CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A federal judge on Tuesday issued a key victory for two race teams, one owned by Michael Jordan, that further pressures NASCAR to settle the antitrust lawsuit filed against it by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports.

NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps said last week the series is “trying our hardest” to settle the federal antitrust lawsuit with the two teams suing in the most expansive comments yet from the defendants.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Bell ruled Tuesday in favor of 23XI, owned by Jordan and three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin, and Bob Jenkins-owned Front Row, on an argument over the market definition of “premier stock-car racing.” Bell found that NASCAR controls the market and NASCAR’s argument that teams can race in other series is moot.

The teams said in alleging the relevant market for premier stock car racing teams that “NASCAR’s Cup Series is currently the only buyer.” The argument was backed by the the expert opinion of Dr. Daniel Rascher, who concluded that “premier stock car racing” is a distinct form of automobile racing, and other types of motorsports like Formula 1 and IndyCar, and all lower levels of stock car racing, are not an equal substitute to NASCAR.

NASCAR in a counterclaim said the teams unlawfully conspired in banding together for negotiations on new charter agreements, but Bell found “NASCAR deliberate(ly), clear(ly) and unambiguous(ly)” alleged that the relevant market is “the market for entry of cars into NASCAR Cup Series races in the United States and any other location where a Cup Series race is held.”

“The same transaction — the sale and purchase of premier stock car racing services — cannot be a different relevant market depending only on which side is complaining,” Bell wrote. “Most simply put, NASCAR made a strategic decision in asserting its Counterclaim and must now live with the consequences.”

The lawsuit was filed a year ago by 23XI Racing and Front Row Racing when they were the only two organizations out of 15 to not sign extensions on new charter agreements.

The new charter agreements were presented to the teams at the start of the 2024 playoffs with a deadline for them to sign. It followed more than two years of tense negotiations over the charters, which are at the heart of NASCAR’s business model as they guarantee revenue and access to weekly races.

23XI and Front Row likely will go out of business without them and are racing this season unchartered, which comes with significantly reduced prize money.

Other teams have called for a settlement to move forward, but mediation sessions and private negotiations have not worked. The trial is scheduled for Dec. 1.

“We are very pleased with the Court’s decision today, ruling in our favor. Not only does it deny NASCAR’s motion for summary judgment, but it also grants our partial summary judgment motion, finding that NASCAR has monopoly power in a properly defined market,” said Jeffrey Kessler, the attorney representing 23XI and Front Row.

“This means that the trial can now be focused on whether NASCAR has maintained that power through anticompetitive acts and used that power to harm teams. We’re prepared to present our case to the jury and are focused on obtaining a verdict that benefits all of the teams, partners, drivers, and the fans.”

NASCAR in its own statement touted the commitment it has shown into building NASCAR into the top motorsports series in the United States since its 1948 formation. Phelps did the same last week while reading from a statement that ran more than six minutes; he defended the Florida-based France family who founded and controls NASCAR and most of the tracks the series uses for events.

“NASCAR looks forward to proving that it became the leading motorsport in the United States through hard work, risk-taking, and many significant investments over the past 77 years,” NASCAR said in a statement. “The antitrust laws encourage this — and NASCAR has done nothing anticompetitive in building the sport from the ground up since 1948.

“While we respect the Court’s decision, we believe it is legally flawed and we will address it at trial and in the Fourth Circuit if necessary. NASCAR believes in the charter system and will continue to defend it from 23XI and Front Row’s efforts to claim that the charter system itself is anticompetitive.”

Most of the organizations that did sign the new charter agreements last year submitted declarations to the court in support of the charter system and calling for a settlement to the case. All the teams want the charters to become permanent, which NASCAR refused to budge on during negotiations for the current agreement.

Should a settlement not be reached before the trial and NASCAR loses, the entire charter system is at risk of being disbanded or overhauled. Teams are frustrated by that threat, and it is understood that NASCAR has since agreed to make the charters permanent and the snag in settlement talks is the amount of money 23XI and Front Row is demanding in damages and legal fees.

Teams are concerned that NASCAR’s entire framework could be torn apart by a loss and are aggravated that it would be over the monetary demands being made by 23XI and Front Row.

Bell last week issued another win for 23XI and Front Row when he dismissed NASCAR’s countersuit against Curtis Polk, the longtime business manager for Jordan and one of 23XI’s owners.

FOR THE FIRST time in 32 years, the Toronto Blue Jays won the American League pennant.

They also came up just short of snapping their World Series title drought, dropping a memorable, tense, 11-inning Game 7 to the Los Angeles Dodgers at a rollicking Rogers Centre on Saturday.

To push the defending champs as far as they could be pushed, Toronto leaned on a diverse, balanced offense that ranked among MLB’s best all season (fourth in runs per game) and somehow got better in the playoffs despite the unforgiving crucible created by October-style pitching staffs.

All of this from a team that just a year ago finished last in the AL East and ranked 23rd in scoring. All this from a team that, after some disappointing free agent pursuits over the past couple of years, entered the playoffs with largely the same roster as last year.

This year, at least, splashy overhauls were overrated.

“The players that are here, they have continued to get better,” Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins said at the Series’ outset.

As the powder-blue dust settles from a magical run that saw the Blue Jays turn an entire nation on its proverbial ear, questions are turning to whether their accomplishment can be replicated. Some of it is standard: whether the latest “it” team can sustain its sudden rise. In a larger sense, though, the baseball industry is wondering what this Toronto run means.

Featuring an offense whose standout trait was an MLB-best batting average, the Blue Jays weren’t just a successful team that adapted to every challenge along the way. The Blue Jays were fun, an absolute gas to watch — for the simple reason that they put the ball in play.

They were led by one of the most fun players in baseball, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who spent the past month terrorizing opposing pitchers. He did it with an elite combination of contact and pop, something that his teammates emulated as best they could. In becoming more like Vladdy, the Toronto offense turned into a juggernaut. And, now, the Blue Jays have the offense everyone else wants to have.

They leveraged Guerrero’s presence to give them the identity they sought, and they acquired and molded players to work in that approach.

“We have always felt that contact would turn into more damage,” Atkins said. “This year, it did.”

Identity. Aesthetics. Success. And now, a pennant. The Toronto Blue Jays nearly won it all, and as we watched Canada fall in love with them, we have to ask: Have the Blue Jays solved the strikeout era?

REALLY, THE EMPHASIS on batting average in this case is more an avatar about Toronto’s style of play than about the ancient baseball statistic. Still, the Blue Jays led the majors in the category, and that was no accident. In fact, before Game 6, Blue Jays manager John Schneider mentioned it after he was asked about comments by Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell, who said the Toronto hitters had gotten lucky on what Snell felt were some pretty good pitches when they beat the lefty in Game 5.

“No, I thought we took good swings early on his fastball,” Schneider said. “And I think we led the league in batting average this year.”

The Blue Jays have constructed a lineup that balances the objective of making consistent contact — even in today’s hyper-strikeout context — remarkably, without losing the ability to hit the ball out of the park and for extra bases.

The Blue Jays aren’t all batting average, and it’s not all about simply making contact. Toronto rated better than the MLB average in home run percentage and isolated power. The Blue Jays were also third in line-drive rate, which helps fuel the average.

During the regular season, the Blue Jays ranked 23rd in the majors in scoring 38.3% of their runs on home runs. That number rose to 48% in the playoffs, but the strikeout rate remained low.

The Blue Jays led the majors with the lowest strikeout rate (17.8%) of any team over the past eight seasons — and lowered that number to 17.1% in the postseason, the lowest by a playoff team that played at least three games since the 2014 San Francisco Giants.

The increase in home run percentage in the playoffs paired with the stunning improvement in strikeout rate unsurprisingly led to more scoring. Toronto scored 4.93 runs per game during the season, ranking fourth, but rolled up an average of 5.83 runs during its 18 postseason games, nearly 30% more than any other team.

Not just contact. Not just power. Toronto puts the ball in play, but its approach always had to be more than that if it was going to translate to the high-stakes games.

“We tried to thread the needle a little bit with that going from last year to this year,” Schneider said. “Understanding that our main guys make a lot of contact, we leaned into it a little bit. And I think, at the same time, you don’t want to just be playing pingpong.”

The Blue Jays finished third in OPS during the regular season behind the New York Yankees and Dodgers, but with better batting averages and on-base percentages than both. With runners in scoring position, Toronto led the majors in average (.292) and BABIP (.329). Only the Kansas City Royals struck out less after counts that reached two strikes. Over and over, the Blue Jays showed an ability to adjust and adapt to what was needed and what was thrown.

The Blue Jays aren’t the first successful playoff team to focus on contact — most of the excellent Houston Astros offenses during their run of success over the past decade featured a relatively balanced attack. The champion 2018 Boston Red Sox were another team like that.

But the Blue Jays might be the most impressive version that we’ve seen yet, if only because the difficulties of hitting for average keep increasing with each passing year as more and more strikeout pitchers arrive in the majors.

It’s worth considering the team the Dodgers vanquished one round before Toronto, the Milwaukee Brewers, who ranked third in regular-season batting average (.258) and posted the fourth-lowest strikeout rate (20.3%). But whereas the Blue Jays gave Los Angeles’ red-hot pitching staff far more trouble than any of the Dodgers’ National League playoff opponents, the Brewers’ hitters were more or less helpless during L.A.’s sweep of the National League Championship Series.

Maybe Milwaukee just ran into the Dodgers’ pitching buzzsaw just as many of its hitters were struggling. Still, it is worth noting that although Milwaukee and Toronto both paired elite averages with elite contact rates, they were in fact very different offenses, one that worked in the playoffs and one that did not.

For one, the Blue Jays were the more veteran team, with an average hitter age more than one season older than the Brewers’. The bigger difference was that the Blue Jays didn’t run all that much, so it was their collective extra-base ability that augmented their high-contact approach, whereas the Brewers went wild on the basepaths. Finally, the Brewers walked more — the Blue Jays weren’t a wild-swinging team but were only about league average in walk percentage.

Even though Milwaukee walked just as often during the playoffs, its lack of collective pop continued and its strikeout rate spiked, leading to a cratering in average and on-base percentage. With no one getting on base, the Brewers weren’t able to get their running game going, especially against the Dodgers.

The level of pitching that playoff teams have to navigate is brutal. Teams have condensed their staffs to their nastiest hurlers. The built-in travel days give the best of those hurlers more game-free rest days. Over the past decade, during baseball’s era of strikeout hyperinflation, teams have struck out 22.4% of the time during the regular season. At playoff time, that number jumps to 24.8%, even though the best offenses are generally still playing.

The Blue Jays turned that around. When a team can navigate the postseason with an offense that somehow gets better during the playoffs, the industry will notice.

IT’S ESPECIALLY NOTABLE because the majority of the position players who appeared during the World Series were with the club last season, and in many cases, have been with the organization for years.

That wasn’t entirely intentional. The Blue Jays wanted to sign Juan Soto, but didn’t. They wanted to sign Shohei Ohtani, but didn’t. Instead, the front office crafted a revamped offensive philosophy under the guidance of a hitting staff led by coach David Popkins, who was hired just more than a year ago.

Popkins, who came to Toronto last October after parting ways with the Minnesota Twins, talked to MLB.com about his philosophy before the season.

“My philosophy is built off of creativity,” Popkins said. “We’re trying to become the most creative lineup at scoring runs in baseball. We do that by practicing all of the different situations and clubs that we’re going to need in the game.”

By “clubs,” Popkins doesn’t mean teams or opponents, but golf clubs. Popkins was talking about an initiative in which, just as in golf, you pick a specific iron or wood or wedge based on the terrain and the distance to the hole, and he would craft a baseball lineup that was adaptable to the game situation and the pitcher on the mound.

This meant that, at the very least, the Blue Jays, under Popkins, were not going with the kind of all-or-nothing approach that has become too prevalent in 2020s baseball. Get a pitch and launch it. It’s an easy philosophy to describe but incredibly complex to implement.

“We say all the time, ‘What club do you take out of your bag?'” Schneider said. “I think last year, we had a lot of guys just hanging out with like a 7-iron the entire time. So, it’s when to use that, when to use a driver. And knowing that they can make contact is kind of a little safety net for them.”

Schneider and his players tout the work of Popkins and his staff. When they were hired last fall, the hitting coaches had no way to know that they were working with a championship-caliber offense because the lineup was not on that level last season.

“[Popkins] gets praise, but he probably doesn’t get enough,” Bo Bichette said. “The energy he brings every day is second to none. I’ve never experienced that from a coach, the passion. When you have that type of passion, you tend to really learn about your craft and learn what it takes. He’s helped all of us for sure.

“We have a ton of talent who — myself in particular — didn’t perform to our capabilities last year. So, that plays a part. But I think we train to be able to do anything in the batter’s box.”

Certainly, there is position regression in these numbers — players bouncing back after down seasons — but consider the following list of leaps in batting average:

Addison Barger, .197 to .243
Bichette, .225 to .311
Ernie Clement, .263 to .277
Alejandro Kirk, .253 to .282
Davis Schneider, .191 to .234
Daulton Varsho .214 to .238

Bichette, who became a free agent after the World Series, might be the litmus test for how eager teams are to follow in Toronto’s footsteps. He’s a career .294 hitter but doesn’t run well, even when healthy, and his declining defensive metrics suggest a need to move down the defensive spectrum. But at the plate, he pairs contact with consistent extra-base ability. If you want a Blue Jays offense, why not sign one of the players most responsible for making it work?

And then there’s 36-year-old George Springer, whose jump from .220 to .309 was the largest year-over-year improvement in batting average among any qualifying hitter this season. Overall, Toronto’s team average went from .241 to .265, even though Anthony Santander (.175) and Andres Gimenez (.210) struggled.

Much has been made about one aspect of the Blue Jays’ improved contact ability and success, and converting that contact into hits. That’s bat speed, which is now tracked by Statcast and can be monitored by teams and fans.

The Blue Jays weren’t elite in average bat speed, but a number of their key hitters showed marked increases over last year — Guerrero, Clement and Barger, just to name a few. Springer was up by nearly 2 mph in his age-35 season.

Yet, all of these players controlled those faster bats, got wood on the ball and did so with authority. The formula seems blindingly obvious. If the pitchers are throwing harder, then the hitters need to swing faster. It’s not remotely that simple in reality, but this is, in effect, what the Blue Jays did.

“I think the whole industry kind of started looking at that last year with more public knowledge of it, public information of it,” Schneider said. “When guys were throwing as hard as they are, you got to combat it somehow, whether it’s with bat speed or mechanics.”

THE BLUE JAYS’ modernized approach to an old-school offense succeeded at a time when many major league teams have put more emphasis on identifying, scouting and developing contact hitting. Toronto is arguably the first team of this era to break through at this level with such an approach.

Because this has already been a trend around baseball, Toronto’s success might be less of a light bulb flashing in the minds of rival executives and more of a validation for what other teams have been trying to do.

“In terms of how baseball goes forward, to me, pitching is so good these days with the stuff and the velo, you have to be able to put the ball in play,” Schneider said. “You have to put pressure on the defense and the pitcher. I like that we can do it in a variety of ways.”

For MLB — the entity — it’s a revelation because the approach didn’t just work, it also was so much fun to watch. And, most importantly, it paid off with a pennant and a thrilling World Series performance that will be long remembered. If you needed any more evidence for that than what existed before this Fall Classic, you just had to feel the Rogers Centre vibrating on the banks of Lake Ontario as the World Series reached its historic crescendo.

They didn’t win it all, but the season was a triumph for the Blue Jays, a triumph for Toronto and a triumph for all of Canada. And if more teams can be like the Blue Jays going forward, it’ll be a triumph for baseball fans, too.

Even now, nearly 24 hours after the fact, it is difficult to properly process what happened to Denny Hamlin in the 2025 NASCAR season finale.

“In this moment,” he said Sunday night, “I never want to race a car again.”

The greatest driver in 77 years of NASCAR racing to never engrave his name on the coveted Cup had produced arguably the greatest season of his two-decade career and had dominated the season’s final event. His goal was to be the highest finisher of the Championship 4. He did that, steering through an obstacle course of an evening that threw everything it had at the 44-year-old with a portfolio of past heartbreak in season-finale title chances. There were bad pit stops and near-misses and a clutch that was softer than marshmallow, but yet he still won the pole position and led 208 of the race’s scheduled 312 laps, including the last 28 in regulation … before that regulation became overtime.

What happened next was difficult to accept for those who watched it on screen or from their seats — all horror movies are — but it was even more impossibly incomprehensible to those who were behind the wheels of the race cars on Sunday night. Even the beneficiary of it all.

“Honestly, I can’t believe it still,” confessed Kyle Larson on Monday afternoon, calling in from Phoenix after only an hour and half of sleep, a night lost to celebrating his second Cup championship, only the 18th driver in NASCAR history to do so. But also mixed into the cause for his insomnia was more than a little bit of survivor’s guilt. “It’s such an odd feeling of, you’re so excited because you won the championship, but you know, I do have a heart. Denny is a great competitor and a good friend. To see somebody that’s just gotten so close every time to win in the championship, and have it in their fingertips, doing everything right throughout the day and weekend and get it snatched from him late … When I finally get to see him later tonight, I just don’t even know what to say. Like, I’m saying, ‘Sorry.'”

“Sorry” is exactly what Larson’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron said to Hamlin when they were on the podium together in the post-race media center. It was Byron, a member of that Champ 4, desperately trying to stay within striking distance with Hamlin late, who hit the wall and brought out the yellow flag that hit the reset button that caused the overtime that sent all the leaders onto pit road. It was during that final pit stop that Hamlin — taking four tires when others took two or less — lost the lead, the race and the championship.

It was on that same pit lane where countless competitors lined up to try to console Hamlin following the checkered flag, after he had ultimately dropped to sixth in the race and second in standings, three points behind Larson, who finished three spots ahead in third place.

It was certainly not the first time that a racer had lost a championship that seemed so inevitable. It was also not the first time that many other racers had come to the side of a rival’s car to hug their crestfallen neck. But this moment was also singular because it was such a unique combination of the two.

In 1998, when Dale Earnhardt finally won the Daytona 500, the crew members of every other team famously lined up to high five the man who had finally snapped a two-decade losing streak in the sport’s biggest race. In 1984, when Richard Petty earned his 200th career victory, his opponents also joined in on the celebration, even Cale Yarborough — the man who had lost to Petty by fractions of a second — stuck around for the postrace picnic with The King and the President, Ronald Reagan. The Petty and Earnhardt families were once again surrounded by their fellow racers after the deaths of Adam Petty in 2000 and Earnhardt the following year. In July 2001, the sport celebrated with Dale Earnhardt Jr. when he won the first race back at Daytona following his father’s death in the 500 five months earlier.

Over nearly eight decades, there have been plenty of instances where triumphs and tragedies both have united the cliquey Cup Series garage, but never had they all been swept up in the same wave of emotion because of what a racer had failed to accomplish like we saw happen on Sunday night in Phoenix. Even when it was a driver like Hamlin, who has made a career out of being divisive, be it looking toward the grandstand and announcing to the crowd “I just beat your favorite driver” or using his podcast to call out rivals or taking the entire sport to court with antitrust claims, which he will do in December.

“That’s because we have all seen how hard Denny has worked in seeing all that he has accomplished, so he deserves to be a champion,” Larson continued. “I hope someday, before he hangs it up, he can experience what it’s like. And I think it’ll be an extremely rewarding feeling for him. Especially now.”

It is a reminder of what Hamlin has done to deserve that title that no one wants: Greatest To Never Win It All. In the annals of NASCAR history, that’s a three-driver race.

Junior Johnson, aka the Last American Hero, won 50 races as a driver with no championship — though, as he often liked to remind us, he never ran a full season in search of a title. Mark Martin won 40 races and finished in the top five in the Cup standings 13 times, including a stunning five runner-up efforts. Hamlin earned his 60th career win in October, the victory that gave him his title shot at Phoenix, tied for 10th on the all-time victories list and that includes three Daytona 500 wins. This was his 10th time finishing in the top five in the final standings and his second runner-up.

All of Hamlin’s near-Cups have come during NASCAR’s Chase/Playoff postseason era. This season has been punctuated with meetings of a postseason exploratory committee, of which Hamlin has been a member. Entering Phoenix, there was still some debate about the scrapping of the current one-race, four-driver, highest-finisher-takes-the-Cup format that has been in place since 2014. When Hamlin battled his way to the front for the final time, there seemed to be the faintest bit of “This still works, we’ll show you” fight in the format.

Now, anyone left who dared consider even the tiniest bit of support, is looking over the smoldering remains of Denny Hamlin’s 2025 season and saying, “Yeah, to hell with that.” And yes, that includes the man who has now won two Cups via that very one-night bracket.

“I think we all would feel like we have a better opportunity to win a championship if it was more races that factored into it,” said Larson. “So, if that’s 36 races or ten races or four, whatever the number is, I think I would feel like I have a better opportunity than just coming down to one race.”

And why is that, champ?

“Because, as yesterday showed, you could have the best car and be doing the best job like Denny was and not leave the champion. That doesn’t feel right. And we are all certainly feeling that today.”