Byron headlines NASCAR’s underappreciated next wave of stars
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — It is time that we start doing a better job of appreciating William Byron. Actually, it is past time for us to get on board the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevy and the affable 26-year-old North Carolinian who wheels it.
He is a freshly minted Daytona 500 champion. His second victory of 2024, on the Circuit of the Americas road course two weeks ago, was the 12th win of his career, marking the third straight season he has won at least two races and his fifth straight campaign with at least one trophy, including last year’s series-best six. He has made NASCAR‘s postseason playoff field in six consecutive seasons, his only miss coming in 2018 when he won the consolation prize of Rookie of the Year, and last fall he made the Championship 4. Oh, and he also won the Xfinity Series title in 2017 … and the year before that set a record for rookie wins in the Truck Series with seven.
That all feels worthy of our collective praise, certainly more praise than it feels like he is currently receiving or has ever received.
But why is recognition of his feats such a rarity?
There are those — like, a lot of those — who will tell you that William Byron is not Jeff Gordon, the original captain of that car and a four-time Cup Series champion. They are also quick to remind us that he’s no Jimmie Johnson, the seven-time champion who was essentially discovered and hired by Gordon. They’ll also say he’s not Chase Elliott, or Kyle Larson, both Cup titlists and both his HMS teammates.
You know who else would tell you all of that? William Byron.
“I know that I am not Jeff Gordon, but when I get that car with his number on the side, I want to do everything I can to do right by Jeff and by the history that number represents,” Byron explained last month, adding that if he ever needed a reminder of all that, it usually comes in the form of a prerace, getting-into-the-car visit from Gordon himself, now the chairman of Hendrick Motorsports. “He likes to joke that there’s no pressure and that it’s not his car anymore … but I also don’t think he’s really joking. There’s still a part of me that can’t believe that conversation is even happening. I mean, it’s Jeff Gordon! I grew up watching him race.”
The first time Byron saw Gordon race in person, it was nearly 20 years ago, at the very racetrack where he will drive Gordon’s old ride this weekend: NASCAR’s oldest racetrack, Martinsville Speedway. It was 2006, and 9-year-old William, who had become obsessed with NASCAR as a toddler, convinced parents Bill (yes, William is a junior, but don’t call him that) and Dana to stay for the entire 500 laps. They watched Gordon and Johnson battle at the front, as they seemingly always did on the half-mile oval, and witnessed Johnson take a huge step toward clinching the first of those seven titles by season’s end.
Not long after, Byron, who grew up in South Charlotte not far from the homes of Johnson and Gordon, rang the doorbell of Johnson’s house on Halloween. He screeched out a “Trick or treat!” and held out his bag for candy.
“Then,” Johnson remembers, laughing, “He told me that one day he was going to be my teammate at Hendrick Motorsports. And he was. For three years. And honestly, it wasn’t very long after he told me that. What, maybe 10 years, tops?”
“Jimmie was my guy, my hero,” Byron recalls, as he has over and over again since February, when Johnson was among the first drivers to visit Daytona 500 Victory Lane to congratulate the kid with the Halloween bag on winning NASCAR’s biggest race. “Literally every Sunday I had his die-cast cars in my room and just dreamed about what it would be like to be in his shoes.”
Byron has not filled those shoes yet, but he’s way ahead of schedule. This, after a career that got started behind the normal driver development schedule, with shoes that were pressing digital pedals in his bedroom instead of those in the floorboard of a stock car.
The man who wears the most current model of Daytona 500 champion’s ring was — and is — a gamer. He was in the late stages of elementary school and the beginnings of middle school when he signed up for iRacing and started assembling a home simulator rig piece by piece. By that age, Gordon, Larson, Elliott and every other racer you’ve heard of (and countless more you will never hear of) had already started logging thousands of laps in competitive karting and quarter midget racing. Even Johnson, whose path was considered atypical, was racing motorcycles by the age of 4.
But Byron was turning laps and winning races while sitting perfectly still, with more than 100 victories over two seasons at the same time he was becoming a teenager, preparing to become a high school student (where he was known as Billy, but don’t call him that, either) and also working toward earning Eagle Scout honors with his local Boy Scout troop.
“We worked hard to make sure that even though he was clearly wanting to become a race car driver, that he still had some sort of balance as just a boy, experiencing a lot of life, not just racing,” Dana Byron said, beaming from the corner of the Daytona International Speedway media center as she watched her son sit down for his post-Daytona 500 news conference in February. “But he knew what he wanted to do, and there was no stopping that. I have joked that all these parents who get mad at their children for playing video games, worried that it’s a waste of time. Well …”
She pointed at the dais, where William was hugging it out with Gordon and explaining how he had somehow held off a field of wrecking race cars to win the Great American Race.
“Sorry, parents, we might have given your child the excuse they needed to keep playing those games.”
There is an entire corner of Hollywood dedicated to this very subject. The dreamer who pretends to be doing the real thing and somehow ends up doing it for real. It’s Mark Wahlberg as Izzy Cole in “Rock Star.” It’s Doug Masters in “Iron Eagle.” It’s the starry-eyed stage-side singers in Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero” and the country crooner in Travis Tritt’s “I’m Gonna Be Somebody.” Last summer, it was “Gran Turismo,” based on the true story of Jann Mardenborough, who went from sim racer to real-life sports car racer, running events across an alphabet soup of series for a total of seven seasons, including three starts in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
With all due respect to Mardenborough, though, or even Izzy Cole of Steel Dragon, none of their fantasy-to-reality accomplishments are even on the same lap with what Byron has accomplished in his still-young through-the-looking glass career.
When he did finally slide into the seat of a stock car, it was in the Legends series, the decades-old boxy roadsters that have been the launching pad of a huge percentage of today’s NASCAR Cup Series starting grid, from Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney to the Busch brothers and Elliott.
“I had no question about his love for racing,” admits his father, Bill, who owns a financial services firm and dabbled in late-model racing years ago. “But it’s an investment of money and time, so I really put it on him to prove why we should do this. He came back with a presentation. A five-page paper. That’s really all you need to know about his work ethic.”
Unlike those Cup champs, when Byron first wheeled one of the 1,300-pound, 130-horsepower Legends machines, he was not good. The perception among his peers was that he was just another rich kid who was in over his head. This was the Eagle Scout/five-page paper kid, though. Every conversation he had with Legends vets, drivers and mechanics was spent furiously scribbling observations into a notebook that he carried with him at all times.
Byron made his first Legends start in late 2012. The next winter he went to an event in Florida, running seven races and wrecking out of five of them.
“The difference between sitting in a sim car and a real car, the visuals are the same, the way the car reacts to mechanical changes, that’s very similar, and it’s obvious that real-life forces and even smells and noise, that’s all different in real life,” Byron illustrates, adding that this applies not only to being in one’s at-home rig but also to Chevrolet’s multimillion-dollar simulator in which he and every other NASCAR driver spend countless hours now. “But the biggest difference is consequence.”
In other words, real walls hurt. Real cars are ruined. There is no reset button.
“Once you learn that, then everything about it is being smart, about picking your spots, knowing when to do things instead of just doing them and seeing what happens,” Byron continues. “You think about all the possibilities before you make a decision, the best that you can in the amount of time you have, which usually isn’t much. But that’s where simulation helps now. Try it in there first, where there is a reset button.”
Thus far, he hasn’t needed a lot of reset buttons in the real world. By any measure, his rise has been stunning.
In his first full year of Legends, he won 33 times. The talk of the spoiled kid out over his skis vanished, thanks to the wining and also as people witnessed his work ethic firsthand. Ignoring talk about Byron’s late start at the ripe old age of 15, he was signed by Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s late-model program, then graduated to race ARCA, K&N and eventually trucks for Kyle Busch. He won that 2017 Xfinity title in dramatic fashion over JR Motorsports teammate Elliott Sadler and was in the No. 24 car the next year. Then came the dozen wins and counting, already more career victories than Blaney, Clint Bowyer, Sterling Marlin and NASCAR Hall of Famers Cotton Owens and just-elected Donnie Allison. He is only a few wins from moving onto the same career wins rung as Ernie Irvan, Curtis Turner, Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne, Harry Gant, Geoff Bodine, Neil Bonnett and, yes, Chase Elliott.
Did we mention he’s doing it while also attending college full time?
“It’s online, so I keep a pretty low profile, but there are times when we are working on a group project and I have to introduce myself,” he says of his continuing education at Liberty University, also one of his sponsors … although he still does have to pay tuition. “But when the question comes up, ‘Well, William, what do you do?’ answering that can be a bit awkward.”
But why? And how do they not already know who he is? It is a confounding anonymity.
It isn’t an issue exclusive to Byron, either. Many of his NASCAR generation continue to express irritation that they are overshadowed by bigger brand-name drivers despite the fact that their numbers are just as impressive — if not more so. See: Christopher Bell, who has made the final four the past two seasons, but still bristles over the fact that he didn’t receive as much as a phone call from the producers of the new Netflix reality show until a bit of a Hail Mary call at the very end of last season.
And, as the world learned via that same series, Byron is not exactly a hair-on-fire party animal. Most viewers’ takeaway was that he loves Legos. However, what could possibly be more relatable than someone who has made their dreams come true, from racing video games to the Harley J. Earl Trophy, while also grinding it out in the Boy Scouts and college? And he certainly is not the first Hendrick driver to be framed up as vanilla, a list that is topped (albeit inaccurately) by his hero, Johnson.
If Byron is being honest — and he has been much more publicly open about this since his Daytona win — the lack of recognition can be frustrating. Right there in that post-500 news conference, it was Byron who described himself as Hendrick Motorsports’ forgotten star, behind Larson, Elliott and all of the HMS legends who came before him.
“I’m always the ‘other guy,’ right?” he says with an eye on the team’s de facto 40th anniversary event this weekend at Martinsville, the place and race where Bodine earned the first of the team’s record 304 Cup Series wins. “That has been hard on me. I have probably let it bother me too much, but it has also been a big motivator for me. I came into this year with a chip on my shoulder because of it. I am a quiet guy. I got a relatively late jump on driving. I don’t come from a long line of racers. But OK, underestimate me. See how that works out.”
Sports
Takeaways from the Panthers’ journey to the Eastern Conference finals, early look at matchup with Rangers
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Kristen Shilton, ESPN NHL reporter
The Florida Panthers waited out the Boston Bruins in their second round Stanley Cup playoff series.
And patience paid off.
The Panthers and Bruins were knotted 1-1 in Game 6 on Friday until defenseman Gustav Forsling broke the stalemate for Florida with just over ninety seconds left in regulation. Boston goalie Jeremy Swayman let out the juiciest of rebounds he’d love to have to back and Forsling made no mistake punching the Panthers ticket to an Eastern Conference final against New York.
Now that should be a high scoring affair.
How the Panthers got there — and what to expect from their series with the Rangers — is here.
Savvy Sergei
Most goaltenders will admit it’s better to stay busy. And in this series against Boston, Sergei Bobrovsky decidedly was not. Boston averaged the fewest shots on goal among remaining playoff teams (25 per game), and there were lengthy stretches where Bobrovsky didn’t have much to do.
It would be easy to dismiss his contributions to Florida’s success by just looking at the numbers then (.896 save percentage, 2.51 goals-against average) but that doesn’t tell the whole Bobrovsky tale.
The Panthers got the timely saves from their veteran. He wasn’t leaky at the wrong time, despite being underworked. Plus, if you take out the Panthers’ 5-1 loss in Game 1, Bobrovsky didn’t allow more than two goals in an outing the rest of the way.
Being dialed in at crucial moments is how goaltenders set themselves apart in the playoffs, and that’s what Bobrovsky did for Florida throughout the second-round run.
0:26
Bobrovsky makes back-to-back saves in heroic fashion
Bobrovsky makes back-to-back saves in heroic fashion
Sergei Bobrovsky makes two consecutive saves in the final minutes of the second period.
Bolstered by balance
The Panthers tapped in with 12 different goal scorers against the Bruins, with all but three of their forwards landing on the scoresheet with at least one. There was no singular scoring star (although Aleksander Barkov came closest to that moniker, by pacing the group with three) and so Boston had its hands full trying to keep all four lines from running through them.
Florida didn’t need it’s top skaters to do all the heavy lifting, and that’s a critical component at playoff time. Bruins netminder Jeremy Swayman was terrific again in this series against a Panthers’ group firing the second-most shots on net among remaining playoff teams (36.5 per game), and that’s a difficult ask for any goalie to stand up to when they’re not offering the sort of goal support Florida does. That’s a major reason why the Panthers are moving on — and Boston’s headed home for the season.
No sleeping on special teams
It’s the great equalizer, right? Generally, the team who wins that special teams battle comes out on top in a series.
Florida was the unequivocal victor there against Boston.
The Panthers ripped in six power-play goals — and one shorthanded score — while the Bruins managed a single goal on the man advantage. The difference that makes in undeniable in the final outcome for both sides. Florida won by larger margins in this series — including two games by four goals or more — than they did against the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round — where only two wins were by two goals or more — but the Lightning matched them on special teams.
When the Bruins fell down in that area, the Panthers pounced all the way to a series win.
Postseason poise
There’s something to be said for owning the moment. Florida did just that.
The blowout in Game 1 could have rattled the Panthers and set an ominous tone for the series ahead. Instead, it seemed to settle them down. There’s confidence that comes from overcoming early obstacles, and any challenges the Panthers faced from there were met with composure.
Florida wasn’t ruined without Sam Bennett in Game 1 and 2, while the Bruins fared worse without Brad Marchand in Game 4 and 5. The Panthers could stay on course when Boston was up 1-0 after the first period in Game 4 and eventually chipped their way back to victory. Yes, there was a controversial goalie interference sequence that factored into Florida’s win, but the call was out of their control.
The Panthers focused on what they could do to succeed, and it paid off with a consecutive Eastern Conference finals bid.
How the Panthers match up with the New York Rangers
A conference finals matchup between the Rangers and Panthers could break records for playoff goal scoring.
No, seriously.
Florida and New York are the third and fourth top offenses in the entire playoff field, averaging 3.70 and 3.50 goals per game respectively. Their power plays are excellent (31.4% for New York and 23.7% for Florida) and the Panthers are second in shots on net (34.0 per game) which would only add to the potential firepower these two teams could generate on one sheet.
Matthew Tkachuk (four goals and 13 points in the postseason), Barkov (five goals and 13 points), and Carter Verhaeghe (six goals and 10 points) would give the Rangers’ elite a run for their money trading chances though, especially if the rush game opens up.
New York’s defense would have to improve over its second-round performance to keep them from running wild. However, the back-and-forth that could come out of this series would highlight what made both Florida and New York so entertaining in their second-round series respectively (although the Rangers stumbled a bit towards the end attempting to close Carolina out).
Another interesting aspect of a Rangers-Panthers series is, of course, in the crease. Sergei Bobrovksy’s numbers (.896 SV%, 2.51 GAA) aren’t exactly on par with Igor Shesterkin‘s (.923 SV%, 2.40). But Bobrovsky wasn’t tested often by Boston and that, as mentioned above, can affect how a goalie performs.
Regardless, Bobrovsky was terrific when he had to be. Shesterkin has been that and more for the Rangers throughout the playoffs. New York’s bread and butter though has been its attack up front plus excellent netminding, and a series against Florida would give them the opportunity to lean on both.
Sports
‘This fan base is going to fall in love with him’: How Luis Arráez is following in Tony Gwynn’s footsteps
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
Comparisons to Tony Gwynn began to follow Luis Arráez when he first established himself in the big leagues, growing more prevalent as the hits piled up and the batting titles followed. Arráez wasn’t as prolific, but his skills and the way he utilized them — consistently spraying baseballs to unoccupied spaces all over the field, barreling pitches regardless of how or where they were thrown — made links to one of history’s most gifted hitters seem inevitable.
Tony Gwynn Jr., the late Hall of Famer’s son, often heard them and largely understood them. But it wasn’t until the night of May 4, while watching Arráez compile four hits in his debut with the same San Diego Padres team his father starred for, that he actually felt them.
“I honestly had goosebumps watching him put together at-bats,” said Gwynn Jr., a retired major league outfielder who serves as an analyst for the Padres’ radio broadcasts. “It took me back to watching film with my dad as he was basically doing the same thing.”
Gwynn was universally celebrated throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but Arráez stands as a polarizing figure in the slug-obsessed, launch-angle-consumed era in which he plays. Some, like the Miami Marlins team that traded him away earlier this month, see a one-dimensional player who doesn’t provide enough speed, power or defensive acumen to build around. Others, like the Padres, who used four prospects to acquire him at a time when trades rarely happen, see the type of offensive mastery that more than makes up for it.
What’s inarguable is that Arráez is the ultimate outlier.
Case in point: The publicly available bat-speed metrics recently unveiled by Statcast feature a graph that places hitters based on their relationship between average bat speed (X-axis) and squared-up rate (Y-axis). All alone on the top left corner, far removed from the other 217 qualified hitters, is Arráez. He has the slowest swing in the sport but also its most efficient, theoretically, because he meets pitches with the sweet spot of his bat more often than anybody else.
Arráez has only 24 home runs in 2,165 career at-bats. But his .324 batting average since his 2019 debut leads the majors, 10 points higher than that of Freddie Freeman, the runner-up. He walks at a below-average clip, but his major league-leading 7.5% strikeout rate is about a third of the MLB average during that stretch, cartoonish in the most strikeout-prone era in baseball history.
He is elite even when he chases: The major league average on pitches outside the rulebook strike zone since the start of the 2023 season is .162. Arráez’s: .297.
“Now with the analytics they focus on home runs, they focus on guys hitting the ball hard but hitting .200,” Arráez said in Spanish. “But in my mind, and with all the work that I do, I stay focused on just doing my job — not try to do too much or try to do what they’re telling me to do. Analysts say my exit velocity is [among] the lowest in the big leagues. Amen. Let them keep saying that. As long as I have my health, I keep doing things to help my team, I’m going to be fine.”
Arráez became the first player to win a batting title in the American and National leagues in consecutive seasons last year. But trade rumors surrounded him from the onset of 2024, his second-to-last season before free agency. As a 27-year-old two-time All-Star with a .324 career batting average, a sterling reputation and a stated desire to remain in South Florida, he was a player the directionless Marlins franchise could build around. But a new front office considered him expendable. A 9-24 start to the season created an opening. And on May 3, five minutes before the first pitch was thrown in Oakland, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker called Arráez into his office.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Arráez said, “I wasn’t ready to be traded.”
Schumaker told Arráez he’d have to remove him from the lineup because a deal with the Padres was close. He gave him the option of returning to the clubhouse or going into the dugout for one final moment with his teammates. Arráez stayed until the fifth inning, retreated to his hotel room, waited on a call from Padres officials and hopped on a flight at noon the following day to meet his new team.
Arráez didn’t have enough clothes for the additional six days of the Padres’ road trip. He wore his Marlins-colored cleats through stops in Phoenix and Chicago and compiled eight hits in 20 at-bats during that stretch. After the team got back to San Diego, he used the May 9 off day to search for an apartment and spend time with his mom, wife and three daughters, who flew in for a weekend visit, then delivered a walk-off single against the rival Los Angeles Dodgers in his home debut the following night. He’s still living out of a hotel room crammed with unopened boxes, but he already feels wanted. Embraced, even.
“They’ve welcomed me here with open arms,” Arráez said. “I feel as if I’ve been here since spring training.”
Arráez was a 4-year-old in Venezuela when Gwynn played the final season of his 20-year career in 2001. When Gwynn died in 2014, Arráez was still a teenager on the Minnesota Twins‘ Dominican Summer League team. Hearing comparisons to Gwynn made him curious enough to find old clips of a player who was mostly foreign to him. He began to study his approach to hitting, marveling specifically at Gwynn’s ability to let pitches travel deep into the strike zone before driving them to the opposite field.
Conversations with one of Gwynn’s most important mentors, Twins icon and gifted batsman Rod Carew, brought Arráez more insight. Now similar conversations are taking place with Gwynn’s only son. When the Padres return from their seven-game road trip through Atlanta and Cincinnati, Arráez plans to visit the Gwynn statue that sits just outside of Petco Park. He isn’t necessarily leaning into the comparisons, but he isn’t running from them, either.
“It’s such a great experience when fans embrace you with open arms and tell you that I’m a mini Tony Gwynn, and that I have a lot of traits that remind them of him,” Arráez said. “It’s nice to hear people say things like that.”
Perhaps the quality Gwynn and Arráez share most is self-awareness. “Know thyself” is a line Gwynn Jr. heard his father say repeatedly growing up, one that translated directly to how he approached his profession: He knew his strengths, worked relentlessly to maximize them and never tried to emulate others. Arráez’s new teammates already see the same in him.
“It’s not like he goes up there and just does it,” Padres third baseman Manny Machado said. “He puts a lot of work in the cage, before games, even before BP and stuff like that. He knows his strength, and he works on it.”
Baseball’s evolution has made it harder than ever for someone like Arráez to exist. Pitchers have never thrown harder, data has never been more prevalent, batting averages have hardly ever been lower. But Padres manager Mike Shildt is adamant that Arráez shouldn’t be an anomaly.
He recalled an old San Diego Union-Tribune article that re-ran May 9, on what would have been Gwynn’s 64th birthday. It detailed the amount of time Gwynn spent working on hitting, and it validated something Shildt had long believed: That more players could hit .300, even today, if they worked on the craft of doing so as diligently and as pointedly as Gwynn did. As Arráez does.
“When you have an ability to hit a ball to all the different areas, you’re going to hit,” Shildt said. “And big picture, our industry hasn’t taught that anymore. It’s not valued anymore. It’s not monetized anymore. You can’t quantify this, but it’s a shame how many amateur and lower-level professional players have been excluded from continuing to play because they don’t meet a measurable. They don’t meet an exit velocity or bat speed or launch angle, or all of those things that this game is now basically recruiting and monetizing blindly. They’re just getting hits. And somehow that became out of vogue in our industry in general.”
But those are now someone else’s problems. The Padres will gladly take Arráez, all he his and all he isn’t, and slot him ahead of Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Xander Bogaerts in hopes of riding his singular bat to the playoffs.
Arráez is still six batting titles away from catching Gwynn. He isn’t anywhere near as good a defender or as lethal a baserunner as Gwynn was early in his career, and he needs another decade-plus of similar production — heightened production, actually, given the .345 batting average Gwynn boasted between his ages 27 and 37 seasons — to even approach him as a hitter. But Arráez’s style is the closest we’ve got.
And if there’s one place that can appreciate it, it’s his new one.
“This fan base is going to fall in love with him,” Gwynn Jr. said. “It’s how a lot of them grew up watching baseball.”
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