Latest Rockingham revival just might bring NASCAR back for good
-
Ryan McGee
ROCKINGHAM, N.C. — This time around, it feels different. Everyone around Rockingham, North Carolina, says so.
Man, I hope so.
They said it in 2018, when a man nearly no one in Richmond County had heard of bought the dilapidated Rockingham Speedway and promised a resurrection. They said it three years later, when North Carolina government officials set aside $50 million to do much-needed work on the Tar Heel State’s big three racetracks. They said it when $9 million of that cash was used to repave Rockingham. They repeated it one year ago, when NASCAR announced that two of its national series would spend Easter weekend 2025 at The Rock. And this week, the people of Rockingham have gleefully reiterated their hopes that, yes, this time is indeed much, much different, as they have watched the team haulers of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck and Xfinity series roll through their town of 9,000, turn up U.S. Highway 1, and churn northbound through the Carolina Sandhills for a Friday/Saturday doubleheader.
A pair of races held on a 1.017-mile oval that refuses to die, once again emerging from that sand like a mummy wrapped in 200 mph duct tape.
“I was born here, have spent my entire life here, and when the racetrack is empty, something is missing from all of us,” says Bryan Land, a sixth-generation Richmond County native. As a kid, he worked in the kitchen of the Rockingham Speedway infield diner located at the entrance of the garage, feeding scrambled eggs and cheeseburgers to the likes of Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty. As an adult, he serves as county manager for Richmond County, and has found himself back in that same infield. He has been there every night this week, as he was at 8 o’clock on Tuesday night, offering up whatever needs to be done to ensure the racetrack is at its best this weekend. “The excitement we all feel right now is very real. Because that hole we’ve all had, it’s being filled. And yes, it does feel different this time around.”
Like Land, I too was born in Rockingham, in a hospital straight back down that highway in the middle of town, 12 minutes south of the track. Now, it’s just a clinic. But back in the day, I came screaming into the world about two weeks before Cale Yarborough won the American 500. My dad, who’d been a father for all of 13 days, was in the pits at The Rock as a gas can man for Dave Marcis in his No. 30 Lunda Construction Dodge.
I’ve spent decades looking for a pic of my Dad as gas can man for Dave Marcis in the Carolinas, late ’60s/early ’70s. Did a NASCAR Classics YouTube deep dive today and got a screengrab from ’72 Carolina 500 at Rockingham, ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Pretty sure he’s in there. pic.twitter.com/Q59Srp7utL
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) February 25, 2025
I’ll be buried in Rockingham, too. I know exactly where the plot is, in the family cemetery, located about 15 miles west of the track.
My point is that this race weekend and what it might mean is personal.
It’s been personal before, during Rockingham’s other flirtations with renewed racing life. It felt good then, too, but it didn’t feel as it does now. Different. Solid. Supported. Like it’s destined to work this time.
For those who do not know — and based on this timeline, there are likely many — a history lesson.
The Rockingham Speedway was opened in 1965, then known as the North Carolina Motor Speedway. It was built through the efforts of Bill Land, Bryan Land’s grandfather, and Harold Brasington, the same man who 15 years earlier had famously gone full “Field of Dreams” and bulldozed the Darlington Raceway into a patch of South Carolina peanut fields just a short drive south from Rockingham. His efforts in Richmond County resulted in a smaller but similarly quirky oval, one that raced like a short track/superspeedway hybrid.
Over the next four decades, the track that became known as “The Rock” hosted 78 NASCAR Cup Series races. Most of those seasons featured two events per year, one very early, often following the Daytona 500, and the other so late on the calendar that it became the place where championships were clinched by everyone from Earnhardt and Yarborough to Benny Parsons, based in nearby Ellerbe, and Jeff Gordon, who’d turned his very first stock car laps at Rockingham under the tutelage of NASCAR Hall of Famer Buck Baker.
In 2001, Rockingham hosted the first race following the death of Earnhardt, the tiny Eastern North Carolina town descended upon by media members from around the globe, all there to see Steve Park, in a car owned by Earnhardt, earn one of the most emotional NASCAR wins ever witnessed.
But as NASCAR became chic, it began ripping its roots from the ground to go hunting for more money elsewhere. During the racetrack-building boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rockingham ownership changed frequently and it became a bargaining chip in an antitrust lawsuit between shareholders of Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Incorporated (SMI) and NASCAR. In 2003, The Rock’s spring date was moved out west to the California Speedway. One year later, Smith moved the fall race to his still-new show palace, the Texas Motor Speedway.
With the exception of lawn mowers and an occasional movie shoot (“Au revoir, Ricky Bobby …”), Rockingham was silent. The sight of the place jailed in chains and padlocks with no chance for parole was so painful that local residents took to using alternate routes up to Southern Pines just to avoid having to look at it.
I know because I was one of them.
Hope retuned in 2008, when grassroots racer Andy Hillenburg, with backing from local officials, purchased the racetrack when Smith unloaded it at auction, saving it from a slew of salvage and scrap metal companies. For five years, Hillenburg ground it out. He opened up the track as a test facility, even building a Martinsville clone behind the big oval’s backstretch. He brought in ARCA and an alphabet soup of late model series, races won by the fresh-faced likes of Joey Logano and Chase Elliott. Ever heard of them?
In 2012, the Trucks came to town. Kasey Kahne won the first event amid an electric, feel-good atmosphere and large crowd, exacting some Rock revenge after losing the track’s final Cup race in ’04 to Matt Kenseth by a scant .010 seconds, Kahne’s second-ever Cup start.
The following year, Kyle Larson won a second Trucks race. But this time, it felt different in a bad sort of way. Something felt, well, off. The crowd wasn’t nearly as big as ’12. The trash cans were overflowing. Many of the toilets didn’t work. My lasting image of that day is of Hillenburg, only hours before the green flag, in a golf cart, frantically rolling through the parking lots and selling tickets out of his pocket.
Hillenburg is a racer’s racer. He is my friend. I will always be thankful for what he did in Rockingham. But naive business decisions, a short track manager’s mentality, and being crippled by turncoats he’d trusted as friends and business partners left him doomed. By 2013, the place was shuttered again. And, honestly, so were the feelings of hope for the future of The Rock, especially as the years clicked by and that harsh geology of Richmond County literally sandblasted every strip of metal, rubber and wood that it could find.
“It just got so quiet, man,” Land said on Wednesday night. “Anything you’d hear, anything, rumors or truth, you’d hope it was for real.”
Land’s emotion echoes that of everyone I have talked to back home in the past several months, especially during January’s two-day session to shake the place down with the machines that will race there this weekend.
Whenever I have written about the Rockingham Speedway in the past few decades, my fellow natives and family members have taken issue when I dive into the reasons for the rawness of our emotions when it comes to the racetrack. But it also is what it is. When the place was built in the 1960s, Richmond County was booming. Textile mills cranked out cloth night and day from every corner of Rockingham. The town of Hamlet, birthplace of John Coltrane and a pack of NFL players, was an East Coast railroad hub. By the 1980s, all of that was gone, having moved overseas or up the coast.
But the Speedway remained. No matter where in the world a Rockingham resident traveled, when someone asked where we were from and you told them, their immediate response was, “that’s the place with the NASCAR track!”
The Rock wasn’t just a part of our identity. It was our identity. So, when that was stripped away, it felt every bit as devastating as the loss of the mills and the railroad. Only, those left in trickles. This happened via a news release, a sheet of fax paper that might as well have been a wrecking ball.
When Dan Lovenheim bought the place in 2018, he openly questioned what he’d done. Every single time he opened a door or unlocked a building or room, all he found was rust and rot.
“It was probably way worse than anyone realizes, even if they had been there and seen it and thought they knew,” he explained when the track’s race dates were announced by NASCAR one year ago.
Lovenheim made his money by transforming a dead zone of nearby Raleigh into a series of nightclub hot spots. That was a lot of work. He thought.
“Oh, that was nothing compared to what we were looking at here at the racetrack,” he said. “But we tried to be patient and take it all one problem at a time.”
When the state earmarked the money to help revive its racetracks three years later, the headliner quickly became North Wilkesboro Speedway, which had been abandoned by NASCAR and Smith in 1996. Thanks to the work of Dale Earnhardt Jr., iRacing and the kinder, gentler resurrection and promotional wizardry of Smith’s son, Marcus, who took over SMI after his father’s death in 2022, the North Wilkesboro comeback to impossibly host the NASCAR All-Star Race was both fast and fascinating. Same for Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium, which was upfitted by NASCAR for February’s Clash.
While the auto racing world reveled in what was happening at those two North Carolina bullrings, the folks back home at Rockingham were blowing up my phone, all with the same question: If NASCAR can go back there, why the hell can’t they come back here?!
Now, it is. And it is doing so because Lovenheim is doing what others before him did not. He has hired professionals who specialize in racetrack revivals and race publicity and either done what they tell him to do or simply got out of their way.
Illinois-based Track Enterprises is the outfit that upfit the once-seemingly doomed legendary likes of the Milwaukee Mile and the Nashville Fairgrounds. When I talked to Track Enterprises’ Robert Sargent on Tuesday, he was rolling around The Rock with his checklist, everything from affixing signs to suite doors and the final fastening of $1 million worth of SAFER barriers to the walls, to the trimming of the infield grass and painting every flat surface to be found on the 244-acre grounds. Meanwhile, the state of North Carolina has been plastered with Rock billboards. Last month at Martinsville Speedway, Michael McDowell‘s Cup car carried a livery promoting the Rockingham race weekend.
“This is what we do,” Sargent breathlessly explained, saying he’ll sleep plenty after Easter Sunday, but not much before. “We do it because we love racing, but the best part is seeing what it means to the community. Every time I turn around, there’s a new Rockingham resident standing there, asking what they can do to help. That’s how much they care.”
So, Mr. Sargent, how do you respond?
“I’ll take all the help I can get. But I also tell them the best thing they can do for us is to enjoy the race weekend. Take it all in. That’s why we are here.”
By all indications, there are plenty who are taking him up on that offer. Saturday’s Xfinity race is already being touted as a sellout with more than 26,000 tickets purchased (although they’ll find somewhere for you if you show up, trust me) and the promotional push has shifted to Friday afternoon’s Trucks race.
Now the question many are asking, back home and everywhere else for that matter, is where does that push go from here? If this Rockingham comeback weekend takes the checkered flag without any significant issues, could the Cup Series return? For a Clash? For an All-Star Race? Maybe even for a 79th points-paying event? NASCAR executive vice president Ben Kennedy, great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France and the man behind the sanctioning body’s willingness to try so many new and old scheduling ideas in recent seasons, has recently hinted that this weekend might very well be an audition for the old oval on the side of U.S. 1.
It was on April 23, 1965, that Bryan Land’s grandfather and Harold Brasington announced they would host their first NASCAR event later that fall. Almost 60 years to the day, their track will be busy once again.
“It’s hard not to think about the possibilities for the future,” Land said as he was about to head back out once again to check on the track. “But right now I think we all are just excited to see racing at The Rock this weekend. I think everyone is. Because we weren’t sure it was going to happen again. We’ve been here before. But this time …”
It feels different?
“Yes, sir. And that feels good.”
-
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.
-
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.”
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike