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BY ALL MEASURES, Detroit Tigers left-hander Tarik Skubal throws a good slider. Particularly when complementing one of the best fastballs and changeups in the game, the pitch serves as an effective third offering with the velocity and movement profile to stand on its own. There’s just one problem with it, according to the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner.

It’s not the slider he wants.

That version belongs to Clayton Kershaw, the future Hall of Famer whose tight, late-breaking slider has propelled him to the best career ERA of any starting pitcher in more than a century. Skubal reveres Kershaw’s slider, coveting it to the point he will spend entire offseasons fiddling with grips, finger pressure, wrist positioning and every other trick of the trade in hopes that the movement profiles spit out by a Trackman unit mirror Kershaw’s.

They never do.

“I’ve been trying to get Kershaw’s slider for four or five years and I can’t get it. I just can’t get it,” Skubal said. “So it’s frustrating. But at the same time, the beauty of the sport is you’re just one cue away from getting the pitch shape you want or getting the velocity.”

Every spring, dozens of pitchers arrive at camp with new pitches, eager to take the seedling they planted in a pitching lab and hope it blossoms against live hitters as the season beckons. A new pitch can alter the trajectory of a player’s career, turning him into, well, someone like Skubal. New-pitch success stories are now almost a rite of spring training, the upshot of a data-driven pitching world in which players A/B test their capability to replicate the pitches they admire most before bringing them to a game already tipped in their favor.

Pitchers are perhaps the most talented and capable movers in all of sports, aligning their bodies to project a five-ounce ball 60 feet, 6 inches to a box 17 inches wide and around 24 inches tall. Their awareness of where their limbs are in space, their feel for the ball and its seams, their ability to capably manipulate everything such that they can marry velocity, spin and deception — it’s like a chef who finds perfect balance among saltiness, sweetness and spiciness.

The only taste left on Skubal’s palate by his slider is bitterness. It’s not just the Kershaw slider that vexes him, either.

“I’ve been trying to throw a sweeper for three years,” Skubal said, “but I can’t get the ball to sweep.”

Stories like these, of the pitches that don’t work out, are told far less often than the successes that permeate Pitching Ninja’s sizzle reels. These failures are the banes of pitchers’ existence, nemeses that invite fury and frustration.

Skubal’s coaches remind their ace that he’s doing just fine. The 28-year-old was the best pitcher in Major League Baseball in 2024, and so far this season his stuff is grading out even better by pitching metrics. Skubal could spend the rest of his career throwing his current slider and remain among the elite, a true ace in a game with few.

“I’m like, dude, I know. But I’m so f—ing close to getting something really good,” Skubal said. “I’m just waiting for the right grip and the right cue to come through. And I’m going to get it.”

COLLECTING NEW PITCHES isn’t just about having a trick to pull out and impress the rest of the staff or to earn social media notoriety. It’s a requisite for modern success. Gone are the days of the two-pitch starter. The three-pitch starter is an endangered species. Even four pitches are often no longer enough. With rare exceptions, the best starting pitchers in 2025 throw at least five pitches. To understand the proliferation of pitchability, one need only look at the number of pitches thrown by the 10 starters with the lowest ERAs since 2024.

Paul Skenes: 6
Skubal: 5
Hunter Greene: 4
Zack Wheeler: 6
Shota Imanaga: 5
Chris Sale: 4
Michael King: 4
Max Fried: 6
Bryce Miller: 5
Corbin Burnes: 5

It goes far beyond the best pitchers in the sport. Almost every pitcher (Burnes is the outlier) throws four- and two-seam fastballs. Each has at least one pitch that bends, and in some cases multiple. There’s usually a changeup of some variety — and often two, with different grips and movement profiles.

Seth Lugo has taken the process of adding pitches to an unmatched extreme. The Kansas City Royals right-hander estimates he throws 11 different pitches and has three unique sliders. Behind him, the six-pitch club includes Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Spencer Schwellenbach, Nathan Eovaldi and Sonny Gray. Among the five-pitch cohort: Cole Ragans, Framber Valdez, Logan Gilbert, Aaron Nola, Zac Gallen, Mackenzie Gore, Nick Pivetta and Garrett Crochet, who as recently as two years ago threw only a fastball and slider.

But for all of the benefits of adding new options to an arsenal, only the lucky few have done so without feeling defeated by a particular pitch.

Gilbert, a 27-year-old right-handed All-Star for the Seattle Mariners and proud member of the five-pitch club, exemplifies how the mix of pitches in a starter’s repertoire is always evolving, even when it comes to the game’s best. In 2021, his rookie season, Gilbert threw eight different types of pitches: four- and two-seam fastballs, a standard and knuckle curve, a slider, a cutter, a changeup and a splitter. He discarded the splitter, cutter and standard curve in his second season, only to re-add a better version of the splitter in 2023 because nothing exasperated him quite like the changeup has throughout his career.

“That’s why I got rid of it,” Gilbert said during spring training. “Except recently I threw one in catch play and kind of felt good, so … I need to stop”

Unlike pitchers who will add and subtract offerings during the middle of the season, Gilbert believes the winter and six weeks of spring training are the time to lock in pitches for the season ahead. After reintroducing the traditional curve and cutter in 2024, he settled on a more limited arsenal for 2025, leaning heavily on his four-seamer, splitter and slider while feathering in curves and throwing a few two-seamers each game.

“I’m naturally black and white, logical, scientific, and that’s kind of how I create pitches. But that’s offseason work,” Gilbert said. “When you’re on the mound, when you’re in the game, you kind of switch back to be able to [be] the artist, so to speak. I work with [Mariners mental skills coach Adam Bernero] a lot on that. It’s about feel. It’s about letting go. It’s about things that you can’t quantify that kind of sound made up, but that’s what makes me a really good pitcher. Probably other guys, too. It’s not that when you’re out there you’re thinking about how do I throw this sweeper with as much break as possible. That’s behind the scenes. And the good guys, I feel like, can switch back and forth between that.

“You start leaning into this stuff — like the process, not the result — and letting go and getting rid of expectations, and stuff like that actually makes you a better pitcher. It sounds so great, but in practice it’s such a hard thing to do. It’s great until somebody gets a double and it’s even harder, but you have to commit to it beforehand and stay committed to it.”

Sticking with something that can potentially lead to suboptimal results while being perfected is a much less difficult proposition for an established major league star than it is for a young pitcher trying to climb an organizational ladder while optimizing his pitch mix for future performance.

When Minnesota Twins starter Joe Ryan was drafted by Tampa Bay in 2018, he asked a scout what allowed Brendan McKay, the Rays’ first-round pick the year before, to move through the organization so quickly. Simple, Ryan was told: McKay’s fastball was so good that lower-level hitters couldn’t touch it, so McKay just carved up lineups with it. That sounded good to Ryan. Hitters struggled with his deceptive four-seamer, thrown from a relatively low slot and with well-above-average backspin. He threw it about 90% of the time. But the Rays’ farm director at the time, Mitch Lukevics, warned Ryan that he would need a greater repertoire as he ascended in the organization, so in his next start, Ryan threw a curveball that got obliterated for a three-run home run. His High-A pitching coach, Doc Watson, told Ryan he should have a new game plan: “Throw f—ing heaters.”

Ryan kept putting off the curveball as he learned other pitches. He was told he needed a changeup to move to Double-A, and he developed one within 10 days. He picked up a sweeper, ditched it at the behest of the Rays and unleashed it again after he was traded to Minnesota. He scrapped the changeup for a splitter in 2023, and it’s now his second-best pitch. The curveball remains his white whale.

“But I threw one the other day and it was the best curveball I’ve ever thrown,” Ryan said. “I’m like, all right, maybe I can do this. But if you have a sweeper, split, short slider that’s hard, sinker, four-seam — I don’t know where the curve works in the equation as much. If you … can just sit on one pitch the whole time, it’s going to be a really tough game. But if you can go in there and just mix the whole time and you have good s—, it’s going to be a really tough day for them.”

FOR MORE THAN a decade, Kenta Maeda could not throw a split-fingered fastball. Splitters are a trademark for most of the best Japanese pitchers, but when Maeda tried to throw one, it didn’t tumble. To hitters, it looked like a batting-practice fastball.

Maeda sought advice from around the game on how to properly throw a splitter. He asked Hideo Nomo, the godfather of modern Japanese pitching, and Masahiro Tanaka, whose splitter led him to a pair of All-Star Games with the New York Yankees. Maeda never worried too much about his lack of a splitter because his circle changeup was plenty good.

In 2018, his third year with the Los Angeles Dodgers, he lost the feel for his change and started to scramble. Without a change, he needed a split. “It was time for me to maneuver that pitch,” said Maeda, the 36-year-old Detroit Tigers right-hander who almost always has a ball in his hand when he’s sitting on the bench. Most pitchers are tinkerers by trade, fiddling with grips and pressures, trying to find something that’s comfortable. Rather than copy his countrymen, who jam the ball between their index and middle fingers to throw a splitter, Maeda conceived of a splitter with some characteristics from his circle change. He put his index and middle fingers together, splitting the ring finger.

“Then I started playing with that pitch during catch play,” Maeda said, “and here we are.”

Six years later, Maeda still throws the split. It’s the sort of thing that gives Skubal hope. He saw how a new pitch can be an immediate success this winter, when San Francisco Giants left-hander Robbie Ray texted asking Skubal how he gripped his changeup. Skubal sent photos and video to explain the pitch to Ray, a reflection of the pitching fraternity in which trade secrets are shared regularly, even among opponents.

Ray cottoned to the changeup and is throwing it nearly 13% of the time this season, the highest percentage since his rookie season in 2014. Ray’s success with it is a reminder of how difficult learning a new pitch can be, because a far more accomplished pitcher has spent nearly two decades trying to find a change upon which he can rely. For the entirety of his 18-year career, Kershaw has entered spring training in search of a usable changeup, only to throw it a dozen or so times a year. Sometimes a pitch isn’t meant to be.

Skubal isn’t there yet with his slider. Still, he’s a competitor, a perfectionist and a realist, so if he couldn’t land Kershaw’s slider, he figured, maybe an alternative would work. During his interactions with Ray, Skubal asked about his slider, which helped Ray capture the AL Cy Young in 2021.

“He showed me his grip, showed me his cues, everything,” Skubal said. “I tried it. I’m like, dude, it doesn’t work. But it works for him. I love his slider. It’s a really good pitch. It didn’t work out in my favor, worked out in his, but maybe it’ll work again. I’ll revisit it.”

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Remembering Ruffian 50 years after her breakdown at Belmont

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July 6, 2025

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Remembering Ruffian 50 years after her breakdown at Belmont

Thoroughbred racing suffered its most ignominious, industry-deflating moment 50 years ago today with the breakdown of Ruffian, an undefeated filly running against Foolish Pleasure in a highly promoted match race at Belmont Park. Her tragic end on July 6, 1975, was a catastrophe for the sport, and observers say racing has never truly recovered.

Two years earlier, during the rise of second-wave feminism, the nation had been mesmerized by a “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King’s win became a rallying cry for women everywhere. The New York Racing Association, eager to boost daily racing crowds in the mid-1970s, proposed a competition similar to that of King and Riggs. They created a match race between Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure and Ruffian, the undefeated filly who had dominated all 10 of her starts, leading gate to wire.

“In any sport, human or equine, it’s really impossible to say who was the greatest,” said outgoing Jockey Club chairman Stuart Janney III, whose parents, Stuart and Barbara, owned Ruffian. “But I’m always comfortable thinking of Ruffian as being among the four to five greatest horses of all time.”

Ruffian, nearly jet black in color and massive, was the equine version of a Greek goddess. At the age of 2, her girth — the measurement of the strap that secures the saddle — was just over 75 inches. Comparatively, racing legend Secretariat, a male, had a 76-inch girth when he was fully developed at the age of 4.

Her name also added to the aura. “‘Ruffian’ was a little bit of a stretch because it tended to be what you’d name a colt, but it turned out to be an appropriate name,” Janney said.

On May 22, 1974, Ruffian equaled a Belmont Park track record, set by a male, in her debut at age 2, winning by 15 lengths. She set a stakes record later that summer at Saratoga in the Spinaway, the most prestigious race of the year for 2-year-old fillies. The next spring, she blew through races at longer distances, including the three races that made up the so-called Filly Triple Crown.

Some in the media speculated that she had run out of female competition.

Foolish Pleasure had meanwhile ripped through an undefeated 2-year-old season with championship year-end honors. However, after starting his sophomore campaign with a win, he finished third in the Florida Derby. He also had recovered from injuries to his front feet to win the Wood Memorial and then the Kentucky Derby.

Second-place finishes in the Preakness and Belmont Stakes left most observers with the idea that Foolish Pleasure was the best 3-year-old male in the business.

Following the Belmont Stakes, New York officials wanted to test the best filly against the best colt.

The original thought was to include the Preakness winner, Master Derby, in the Great Match Race, but the team of Foolish Pleasure’s owner, trainer and rider didn’t want a three-horse race. Since New York racing had guaranteed $50,000 to the last-place horse, they paid Master Derby’s connections $50,000 not to race. Thus, the stage was set for an equine morality play.

“[Ruffian’s] abilities gave her the advantage in the match race,” Janney said. “If she could do what she did in full fields [by getting the early lead], then it was probably going to be even more effective in a match.”

Several ballyhooed match races in sports history had captured the world’s attention without incident — Seabiscuit vs. Triple Crown winner War Admiral in 1938, Alsab vs. Triple Crown winner Whirlaway in 1942, and Nashua vs. Swaps in 1955. None of those races, though, had the gender divide “it” factor.

The Great Match Race attracted 50,000 live attendees and more than 18 million TV viewers on CBS, comparable to the Grammy Awards and a pair of NFL “Sunday Night Football” games in 2024.

Prominent New York sportswriter Dick Young wrote at the time that, for women, “Ruffian was a way of getting even.”

“I can remember driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, and the lady that took the toll in one of those booths was wearing a button that said, ‘I’m for her,’ meaning Ruffian,” Janney said.

As the day approached, Ruffian’s rider, Jacinto Vasquez, who also was the regular rider of Foolish Pleasure including at the Kentucky Derby, had to choose whom to ride for the match race.

“I had ridden Foolish Pleasure, and I knew what he could do,” Vasquez told ESPN. “But I didn’t think he could beat the filly. He didn’t have the speed or stamina.”

Braulio Baeza, who had ridden Foolish Pleasure to victory in the previous year’s premier 2-year-old race, Hopeful Stakes, was chosen to ride Foolish Pleasure.

“I had ridden Foolish Pleasure and ridden against Ruffian,” Baeza said, with language assistance from his wife, Janice Blake. “I thought Foolish Pleasure was better than Ruffian. She just needed [early race] pressure because no one had ever pressured her.”

The 1⅛ mile race began at the start of the Belmont Park backstretch in the chute. In an ESPN documentary from 2000, Jack Whitaker, who hosted the race telecast for CBS, noted that the atmosphere turned eerie with dark thunderclouds approaching before the race.

Ruffian hit the side of the gate when the doors opened but straightened herself out quickly and assumed the lead. “The whole world, including me, thought that Ruffian was going to run off the screen and add to her legacy,” said longtime New York trainer Gary Contessa, who was a teenager when Ruffian ruled the racing world.

However, about ⅛ of a mile into the race, the force of Ruffian’s mighty strides snapped two bones in her front right leg.

“When she broke her leg, it sounded like a broken stick,” Vasquez said. “She broke her leg between her foot and her ankle. When I pulled up, the bone was shattered above the ankle. She couldn’t use that leg at all.”

It took Ruffian a few moments to realize what had happened to her, so she continued to run. Vasquez eventually hopped off and kept his shoulder leaning against her for support.

“You see it, but you don’t want to believe it,” Janney said.

Baeza had no choice but to have Foolish Pleasure finish the race in what became a macabre paid workout. The TV cameras followed him, but the eyes of everyone at the track were on the filly, who looked frightened as she was taken back to the barn area.

“When Ruffian broke down, time stood still that day,” Contessa said. Yet time was of the essence in an attempt to save her life.

Janney said that Dr. Frank Stinchfield — who was the doctor for the New York Yankees then and was “ahead of his time in fixing people’s bones” — called racing officials to see whether there was anything he could do to help with Ruffian.

New York veterinarian Dr. Manny Gilman managed to sedate Ruffian, performed surgery on her leg and, with Stinchfield’s help, secured her leg in an inflatable cast. When Ruffian woke up in the middle of the night, though, she started fighting and shattered her bones irreparably. Her team had no choice but to euthanize her at approximately 2:20 a.m. on July 7.

“She was going full bore trying to get in front of [Foolish Pleasure] out of the gate,” Baeza said. “She gave everything there. She gave her life.”

Contessa described the time after as a “stilled hush over the world.”

“When we got the word that she had rebroken her leg, the whole world was crying,” Contessa said. “I can’t reproduce the feeling that I had the day after.”

The Janneys soon flew to Maine for the summer, and they received a round of applause when the pilot announced their presence. At the cottage, they were met by thousands of well-wishing letters.

“We all sat there, after dinner every night, and we wrote every one of them back,” Janney said. “It was pretty overwhelming, and that didn’t stop for a long time. I still get letters.”

Equine fatalities have been part of the business since its inception, like the Triple Crown races and Breeders’ Cup. Some have generated headlines by coming in clusters, such as Santa Anita in 2019 and Churchill Downs in 2023. However, breakdowns are not the only factor, and likely not the most influential one, in the gradual decline of horse racing’s popularity in this country.

But the impact from the day of Ruffian’s death, and that moment, has been ongoing for horse racing.

“There are people who witnessed the breakdown and never came back,” Contessa said.

Said Janney: “At about that time, racing started to disappear from the national consciousness. The average person knows about the Kentucky Derby, and that’s about it.”

Equine racing today is a safer sport now than it was 50 years ago. The Equine Injury Database, launched by the Jockey Club in 2008, says the fatality rate nationally in 2024 was just over half of what it was at its launch.

“We finally have protocols that probably should have been in effect far sooner than this,” Contessa said. “But the protocols have made this a safer game.”

Said Vasquez: “There are a lot of nice horses today, but to have a horse like Ruffian, it’s unbelievable. Nobody could compare to Ruffian.”

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Volpe toss hits Judge as sloppy Yanks fall again

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July 6, 2025

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Volpe toss hits Judge as sloppy Yanks fall again

  • Jorge CastilloJul 5, 2025, 09:42 PM ET

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      ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.

NEW YORK — A blunder that typifies the current state of the New York Yankees, who find themselves in the midst of their second six-game losing streak in three weeks, happened in front of 41,401 fans at Citi Field on Saturday, and almost nobody noticed.

The Yankees were jogging off the field after securing the third out of the fourth inning of their 12-6 loss to the Mets when shortstop Anthony Volpe, as is standard for teams across baseball at the end of innings, threw the ball to right fielder Aaron Judge as he crossed into the infield from right field.

Only Judge wasn’t looking, and the ball nailed him in the head, knocking his sunglasses off and leaving a small cut near his right eye. The wound required a bandage to stop the bleeding, but Judge stayed in the game.

“Confusion,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “I didn’t know what happened initially. [It just] felt like something happened. Of course I was a little concerned.”

Avoiding an injury to the best player in baseball was on the Yankees’ very short list of positives in another sloppy, draining defeat to their crosstown rivals. With the loss, the Yankees, who held a three-game lead over the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League East standings entering June 30, find themselves tied with the Tampa Bay Rays for second place three games behind the Blue Jays heading into Sunday’s Subway Series finale.

The nosedive has been fueled by messy defense and a depleted pitching staff that has encountered a wall.

“It’s been a terrible week,” said Boone, who before the game announced starter Clarke Schmidt will likely undergo season-ending Tommy John surgery.

For the second straight day, the Mets capitalized on mistakes and cracked timely home runs. After slugging three homers in Friday’s series opener, the Mets hit three more Saturday — a grand slam in the first inning from Brandon Nimmo to take a 4-0 lead and two home runs from Pete Alonso to widen the gap.

Nimmo’s blast — his second grand slam in four days — came after Yankees left fielder Jasson Dominguez misplayed a ball hit by the Mets’ leadoff hitter in the first inning. On Friday, he misread Nimmo’s line drive and watched it sail over his head for a double. On Saturday, he was slow to react to Starling Marte’s flyball in the left-center field gap and braked without catching or stopping it, allowing Marte to advance to second for a double. Yankees starter Carlos Rodon then walked two batters to load the bases for Nimmo, who yanked a mistake, a 1-2 slider over the wall.

“That slider probably needs to be down,” said Rodon, who allowed seven runs (six earned) over five innings. “A lot of misses today and they punished them.”

Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s throwing woes at third base — a position the Yankees have asked him to play to accommodate DJ LeMahieu at second base — continued in the second inning when he fielded Tyrone Taylor’s groundball and sailed a toss over first baseman Cody Bellinger’s head. Taylor was given second base and scored moments later on Marte’s RBI single.

The Yankees were charged with their second error in the Mets’ four-run seventh inning when center fielder Trent Grisham charged Francisco Lindor’s single up the middle and had it bounce off the heel of his glove.

The mistake allowed a run to score from second base without a throw, extending the Mets lead back to three runs after the Yankees had chipped their deficit, and allowed a heads-up Lindor to advance to second base. Lindor later scored on Alonso’s second home run, a three-run blast off left-hander Jayvien Sandridge in the pitcher’s major league debut.

“Just got to play better,” Judge said. “That’s what it comes down to. It’s fundamentals. Making a routine play, routine. It’s just the little things. That’s what it kind of comes down to. But every good team goes through a couple bumps in the road.”

This six-game losing skid has looked very different from the Yankees’ first. That rough patch, consisting of losses to the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Angels, was propelled by offensive troubles. The Yankees scored six runs in the six games and gave up just 16. This time, run prevention is the issue; the Yankees have scored 34 runs and surrendered 54 in four games against the Blue Jays in Toronto and two in Queens.

“The offense is starting to swing the bat, put some runs on the board,” Boone said. “The pitching, which has kind of carried us a lot this season, has really, really struggled this week. We haven’t caught the ball as well as I think we should.

“So, look, when you live it and you’re going through it, it sucks, it hurts. But you got to be able to handle it. You got to be able to deal with it. You got to be able to weather it and come out of this and grow.”

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Former White Sox pitcher, world champ Jenks dies

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14 hours ago

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July 6, 2025

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Former White Sox pitcher, world champ Jenks dies

  • ESPN News Services

Jul 5, 2025, 05:48 PM ET

Bobby Jenks, a two-time All-Star pitcher for the Chicago White Sox who was on the roster when the franchise won the 2005 World Series, died Friday in Sintra, Portugal, the team announced.

Jenks, 44, who had been diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, a form of stomach cancer, this year, spent six seasons with the White Sox from 2005 to 2010 and also played for the Boston Red Sox in 2011. The reliever finished his major league career with a 16-20 record, 3.53 ERA and 173 saves.

“We have lost an iconic member of the White Sox family today,” White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in a statement. “None of us will ever forget that ninth inning of Game 4 in Houston, all that Bobby did for the 2005 World Series champions and for the entire Sox organization during his time in Chicago. He and his family knew cancer would be his toughest battle, and he will be missed as a husband, father, friend and teammate. He will forever hold a special place in all our hearts.”

After Jenks moved to Portugal last year, he was diagnosed with a deep vein thrombosis in his right calf. That eventually spread into blood clots in his lungs, prompting further testing. He was later diagnosed with adenocarcinoma and began undergoing radiation.

In February, as Jenks was being treated for the illness, the White Sox posted “We stand with you, Bobby” on Instagram, adding in the post that the club was “thinking of Bobby as he is being treated.”

In 2005, as the White Sox ended an 88-year drought en route to the World Series title, Jenks appeared in six postseason games. Chicago went 11-1 in the playoffs, and he earned saves in series-clinching wins in Game 3 of the ALDS at Boston, and Game 4 of the World Series against the Houston Astros.

In 2006, Jenks saved 41 games, and the following year, he posted 40 saves. He also retired 41 consecutive batters in 2007, matching a record for a reliever.

“You play for the love of the game, the joy of it,” Jenks said in his last interview with SoxTV last year. “It’s what I love to do. I [was] playing to be a world champion, and that’s what I wanted to do from the time I picked up a baseball.”

A native of Mission Hills, California, Jenks appeared in 19 games for the Red Sox and was originally drafted by the then-Anaheim Angels in the fifth round of the 2000 draft.

Jenks is survived by his wife, Eleni Tzitzivacos, their two children, Zeno and Kate, and his four children from a prior marriage, Cuma, Nolan, Rylan and Jackson.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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