DODGERS PITCHERTyler Glasnow, who stands 6-foot-8, 225 pounds, can do a standing backflip.
“It’s no big deal, really,” he said. (Yes, it is. There aren’t many people that big and tall who can do a backflip.)
“Oh, I’m sure there are a lot of people bigger than me that can,” he said. (No, there aren’t.)
Glasnow, 30, is a new member of the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ rotation, acquired from the Tampa Bay Rays in a trade in December and immediately signed to a five-year, $136 million extension. His stuff is as overpowering and violent as anyone’s in the game, in part because of his remarkable athleticism: a breathtaking combination of size, speed, strength, agility, mobility and balance, all of which has drawn comparisons to Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps — and a giraffe.
“He is the most physically gifted athlete I have ever seen in my life,” said Rays closer Pete Fairbanks, an ex-teammate. “He is more flexible than anyone I’ve ever seen. His movements are cleaner than anyone I’ve ever seen. He is unbelievable. I don’t think there is athletic activity that he can’t do.”
Besides a backflip, Glasnow can walk on his hands. He won a silver medal in the Junior Olympics in the high jump. He was an excellent basketball player (“I’m tall,” he said). He loved roller hockey and was a wizard on a skateboard. He ran track, did the shot put and played football for one year in high school. He lifted a huge amount of weight, and says, “if I’m on the side of a squat rack, I can go parallel to the ground, but I don’t know if that is unusual.”
It is.
“We call that a flagpole,” said Dodgers pitcher J.P. Feyereisen. “He was doing that in the weight room today. I’m not sure how many guys could do that. He’s 6-8, and he can do it.”
Yet with this amazing array of skills and athleticism, Glasnow hasn’t been able to stay healthy. He has never completed a game in his major league career; he has never pitched enough innings in a season (162) to qualify for the ERA title. He had Tommy John surgery in 2021, an injury he said had affected him for even longer.
But he has averaged 11.5 strikeouts per nine innings and only 7.3 hits. His stuff is hellacious. His curveball is one of the best in the game; it’s unhittable when paired with his 98 mph fastball. Beginning Wednesday, when Glasnow takes the mound in Seoul, South Korea, for the Dodgers’ Opening Day game against the San Diego Padres, the Dodgers are hoping to harness that athletic ability and spectacular stuff.
“I feel amazing now,” he said. “I figured out the elbow thing. I’ve had that since 2019. Now that that’s ironed out. I feel the healthiest I’ve ever felt. Now after meeting all the coaches and the training staff [with the Dodgers], I’m really excited about the future. Everything is so buttoned-up here, I will be able to put my body in the best position to succeed.”
“When it comes to ability, no one is better than Tyler,” former teammate Brad Miller said. “I think his relationship with the Dodgers is a match made in heaven. That $130 million extension is going to be like pennies on the dollar for what he will do for the Dodgers.”
THE ART OF pitching has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, as athletic trainers and performance experts have found new ways to improve body function with all-new exercises — and yet it all feels familiar to Glasnow.
“I look at videos doing gymnastics when I was 5, and the fundamentals and warmups I was doing then are what baseball players are being taught today,” Glasnow said. “It’s crazy. Walking on your hands, the high jump, backbends. I already have a baseline for all this.”
“Whatever he did as a kid from ages 5 to 12, I need to write it down and have my son do it, because that’s how you build an athlete,” Fairbanks said. “He’s the perfect blend of genetics.”
Glasnow’s mom, Donna, is 5-9, a retired gymnast who now coaches gymnastics at Cal State Northridge; his dad, Greg, 6-2, is a swimmer and a water polo player.
“She chose to be a gymnast, but if she had chosen another sport, she probably would have been great at it,” Glasnow said of his mom. “She’s almost 70 years old. But she’s in insanely good shape. I remember growing up, she was always doing handstands and cartwheels around the house, all this crazy stuff. She put us [Glasnow and his brother, Ted] in gymnastics when we were little. She was always trying to get us to do as many athletic things as possible. I look at the gymnastics things we did as kids. It was insane. It was like, ‘Whoa, we were 5!'”
Ted was a decathlete at Notre Dame.
“He is 6-1, 6-2, he is ginormously strong,” Glasnow said. “He is the most shredded human in our family. When he was competing, it was insane how big he was. I got the height. He got the strength. I could lift a lot of weight, I was obsessed by it, but he was stronger.”
Said Yarbrough: “I asked Tyler once what he would have done if he hadn’t been a baseball player. He said nonchalantly, ‘Well, my brother does the decathlon. I guess I’d do that.'”
As a kid, Glasnow loved being on the trampoline, doing flips, which taught him the sensation of being in space while still maintaining control of his body. That led to his first backflip.
“I was 19 years old, I was at the ocean in Mexico,” he said. “I had never thought about doing a backflip in gymnastics. But I was there, on the sand, and I thought, ‘I think I can do this.’ So I did it in the sand. I just thought to myself, ‘Well, I guess I can do a backflip.'”
“He just said to me, ‘Do you want to see it?'” Yarbrough said. “And he just did it on a dime.”
“I call him the Giraffe,” said Texas Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, a former teammate in Tampa. “Giraffes have long limbs, long levers, but can really move. People think giraffes are bumbling animals, but they can run. When I was with the Rays, Tyler used to beg to pinch run if we were in a long game. He’d say, ‘Please let me run. I promise I can score from first on a double. My sprint speed would measure really high on Statcast!'”
“Everyone talks about how [5-10 Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu] Yamamoto can contort his body and bend his back all the way,” said Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers president of baseball operations. “But Tyler can do that even better.”
Glasnow knows his body well, what it can do.
“The biggest difference with the athleticism is [considering] my height, how I’m able to get down the mound differently than most,” Glasnow said. “And because I do a lot of the mobility stuff, I think I can stay stable in places where some people would find it harder to balance. I think I have good single-leg stability. I am pretty explosive. I can push off hard, and … I can get the ball out a lot harder than most people. It’s all about stability, where you are in space, finding yourself, kind of like eyes-closed balance. When pitching, I get so extended in my back, like the high jump. My mom would always have us doing handstand walks, single-arm stability stuff. Doing all that at such young age, it has helped my body and my brain on the mound.”
GLASNOW’S HEIGHT CAME from his mother’s side; she has a brother who is 6-9. In Glasnow’s case, it happened suddenly. He was 5-8 as a high school freshman in Santa Clarita, California.
“Then my junior year, over a winter break, in like five weeks, I grew like four inches,” he said. “When I got back to school at winter break, people were like, ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Crazy. I remember leaving and coming back and people were like ‘What!?'”
Glasnow graduated high school at 6-6, meaning he grew almost a foot in only four years. Normally, when someone grows that quickly, it is difficult for the body to catch up, to remain coordinated. Not Glasnow. The increased size only added to his pitching acumen.
“I’ve always been really athletic,” he said. “I was always comfortable picking up any new sport. As far as baseball specifics go, having athletic parents, growing up in the place that I grew up, it’s such a great baseball culture there. Santa Clarita was all about baseball. I played all year round, And I had some really good coaches. Baseball was always my best sport.”
His idol was Randy Johnson, who was 6-10, “and he had trouble throwing strikes, too,” said Glasnow, who struggled with his own command. “But I never really nerded out on baseball too much when I was a kid. I was such a rambunctious human, I couldn’t just sit and watch a baseball game.”
Even then, though, his stuff was elite. He was drafted in 2011 by the Pittsburgh Pirates and spent several years after his 2016 debut yo-yoing between the majors and Triple-A and the bullpen and the rotation. After being traded to the Rays midseason in 2018, he became a full-time starter until he had Tommy John surgery in August 2021.
“The first time I saw him throw in person [in 2018], he was in an empty stadium, in the bullpen just getting some work in, no one in the box, and he was casually throwing 97-98 mph, the ball was just exploding, and the look on his face was, ‘I can’t help it,'” said Adam Kolarek, an ex-teammate in Tampa. “It looked like Michael Jordan shrugging his shoulders [after making another 3-pointer] as if to say, ‘I don’t know how I do it.’ It’s not cocky. Tyler just can’t help it.”
“I faced him last spring in a simulated game,” said former Rays teammate Brandon Lowe. “I swung at a curveball that bounced before the plate. I thought it was a fastball. That has never happened to me before. It is almost impossible to mistake a fastball for a curveball.”
“He is a beast,” Miller said. “He is so long, but he is not lanky. [Jacob] deGrom has these amazing levers in his body. Tyler has the same ones, and he’s 40 pounds bigger. The dude just hands the ball to the catcher.”
So, is there anything Glasnow can’t do?
“I suck at golf,” he said. “Awful. Terrible. I chunk it. I have the all-or-nothing mentality. I hit it really far, but it slices farther than it goes straight. I’ll lose like 15 balls in a round. I suck.”
Finally, we found the one thing Tyler Glasnow can’t do.
Landeskog, who returned in Game 3 of this Western Conference first-round series after missing nearly three seasons while recovering from a knee injury, scored his first goal since June 20, 2022, in a multi-point performance that saw the Avalanche tie the series at 2-2 in Game 4 at Ball Arena. Game 5 is Monday in Dallas.
“It means a lot,” Landeskog told reporters after the win. “Obviously, I’ve envisioned scoring again for a long time. There obviously days when I didn’t know if I was ever going to score again. It obviously feels good. It’s a tight playoff series in a big game here at home. To get to do it here at home in front of our fans obviously means a means a lot. Super exciting. Hopefully more to come.”
A short-handed goal from Logan O’Connor midway through the first period followed by a late power-play goal from Nathan MacKinnon staked the Avalanche to a 2-0 lead entering the second period.
That set the stage for Landeskog, who was in the slot when Brock Nelson fed a pass that the 32-year-old winger launched for a one-timer that beat Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger for a 3-0 lead.
Landeskog, who was playing on the second line, was instantly mobbed by his teammates on the nice such as Samuel Girard, Valeri Nichushkin, Devon Toews and Nelson, who joined the Avalanche at the NHL trade deadline.
As Landeskog returned to the bench, he was congratulated by the entire team which also included a hug from a smiling MacKinnon, who along with Landeskog, have been with the franchise for more than a decade.
“I was just proud of him again,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar told reporters after the game. “I was proud of him regardless of if he scores or not because I know what he’s gone through, and I know how difficult that was. I think that takes it to another level. You know he wants to come back and contribute like he did in the past and he’s off to a great start.”
Landeskog’s goal was the latest milestone in what’s been a lengthy recovery from a chronically injured right knee. He missed what amounted to 1,032 days since his last NHL game.
In that time, the Avalanche have remained in a championship window but have dramatically altered their roster. The Avs have nine players from that championship team who have remained with the franchise and have since reshuffled a roster that led to them re-acquiring defenseman Erik Johnson, one of Landeskog’s closest friends, in their bid for the fourth title in franchise history.
Even with all the changes, there were still questions about when they could see Landeskog return to the lineup. And if Landeskog did return, what he could look like?
His first professional game in three years came April 11 with the Avalanche’s AHL affiliate where he logged 15 minutes. Landeskog would then score a goal and get an assist in his second and final game.
And much like his AHL stint, all it took was two games for Landeskog to score and have another two-point performance.
While Landeskog’s goal became the most celebrated moment of the evening, what he did to help create the Avalanche’s fourth goal was an example of why he’s so crucial to their title aspirations.
Landeskog played a pass to Nelson who then found a Girard for a shot from the point that gave the Avs a 4-0 lead in the fourth. In the time Landeskog passed the puck, he anchored himself at the net front to gain position on 6-foot-7 Stars defensemen Lian Bichsel to screen goaltender Casey DeSmith, who replaced Oettinger for the third period.
Jockeying with Bichsel, who is six inches taller and 16 pounds heavier, allowed Landeskog to test both his strength and that right knee to gain leverage.
The result? Girard’s shot found space in traffic with Landeskog making it hard for DeSmith to see the puck.
“He’s a big boy,” Landeskog said with a smile. “He’s a big strong guy, a physical player and hard to play against. I was trying to get in front of their goal, and he was trying to get me out of there. It was a good battle.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Brandon Crawford grew up in the Bay Area as a San Francisco Giants fan. He wound up playing 13 seasons for the Giants, helping them win two World Series titles.
San Francisco paid tribute Saturday to a man who played more games at shortstop (1,617) than anyone else in franchise history and won four Gold Gloves and made three All-Star teams.
During Brandon Crawford Celebration Day at Oracle Park, Crawford’s family, friends and former teammates joining him on the field before a game against Texas. He gave a speech to the fans who supported him from 2011-23.
“I played in a few big games throughout my career — postseason games, All-Star Games, a couple of World Series — but I can honestly say I’ve never been more nervous than giving this speech right now,” Crawford said.
Moments after Crawford concluded his nearly eight-minute speech, he threw the ceremonial first pitch to Buster Posey, the longtime Giants catcher and current president of baseball operations.
Crawford spent his early life in Menlo Park before his family moved to the East Bay city of Pleasanton, where he attended Foothill High. He played three seasons at UCLA and the Giants selected him on the fourth round of the 2008 amateur draft.
“It’s such a great story, a guy that grew up here, grew up a Giants fan,” said Rangers manager Bruce Bochy, Crawford’s skipper during the catcher’s first nine seasons with the Giants.
In his first major league game, Crawford hit a grand slam off Milwaukee’s Shaun Marcum in a 5-4 win May 27, 2011. Since the Giants began playing in San Francisco in 1958, Crawford ranks in among the team’s top 10 in hits (1,392, fifth), doubles (290, fifth) and triples (44, third).
“His baseball smarts were through the roof,” said Webb, a teammate for five seasons. “I tried to get as much as I could from him, and I think everyone else did as well.”
Crawford ended his career with St. Louis last season. He is spending this year with his wife Jalynne and their five children at their home in Arizona. Crawford said he could return to the game in the future.
“I may be stepping away from the field,” Crawford told the fans at the end of his speech, “but I’ll always be a Giant.”
It’s safe to say that his performance Saturday night falls squarely into the “all” category.
Suárez became the 19th player in Major League Baseball history to hit four homers in a single game, accomplishing the feat in an 8-7 loss to the Atlanta Braves in 10 innings. The third baseman is the first player in the big leagues to do so since J.D. Martinez — also for the D-backs — in 2017.
“What can I say; obviously, it’s awesome,” Suárez said. “I never thought in my life that I would be able to hit four homers in a game.”
Suárez entered the contest batting .167 with six homers and 15 RBIs. After Saturday’s performance, he has 19 hits, including a league-best 10 homers.
The 33-year-old Suárez hit a solo shot in the second, a two-run homer in the fourth and two more solo homers in the sixth and the ninth to finish with five RBIs.
His fourth homer off Braves closer Raisel Iglesias tied the score at 7 as the home crowd of more than 43,000 at Chase Field roared. D-backs manager Torey Lovullo admitted he “couldn’t believe” Suárez had done it again.
“I thought there’s no way he goes deep. When does that happen?” Lovullo said. “It’s like a fairy tale. When it happened, I just was shaking my head. I couldn’t believe it. He turned around a pretty good pitch.
“It’s one of those magical nights. It’s hard to describe.”
The four baseballs traveled a combined 1,655 feet, with the longest being a 443-foot shot to center for his third homer. The first three homers came off Grant Holmes.
Suárez became the second third baseman with a four-home-run game, joining ex-Philadelphia Phillies great Mike Schmidt (April 17, 1976, at the Chicago Cubs). Suárez previously had two three-HR games — July 30, 2024, with the Diamondbacks, and Sept. 5, 2020, as a member of the Cincinnati Reds.
Overall, there have been more perfect games in MLB history (24) than four-home-run games.
The Braves rallied in the 10th to win after Matt Olson scored on a wild pitch. Arizona became the second team to lose a game in which a player hit four home runs, joining the Braves in 1986, who lost in Bob Horner‘s four-homer game.
“Mixed feelings right now because we didn’t win the game,” Suárez said. “But this is baseball; that’s why this game is so special. I just want to glorify God with this for the game today. It’s a gift, and I don’t take it for granted.”
The Venezuelan-born veteran has hit 286 homers over a 12-year career with the Detroit Tigers, Reds, Seattle Mariners and Diamondbacks.
Information from ESPN Research and The Associated Press was used in this report.