know where UCF is, to be honest. And we have the astronauts in Houston,” Doll said. “That’s a big thing. They live here and train here. They just go out there [to Florida] to launch. I mean, they only use that every once in a while. Mission Control is manned 24/7. We always have people monitoring the space station.”
That would explain why legendary NASA flight director Gene Kranz, who oversaw the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, including the first moon landing (and was portrayed by Ed Harris in “Apollo 13”), said the Florida-Texas grandstanding has evolved over the years.
“That may be a current-day rivalry, but that was not the case back through the programs that I supported,” Kranz, who is 90 and lives near Houston, said. “I think it may have come about once we started putting astronauts as center directors down at the Cape.”
No matter which side you’re on, the Knights are way ahead in embracing the SpaceU moniker. Every single sport at UCF has an alternate SpaceU/Citronauts jersey. And it’s good for business.
“Every year, people want to see when the first game is and then when the Space Game is,” said Jimmy Skiles, one of the senior athletic directors at UCF and the chief branding officer. “It’s become just this whole event in itself. I think we are the only college fan base in the country that is willing to accept an alternate mascot and alternate color and even an alternate name for the university — SpaceU — for a single game.”
It’s evident annually, seeing a split fan base wearing black and gold and another huge section of the stadium wearing blue, such as during the 45-3 upset of Oklahoma State two weeks ago.
“That’s never been one of our colors,” Skiles said. “It’s a color we created as part of our space brand. And yet we had 25,000 people wearing Canaveral Blue.” Skiles said eight of their top 10 best-selling merchandise items each year are all space-related.
The other thing fans love about the Space Game? UCF dominates every time. This year, a 4-5 UCF team that had just one Big 12 win crushed No. 15 OSU, moving to 7-0 all time in Space Games with a 202-point margin of victory. Fans switch from “Go Knights!” to “Go ‘Nauts!” for the annual event. It’s almost enough to start an identity crisis.
can ‘Naut lose
+202 point differential all-time in Space Games pic.twitter.com/MtdLIR5Kk5
— UCF Football (@UCF_Football) November 12, 2023
“Our whole fan base accepts the switch on the Space U/Citronauts thing, but so many people are like, ‘It’s time to rebrand to Citronauts full time,” Skiles said. “And then you have the Knights loyalists that are like, ‘Absolutely not, we are Knights. Our colors are black and gold.'”
Whatever they’re called, Houston isn’t giving up the Space City name, and UCF isn’t giving up the SpaceU name. And UCF is ready for Houston to hold up its end of the bargain in the burgeoning rivalry.
Skiles said in 2019, UCF approached UH to invite them to do their own alternate uniforms for UCFs’ Space Game when the Cougars visited Orlando. He knew he probably didn’t give Houston enough time to go all in, but he thought maybe they’d do a themed helmet, like UCF did with its hand-painted helmets resembling the moon’s dark and light sides, complete with craters.
“That was the 50th year of Apollo mission, the moon landing,” Skiles said. “We thought it’d be a really cool thing to have both of us do something. And it came game week and Houston didn’t do it.”
This time around, Houston is excited about visiting UCF as conference rivals, perhaps with a future trophy on the line.
“It is something we’re tracking on, trust me,” Houston athletic director Chris Pezman said. “It’s logical. It should have happened a long, long time ago. It’s something we’ve been working on for a few years. Now it’s time to get it going.”
Eric DeSalvo, UCF’s associate athletic director for content, remembers when he was a student at the school between 2005 and 2009 and could feel the ground rumble when space shuttles would launch at Canaveral. Seeing rockets launch from his own stadium never gets old, he said.
“It’s like a core memory you’ll always remember, being able to see a launch with thousands of your favorite fans,” DeSalvo said. “This season opener, we’re beating Kent State and right as the clock expired a [SpaceX] launch was going up. It’s so cool. It’s not every day you get to see that.”
So inside the building at UCF, they were excited to hear Holgorsen’s dig. It felt like liftoff for the two teams’ future in their own space race.
“Dana, where’s this been the whole time?” said Eric DeSalvo, UCF’s associate athletic director for content. “Why’d you wait until last week for that comment? We needed this.”
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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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