
Two top NFL prospects and one epic title game: When Caleb Williams and Olu Fashanu were high school teammates
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Heather Dinich, ESPN Senior WriterOct 19, 2023, 07:00 AM ET
Close- College football reporter
- Joined ESPN.com in 2007
- Graduate of Indiana University
WASHINGTON — With Olu Fashanu, it was the size.
That was the first thing former DeMatha Catholic High School offensive lineman Golden Israel-Achumba noticed when he saw his rival offensive lineman on the opposing sideline in 2018.
“I’m looking at Olu like, ‘Who is that guy?'” Israel-Achumba said of the now 6-foot-6, 317-pounder who is his friend and teammate at Penn State. “That guy’s huge. He’s not letting anything get by him.”
For Caleb Williams, it was the demeanor. Whether it was seeing him as a high school freshman in 2017 or as a USC star today, the way he carried himself stood out.
“I know his look on his face, I know the body language, the way he walks, the way his arms move, the ways his feet move,” Gonzaga College High School football coach Randy Trivers said. “It’s the way his shoulders, his posture … a lot of athletes under certain circumstances are going to be really, really good. But there’s few athletes under circumstances that can really consistently triumph and be good. There’s a fearlessness of failure.”
Not only did their 2018 Gonzaga football team defeat its biggest rival, DeMatha, to win the school’s first Washington Catholic Athletic Conference title in 16 years, but the Eagles did it in epic fashion. The dramatic championship game, which was highlighted by SportsCenter and Good Morning America, featured three touchdowns and three lead changes — in the final 29 seconds.
That 2018 team could again make history this spring as the only known high school team in at least the past 20 years to produce two top-five NFL draft picks in the same class. While most draft experts have Williams — USC’s starting quarterback and the reigning Heisman Trophy winner — as the No. 1 overall pick, many also have Fashanu as the top offensive lineman and the No. 5 overall pick. According to ESPN Stats & Information research, the most comparable high school duo would have been Alex Smith and Reggie Bush, who played together at Helix High in San Diego, but weren’t in the same draft class. Smith was No. 1 overall in 2005, while Bush was No. 2 in 2006.
But before they hear their names called in the draft, Williams and Fashanu both have College Football Playoff dreams to attend to, continuing this Saturday. Williams, coming off the worst performance of his college career in a 48-20 loss to Notre Dame, will look to bounce back against Utah, a team that beat the Trojans twice last year. Fashanu and Penn State head to Columbus to take on No. 3 Ohio State in a game that will go a long way toward determining Big Ten supremacy.
In July, Williams said being so close to the CFP last year and ultimately falling out of the top four on Selection Day frustrated and fueled him.
“It bothers me because I play for championships,” he said. “I don’t play for anything else.”
He and Fashanu have the high school history together to prove it.
WILLIAMS AND FASHANU have emerged in the national spotlight, but both left their prints all over Gonzaga, a 203-year-old private school located about four blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
The school’s football field is connected on one side by the red brick St. Aloysius Church and the U.S. Government Publishing Office on the other. The Eagles compete in one of the nation’s most elite high school football conferences, with its best teams annually producing some of the top collegiate players at the Power 5 level.
Virginia Tech running backs coach Elijah Brooks was the head coach at DeMatha when Williams was choosing where he would go to high school.
“Losing Caleb in the high school recruitment might have been my worst recruiting loss ever,” he said. “He had come to my camps for many years, and he was almost a shoo-in to come to DeMatha. When that didn’t happen, I knew we lost a talented player. But I had no idea he was gonna be this phenomenal. And he is exactly that.”
Sam Sweeney, then a junior at Gonzaga and a contender for starting quarterback, conceded he wasn’t thrilled a freshman quarterback came in and won the starting job. Sweeney and Williams had a good relationship. They were always together, going to meetings and extra film sessions, and training with the same personal quarterbacks coach — Chris Baucia, a DeMatha alum.
“It was very unique to me, just because you sit two years … waiting to be the starting quarterback and then you come your junior year, and this freshman shows up and you kind of question it,” said Sweeney, now a star lacrosse player at Penn State, “but now seeing what he’s done … it makes sense now.”
Trivers said it wasn’t a difficult decision to start Williams as a freshman.
“We had opportunities for him to show us his level of maturity in the meeting room,” Trivers said, “his level of maturity and toughness in the strength and conditioning program, his level of maturity and competence on the practice field. And when he was doing those things over and over again, it just became clear that, OK, this goes against what my norm would be with a freshman quarterback for sure, but this guy, that’s what he is. And he’s ready.”
While Williams had football tunnel vision from an early age, Fashanu was a basketball player who didn’t immerse himself in football until he was at Gonzaga. One of Fashanu’s former Gonzaga teammates, current Wake Forest offensive lineman Luke Petitbon, said all of the offensive lineman during the 2018 season were big, but Fashanu “was just bigger than all of us.”
“Gonzaga is a school where the athletes and regular students, everyone is such good friends,” he said, “so Olu would be with a friend who doesn’t play football and he’s like nine inches taller than him and outweighs him by 150 pounds, but it’s normal at Gonzaga, which makes it cool because it’s not just athletes in a clique hanging out with each other. It’s definitely funny seeing Olu next to people who are 5-foot-8 and 150 pounds.”
Petitbon said he first spotted Fashanu in the stands at Buchanan Football Field for the school’s annual cookout for freshmen. The freshmen football players had already reported, and Fashanu hadn’t even signed up yet.
“At the time he was probably like 6-foot-4, kind of skinny,” Petitbon said. “He’s not as big as he is now, but he was still a massive human being, and I talked to him. He never played football before.”
Fashanu signed up for freshman football, but it wasn’t until Petitbon’s junior year that they played side-by-side. During their senior year, Fashanu had moved to his current position at left tackle, and Petitbon was at right guard.
Petitbon, who said he is on a text chain with Fashanu and a few other former Gonzaga linemen, said they still laugh about going to Outback together in his hometown of Annapolis, Maryland, where “Olu would eat an ungodly amount of food.”
“The Outback appetizers are ginormous,” Petitbon said, “and Olu would eat an entire cheese fries and a Bloomin’ Onion, and a bunch of wings and then have a big steak afterwards.”
Multiple former teammates and coaches described Fashanu as a “gentle giant” who has continued to develop, including at Penn State. Trivers said Williams was “more refined” when he arrived at Gonzaga because he had more experiences leading up to high school, while Fashanu had potential “with a capital ‘P.'”
“You could see his body, he had good length and as a young kid, decent enough thickness to know this guy has a chance to be a big dude, but he was very green, very raw because he really had no football experience coming in,” Trivers said.
Gonzaga assistant coach Justin Young, who coached Fashanu on the offensive line during his freshman and sophomore seasons, has also been the team’s strength and conditioning coach. Young said Fashanu was “molding clay,” as far as improving his flexibility in the weight room, but knew from the start he was “a first-rounder based on his size and his potential.”
“To be honest and completely humble, we just assumed he would be this type of player because of his build, just a massive young man walking these hallways,” Young said. “… He didn’t come in at the strongest but he definitely attacked getting strong. He was definitely a four-year project, three-and-a-half year project as far as getting his flexibility where it needed to be. Caleb on the other hand, he’s different. He came in there prepared and ready, came to our morning workouts a freshman prepared and ready and in shape. He just attacks some of the hardest things we try to give our players and attacks them with a smile. He’s built for whatever. He just plays quarterback.”
IN ORDER TO make it to the WCAC title game, Gonzaga had to finish as one of the top four teams in the 10-team conference.
“No one thought we were gonna be good,” said Sweeney, then a receiver for Gonzaga. ” … We were written off from the start, even in the summer, and we just put our heads down and worked and used that as motivation.”
Gonzaga won its first six games, but stumbled down the stretch. The Eagles finished the regular-season with three losses, including a triple overtime loss to DeMatha, located about 11 miles away from the heart of the nation’s capital. The storied history between the two all-boys Catholic schools is comparable to “a miniature Ohio State versus Michigan,” said Wolverines defensive back Josh Wallace, who played the same position for DeMatha.
The regular-season loss to DeMatha ensured Gonzaga would lose its division for the second straight season. Two weeks later, on Nov. 3, Gonzaga lost again, this time on its home field to St. John’s in the nation’s oldest Catholic high school football rivalry. It was a convincing 34-17 loss in front of a crowd of more than 2,500.
“They crushed us,” Petitbon said. “We were going into the playoffs as the four-seed.”
And they won — against the very team that had just “crushed” them a week earlier.
Gonzaga beat St. John’s, 24-14, in the WCAC semifinal that would pit them against DeMatha in the championship game. DeMatha had won four straight conference titles from 2013-2016 and produced NFL talent such as Chase Young and Anthony McFarland Jr.
“That was the thing with Gonzaga,” said Indianapolis Colts safety Nick Cross, who played for DeMatha in the 2018 title game. “They were never as talented as us. They’d always find a way to get lucky and to win. They would out-fundamental us.”
As determined as Gonzaga was to win its first title since 2002, the Eagles fell into a 20-0 hole in the first half of the championship game, and a 16-year-old Williams would have to lift them out of that hole.
“The main plan was to contain him, keep him in that pocket and make him make the throws that he didn’t want to make,” Israel-Achumba said. “We also wanted to get him and hit him in the pocket, but that was obviously hard because we had Olu stopping dudes from doing that. It was like, OK, they have a trump card — not only one, but two.”
Gonzaga trailed by three with less than a minute remaining when Williams was sacked, forcing a third-and-33 situation. Williams had injured his ankle on the play, and Trivers said that had the Eagles needed to play another game, Williams probably wouldn’t have been able to participate. Ultimately no cast or surgery was needed, but Trivers called it “a fairly significant injury.”
“He was laying there, I heard him say, ‘My foot, my foot. I can’t get up.'” Sweeney said. “And that’s when I came to the realization that if he can’t get up, I have to play quarterback right now with a minute left in the championship game and score. OK, that’s not happening. Caleb you need to get up.”
“He gets up,” Trivers said, “and you see visibly, there’s a real limp. That was real, for sure, but then he was able to make the throw on the next play to Sweeney, and then a couple more really good throws to finish off the game.”
“Even that last play — on [an injured] foot — and he’s throwing the ball, he’s flicking his wrist and it’s going 50-60 yards in the air,” Sweeney said. “He was just a sophomore in high school, 16 years old. How much talent he had and his competitiveness and willingness to do whatever it takes to win. It’s pretty crazy. It’s still crazy to this day.”
WILLIAMS, HOBBLED BY his injured ankle, heaved a 53-yard Hail Mary as time expired, and Gonzaga students prayed in the stands. He was on his own 41-yard line when he threw it, and it easily sailed about 60 yards.
Colts’ safety Nick Cross and Atlanta Falcons safety DeMarcco Hellams were defending the end zone when DeMatha rushed four and Williams released the ball as the clock expired.
“I didn’t get enough umph in my jump to be able to knock the ball down,” Cross said.
Gonzaga’s John Marshall, who went on to play defense at Navy, did.
He miraculously emerged from a pile of defenders in the end zone with the game-winner from Williams. Brooks, DeMatha’s coach, said there was “dead silence” on his sideline when Marshall came down with the ball, and his “heart just dropped.”
Gonzaga 46, DeMatha 43.
“It was a surreal moment,” Marshall said. “I didn’t know where I was for a couple of seconds after I caught it.”
Fans thundered onto the field, where Williams was lying flat on his back near the 50-yard line with his helmet on, before getting up to join the celebration.
Three of Williams’ six touchdowns came in the final 3:03 of the game.
“Caleb is one of the best quarterbacks I’ve ever played against,” Cross said.
Petitbon, who lined up with Fashanu for two seasons, said Williams played “like a man possessed” in the WCAC title game. Williams accounted for 480 of the Eagles’ 530 yards of offense. He completed 13 of 29 passes for 359 yards, and carried the ball 20 times for 122 yards.
He even caught one pass for 9 yards.
“It was probably the best single game performance I’ve ever seen,” said Petitbon.
“It’s just the odds of hitting that is slim to none,” Brooks said, “but if anyone was going to make the play, it was going to be him.
“After years have passed and seeing that not only did we lose to a good team,” he said, “we might have lost to arguably the greatest quarterback — maybe player — to come out of the DMV area in the last 20 years. Maybe ever.”
GONZAGA IS THE oldest all-boys school in Washington, D.C., but the athletic department has only retired three numbers — one from basketball, another from hockey, and Williams’ No. 18. They are displayed above the bleachers in the gym, and Williams returned in May for the dedication.
There are also framed newspaper clippings from the 2018 season hanging on the walls in Trivers’ office, along with the framed and stained jersey Williams wore that season. In the locker room, the first locker has been commemorated with Williams’ purple nameplate and will be reserved in his honor. In the hallway just outside and in plain view of Williams’ locker, is a banner that recognizes him as D.C.’s Gatorade Player of the Year for the 2018 season, when he threw for 2,624 yards and 26 touchdowns.
His legacy is already etched in the school’s history, along with Fashanu, who was named to the league’s first-team offense in 2018 and was part of an offensive line that produced all Power 5 alums.
Their places in the first round of the NFL draft will only enhance that.
Israel-Achumba remembered scrolling through Instagram on his phone last season when he saw an early mock draft that had his roommate projected in the first round.
“Usually I see some guys from other schools, some of the older guys on my team,” he said. “I was shook when I saw him. I’m like, whoa. It’s happenin’. I sent it to him, like, ‘Have you seen this?'”
Fashanu wanted his friend to stop “messing around.” Then somebody else sent it to him. Then his parents. But Fashanu, who Penn State coach James Franklin said has the highest GPA of all scholarship players on the team, turned down the opportunity to possibly be among the first five offensive tackles drafted last year.
“I’d say the main two [reasons] were so I could graduate in the summer and start my master’s in the fall,” he said, “and also I felt like not only myself, but everyone on the team, we know that this year we could go a lot further than just the Rose Bowl.”
Regardless of where Penn State winds up this postseason, NFL scouts will be watching.
“He’s a no-brainer with his height, weight, length and speed,” a veteran scout told ESPN’s Pete Thamel this week. “He’s an easy mover and makes the game look easy. He’s a great kid from a great family. He’ll be the first tackle taken this year.”
Israel-Achumba saw the potential in his roommate the first time he looked at him as a rival.
“Couple that with Caleb Williams and the throws he was making and the scrambling, and all the magic he was doing,” Israel-Achumba said, ” … every single thing he’s doing in college now is what he did in high school. Same with Olu.”
Current USC running back MarShawn Lloyd — now teammates with Williams — played against the Heisman Trophy winner that season as a running back for DeMatha.
“Still to this day, Caleb brings up the Gonzaga game,” Lloyd said. “He’ll wear his Gonzaga shorts, and I’ll be like, ‘Bro, take those off.'”
Petitbon still keeps in touch with Williams, though not as frequently as he does Fashanu and the Gonzaga linemen. He said he and Williams usually talk the most during the offseason when they’re playing Call of Duty together online. (“We’re both actually pretty good,” Petitbon said.).
Regardless of what happens in the future, Williams and Fashanu will remain connected through their championship past.
“Having the Heisman Trophy winner, that’s unique, that’s rare,” said Trivers, who is in his 27th season coaching high school football and has spent two decades as head coach of three different programs. “Having a guy in Olu Fashanu that’s likely a first-round draft pick, that’s rare. It’s one thing to be a good high school player, and even a good college player — and even a great college player — but to be what I think is going to happen for these guys — God keep them healthy — these guys are going to be first-round draft choices. That’s another level of talent.”
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Associated Press
Jul 11, 2025, 04:50 PM ET
BOSTON — The Red Sox activated All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman from the 10-day injured list before Friday’s game against Tampa Bay.
Bregman, who has been sidelined since May 24 with a right quad strain, returned to his customary spot in the field and was slotted in the No. 2 spot of Boston’s lineup for the second of a four-game series against the Rays. He sustained the injury when he rounded first base and felt his quad tighten up.
A two-time World Series winner who spent the first nine seasons of his big league career with the Houston Astros, Bregman signed a $120 million, three-year contract in February. At the time of the injury, he was hitting .299 with 11 homers and 35 RBI. Those numbers led to him being named to the American League’s All-Star team for the third time since breaking into the majors with the Astros in 2016.
Bregman missed 43 games with the quad strain. Earlier this week, he told reporters that he was trending in a direction where he didn’t believe he would require a minor league rehab assignment. With three games left before the All-Star break, the Red Sox agreed the time was right to reinstate a player to a team that entered Friday in possession of one of the AL’s three wild-card berths.
“He’s going to do his part,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said before Friday’s game. “Obviously, the timing, we’ll see where he’s at, but he’s been working hard on the swing … visualizing and watching video.”

JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”

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Associated Press
Jul 11, 2025, 03:58 PM ET
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.
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