Former Detroit Tigers pitcher Kenta Maeda agrees to minor league deal with New York Yankees
News of potential involvement between Maeda and the Yankees was confirmed by the New York Post's Jon Heyman.
Maeda initially signed with the Tigers ahead of the 2024 season for two years and $24 million, offering starting depth to a Tigers team still undergoing a rebuild. And though the 2024 Tigers surprised many by earning a trip to the playoffs, Maeda didn't factor much into that success, going 3-7 with a 6.09 ERA over 112 ⅓ innings.
The nine-year veteran made the team out of spring training but was relegated to a relief role, where he struggled to a 7.88 ERA in seven appearances out of the bullpen. Instead of keeping him around (he was the third-highest paid pitcher on the team entering 2025), the Tigers cut him on May 1, allowing him to sign a minor-league deal with the Chicago Cubs on May 16.
Maeda showed little improvement with Triple-A Iowa, going 3-4 with a 5.97 ERA in 12 starts with the Cubs affiliate. The Cubs never promoted him to the big league club, and instead of waiting for promotion, Maeda opted out of his contract in favor of a deal with the Yankees.
You can reach Christian Romo at cromo@freepress.com
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Former Tigers RHP Kenta Maeda agrees to minor league deal with Yankees
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Washington Post
2 minutes ago
- Washington Post
As U.S. Ryder Cup captain, Keegan Bradley needs to take himself out of it
OWINGS MILLS, Md. — One way to look at the impending Ryder Cup fiasco is that Keegan Bradley, PGA Tour pro, has played unexpectedly good golf for most of this season. He has made the job of Keegan Bradley, U.S. Ryder Cup captain, quite difficult. Earn his way onto his own team for next month's competition? It remains possible. Another way to look at it: Regardless of how he plays in the remaining two PGA Tour events before he must choose his team, Bradley should stand down. Step aside. Being the team captain is enough. Playing would be too much. For reference, let's take the 2027 Ryder Cup in Ireland. Rory McIlroy is from Northern Ireland. Wouldn't he be a perfect fit for captain of the European team? Why not take on that challenge of playing and captaining? 'The idea of me being a playing captain sometime soon … has come up,' McIlroy revealed Wednesday. 'And I've shot it down straightaway.' Why? 'Because I don't think you can do it.' That's a reasonable take. But Bradley doesn't have to listen to a star on the rival team. He should, however, listen to reason. 'He might be right,' Bradley said. 'We don't know. No one knows.' Let's not find out. Here we are, less than two weeks from Bradley naming his team, and the captain clearly still is mulling his standing for his own squad. He is 10th in the U.S. standings. The top six make the team automatically. The next six are captain's picks. Perform well at this week's BMW Championship at Caves Valley Golf Club, where he spoke Wednesday, and he will move up in the standings. Perform well at next week's Tour Championship, and Bradley the player will put more pressure on Bradley the captain. 'I certainly have a lot of concerns, as well as everybody else,' Bradley said. '… I can truly sit here right now and say I don't know what's going to happen. I have to look at myself just like any other player trying to make the team.' Except he's not any other player trying to make the team. He's the captain charged with leading it. Bradley said Wednesday that the enormity of his impending task is beginning to weigh on him in ways that it hadn't before now. The matches are Sept. 26-28 at Bethpage Black on Long Island. That's six weeks away. There's much to do. 'The Ryder Cup has always been so far away, and now it's right there,' Bradley said. '… I'm thinking a lot more about it now. I'm laying in bed thinking about golf balls that the guys play, thinking about pairings. Certainly amped up.' As is most of the sport. The Ryder Cup has morphed from a biennial exhibition between Europe and the United States into something of a golf behemoth. The challenge for Bradley's American charges is gargantuan. The crowds at Bethpage should be somewhere between boisterous and unreasonable and could bring a brand of partisanship that borders on embarrassing. The American captain should be in charge of quieting that noise for his team, not playing through it. He isn't just responsible for announcing his six captain's picks Aug. 27. He has a say in course setup. He will choose who plays with whom and when. He must organize. He must inspire. It's a lot. Why complicate it, then? If you're already thinking about which brand of golf ball one of your players uses and what the impact might be on a partner who plays a different brand, and that keeps you up at night — why introduce your own swing into the mix? Maybe because he has significant support. 'I think if it's something that Keegan wants to be part of the team and wants to play, I think he's a guy we'd all love to have on the team,' said none other than Scottie Scheffler, the best golfer on the planet. 'The intensity that he's brought as a captain — I mean, he has definitely exceeded my expectations as a captain.' That's a strong endorsement from perhaps the most important voice. And it is added to a chorus of American players who have backed Bradley's candidacy to play. Back to McIlroy. Maybe he's merely trying to mess with his opponents' minds, but his answers about why he already has shot down the idea of being a playing captain one day seemed genuine. 'You think about the extra media that a captain has to do,' he said. 'You think about the extra meetings that the captains have to do with the vice captains, with the PGA of America, in Keegan's case, preparing your speech for the opening ceremony. There's a lot of things that people don't see that the captain does the week of the Ryder Cup — especially now that the Ryder Cup has become so big.' This dilemma is only partly Bradley's fault, and all he did to get here was play pretty good golf. He won the Travelers Championship in June to rise to seventh in the world rankings. He has four other top-10 finishes this calendar year. Even as his past four events have yielded a missed cut and no finish higher than a tie for 30th — dropping him to 12th in the rankings — he certainly would be under consideration by any other American captain. 'I definitely think he's one of the best 12 American players right now,' McIlroy said. 'That's why everyone is so interested and it's such a compelling case.' It could have been compelling to watch Bradley the player try to earn his way on. The PGA of America — the organization that stages the Ryder Cup and that is wholly separate and different from the PGA Tour — made it a potential debacle by naming Bradley captain for a Ryder Cup in which he was going to be just 39 years old. The interview process essentially went like this: Seth Waugh, former CEO of the PGA of America: 'Keegan, this is Seth. Would you like to be Ryder Cup captain?' Bradley, dumbfounded: 'Uh, sure?' Maybe wait for him to be a vice captain a time or two before offering him the big chair? Maybe wait for him to be in his mid- to late 40s, when he would have less of a chance to put himself in the position he's in? But here we are. Not that anyone should make choices based on how they could be second-guessed, but think of it this way: Should Europe win, what are the odds that the main American lament is 'What if Keegan had just played himself?' A much more likely frustration would seem to be 'Why in the world did Keegan include himself?' The Ryder Cup is a month and a half away. Keegan Bradley is still wrestling with a decision. He should stop. Play the next two weeks, then put the clubs away. The captain's enormous responsibility is to put his players in the best position to excel. He can't do that if he's at the range working on his own game, too.
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The $62m question: does a high school really need a professional-style stadium?
When the television cameras pan around the US's newest sporting temple to show the cavernous stands, elegant brick exterior, VIP suites and massive video board, viewers might believe they are looking at a professional venue. Yet the occupants of Phillip Beard Stadium, the Buford Wolves, are not a professioanl team or even a college one. They are high-schoolers. In the exorbitant world of high school football, Buford's $62m, 10,000-capacity arena is not the biggest or most expensive taxpayer-funded student stadium in the US. But it may be the most luxurious. The Wolves host the Milton Eagles on Thursday in the stadium's first regular-season game, which will be broadcast nationally on ESPN. With 13 Georgia state championships from 2001 to 2021 and a long record of players progressing to college scholarships and, eventually, the NFL, Buford is a football powerhouse – and the new stadium is a loud statement of the school's desire to keep it that way. Related: 'The stadium is secondary': how US sports teams became real-estate speculators If it feels like half of Buford is at the big game … they probably are. The Atlanta-area city has roughly 19,000 residents and the well-regarded high school (rebuilt in 2019 for $85m) has about 1,900 students. In 2010, another educational institution in the Atlanta region, Kennesaw State University, built a smart 10,200 capacity multi-use stadium for $16.5m. In the past 15 years, however, construction costs have soared, fan expectations have evolved, streaming and social media have changed how we consume sports and college athletes are now allowed to earn significant sums by monetising their personal brands. The trend is clear: newer, fancier, costlier. Phillip Beard Stadium has the typical uncovered benches familiar to anyone who's seen Friday Night Lights. Yet it also boasts more than 1,500 premium seats, 15 suites, a 3,600 sq ft double-sided video board and a 10,500 sq ft event space with a trophy wall. Buford City manager Bryan Kerlin told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the stadium had been paid for by the city general funds and its funding 'had no impact on teacher salaries, classroom resources, or any educational funding'. Still, there may well be other parts of the city the money could have been diverted to. Besides, blending spartan spaces for students and high-end facilities for corporate clients and rich alumni is increasingly common. It could make financial sense for schools aiming to maximise revenues and claw back some of the construction and operating costs, according to Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. 'The economics term is price differentiation,' he says. It's long been common in professional sports as teams adopt a strategy beloved of airlines, with their myriad fare classes and options: charging wildly different amounts for the same product based on variations in the customer experience. As the masses in the cheap seats generate the noise, corporate boxes can deliver thousands of dollars in income per event, giant video screens appeal to advertisers, and perhaps former students who've been wined and dined in air-conditioned comfort and enjoyed a perfect view of the action will be inspired to make generous donations to the alma mater. Upscale new arenas are also a way to entice fans off the couch in an era when it seems like almost every sporting contest, no matter how obscure, is streamed. 'Everyone knows their biggest competitor is being able to watch on TV,' Matheson says. Climate-controlled facilities mitigate against extreme weather, and with gargantuan video boards, televisions on concourses, myriad food and drink options and glitzy graphics on LED ribbon displays, fans can go to the stadium, experience the live atmosphere and still gaze at screens. Northwestern University in Illinois is building a privately-funded new stadium guided by the principle of 'premium for everybody,' reports Front Office Sports. At a projected cost of $862m it will be the most expensive college stadium ever, yet with only 35,000 seats it will hold 12,000 fewer people than the venue it is replacing. The theory underpinning the design is that modern fans want a more intimate and luxurious experience, with changing tastes – and a changing climate – rendering even relatively recent venues obsolete. In 2020 Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers quit their open-air 48,000-capacity ballpark, which opened in 1994, for a new 40,000-capacity building with a retractable roof. This season a minor league baseball team, the Salt Lake Bees, moved from Smith's Ballpark, which also opened in 1994, to a new home, hiking ticket prices and halving their seating capacity in the process. The concentration on high-end customers, of course, prices out fans who cannot afford to spend heavily on a night out at the game. 'In all, premium seating makes up one-sixth of seats at the new ballpark, whereas it contributed to just 3% of Smith's Ballpark's capacity,' the Salt Lake Tribune reported. 'The seats closest to the action aren't available for sale on a per-ticket basis; instead, those are field-level suites that must be reserved in their entirety.' Sports' growing focus on premium customers mirrors a shift in the American economy as a whole: this year a Moody's Analytics study found that the US economy is now deeply reliant on the richest households, with the top 10% of earners accounting for 50% of consumer spending, a sharp rise from recent decades. Logically, better facilities should breed better players, with victories leading to bigger attendances, swelling civic pride, adding to the appeal of the fast-growing suburbs where large high school stadiums are often located and boosting the prospects of the kids who dream of reaching the NFL. The trickle-down effect from the professional and college ranks to high schools isn't only a matter of swankier facilities. It's also visible in the potential financial incentives. College players have been permitted to make money from their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights since 2021. In June this year a former high school player filed a class-action lawsuit in California challenging restrictions on the ability of the state's high school student-athletes to profit from their NIL rights. It could pave the way for high school stars across the US to earn income and to transfer to other schools for sporting reasons. 'Corporations see a lot of untapped economic value in high school athletics,' Yaman Salahi, an attorney representing the player named in the suit, said in a statement to Front Office Sports, 'and we want to ensure that value is shared equitably with the athletes that create it.' Like teenaged soccer starlets at professional clubs in other countries, 16- and 17-year old American football players might one day be wealthy and famous, with a status to match the grandeur of their home stadiums. 'The difference here is that it's the local public school that's doing the development,' Matheson points out. For now, stadiums as sizeable and expensive as Buford's remain rare outside Texas, the state that is the epicentre of the high school football infrastructure arms race. In 2017 the independent school district in the Houston-area suburb of Katy opened a $70m, 12,000-capacity stadium adjacent to its existing and still operational 9,800-seat venue. According to the website more than a quarter of the 1,267 high school football stadiums in Texas can hold over 5,000 people, with eight seating at least 16,500. The combined capacity of 4.4 million is larger than the populations of 24 states. About a quarter have video scoreboards and 27 high school stadiums have opened in Texas since 2020. A $56m multi-purpose venue in the Houston-area city of La Porte is set to host its inaugural match this month. Texas produces more NFL players than any other state, found a study by the data analysis firm Lineups, with Houston the leading city. On the other hand, Texas is ranked 34th for educational attainment by US News & World Report, is far below the national average for teacher pay and expenditures per student, and according to one study, this year Texas teachers expect to spend on average $1,550 of their own money on classroom supplies. Many would argue there are better things to spend money on than school sports.
New York Times
32 minutes ago
- New York Times
8 factors that predict potential underdog College Football Playoff contenders
The AP's preseason poll dropped on Monday afternoon, and tucked inside were a list of the most obvious contenders to make the 2025-26 College Football Playoff — names like Texas, Penn State, Clemson, Georgia and last year's title-game combatants, Ohio State and Notre Dame. The Athletic's own Matt Baker recently disproved the notion that ranked preseason teams have an edge because they're ranked; rather, these squads are ranked highly because they're also the most likely playoff frontrunners, with more talent than anybody else in a sport where that tends to matter a lot (and in an era when it matters more than ever). Advertisement Either way, those 25 teams aren't necessarily going to sneak up on anyone. But we're also interested in teams from outside the preseason ranking who might still crash the playoff party. So I combed back through data since 2000 (the earliest season of turnover-margin data in Sports-Reference/CFB's database) for indicators that might predict an unranked AP preseason team's ability to still finish within the top 12 of the final pre-bowl poll — a general proxy for being in the playoff mix going into the committee's final weekend of decision-making. Many of these elements relate to the concept of regression toward the mean: the idea that teams tend to revert in the direction of longer-term norms over time, especially when we account for more volatile or luck-driven stats. It's useful to be able to create a hierarchy of those types of factors to look at — or regress away — when trying to identify playoff-worthy dark horses. With that in mind, let's run down the key questions to ask around any potential surprise contender — and the potential beneficiaries of those variables in 2025 — in order of predictive importance. This factor is not necessarily a surprising consideration — good teams tend to stay good going forward, especially in college football — but it's the most important metric for determining whether a team from outside the preseason top 25 will break through in spite of the pollsters' concerns. Of the 66 teams in our dataset that made the leap from outside the preseason poll, more than half (35) were coming off a season with a +5.0 Simple Rating System (SRS) score, which puts a team as roughly a top-50 team in the previous year's pecking order, and more had a previous rating of +10.0 or better (12) than were negative the previous season (nine). It's not impossible for a surprise team to really surprise, rising from a poor previous rating to crack the top 12, but it's rare. More often, those teams come from the top ranks of the prior year, which means BYU and Louisville get the most credit in this category, followed by USC, Iowa, Minnesota and Virginia Tech. Many of these teams suffered key personnel losses to some degree or another, so caution is advised, particularly before we get to the other indicators. Situations like Florida State last year — whose SRS declined by a shocking 21.7 points year-over-year — can happen. But as a baseline, the clear majority of teams stick within a touchdown of their previous SRS, for better or worse. Advertisement The second-most important predictor also involves SRS — but it concerns whether a school was abnormally good (or bad) by its own standards a year ago. In the spirit of regression to the mean, if a team has established a particular long-term level of play, then deviates from that level in one season, it is likely to return or at least move back to the long-term norm the following year. That means we're looking for squads whose 2024 ratings were far worse than usual. Newer FBS teams like James Madison (and Delaware, Missouri State, etc.) were excluded from consideration because they lacked a five-year sample of previous seasons. Tulsa and Kent State top the list, but are usually just mediocre and were among the worst teams in FBS last season. They are good candidates to improve, but not to make the CFP. More realistically, Air Force, Oklahoma State and Florida State all have the potential to improve quite a bit through a combination of regression, the portal and recruiting (in the case of OSU and FSU), and the other built-in ways that prevent competitive programs from staying down for too long. Much to the chagrin of mid-major fans across the nation, the college football power structure favors elite teams in elite conferences whenever it can. So it makes sense that a potential dark-horse candidate from a more prestigious conference is going to get the benefit of the doubt in the rankings before a team trying to make their bid from a smaller conference. In terms of our 2025 candidates in the categories we've looked at so far, that big-conference bias is good news for Iowa — who has the best combination of 2024 SRS and the potential to regress toward an even higher rating based on its previous norms — plus Louisville, USC, BYU, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin and the rest of the power-conference teams we've discussed. Meanwhile, the American and, to a lesser extent, Sun Belt are the epicenter of teams that have solid indicators, but their conference might get held against them, barring an automatic bid. Advertisement Though it sometimes gets mentioned in betting circles, one of my favorite semi-hidden stats remains 'yards per point' (YPP). At its core, YPP measures how efficiently a team converts yardage into points on offense — and how inefficiently it forces opponents to do the same on defense. Teams with a lower YPP than their opponents are essentially turning field position into points at a better rate, which translates into a higher scoring margin and, usually, more wins. Like turnover margin (more on that stat later), it can be volatile from year to year, bouncing around with red-zone execution, third-down conversion rates, special teams performance and 'bend-but-don't-break' defense. But when a team consistently posts a strong YPP differential, like the New England Patriots did throughout their dynasty, it's often a sign of something more sustainable. In our historical sample, teams that had lower YPP differentials between offense and defense in the previous season — negative numbers are better because they mean you traded fewer yards for the same points than your opponent did — tended to be more likely to make the leap from unranked to the top 12 after controlling for everything else. Our group of historical surprise teams had an average prior YPP differential of -1.3 and 62 percent of them were negative in the previous season. That's a bit counter to the usual wisdom that YPP is heavily luck-based and likely to regress against teams who relied on it. In this case, it may be picking up on a team's strengths that don't always show up in other conventional stats, like situational execution, special teams efficiency and a general ability to squeeze more points out of opportunities. If that holds true, Army and Iowa stand out among the unranked masses for their efficiency on offense and ability to bend, not break, on defense. In a less contrarian statistical finding, we won't be surprised to learn that teams that won fewer games than we'd expect based on their points scored and allowed — via the Pythagorean Formula — tend to be more likely to bounce back the following season. More importantly for this exercise, they are also prone to being overlooked by the preseason pollsters, who may tend to judge a team off of its standard win-loss record without digging into extenuating stats like its point differential. That could give a boost to teams like UCF and especially Auburn, plus Virginia Tech slightly lower down the list, each of which was unlucky with close games compared to blowouts in 2024. Like with Pythagorean luck, another well-known factor that regresses to the mean for football teams over time tends to be turnovers. Yes, there are some notable exceptions — we go back to Bill Belichick's Patriots for an example from the NFL — but generally speaking, a team with an outlier turnover margin in either direction has a tendency to move toward the middle the following season. That means for breakthrough candidates, we're looking for teams coming off poor turnover differentials in 2024. Most notable here is Florida State, whose uncharacteristically awful 2024 was driven at least some by that minus-16 turnover margin. Plus, lurking just at the periphery of this list are Auburn, UCF, Oklahoma State, Arkansas and West Virginia — all were at minus-eight or worse and have a number of additional factors pointing to better days in 2025. Advertisement One of the interesting philosophical arguments around preseason polls is what exactly they're attempting to rank. Most view them as an accounting of top-to-bottom roster talent on paper going into the season, which incidentally is why their basketball cousin is a good predictor of March Madness results even after controlling for season-long performance. However, they're not necessarily trying to peg where a team will end up by season's end. In theory, the two rankings ought to be correlated, but differences come about because of scheduling, which is an area we can project in our search for surprise playoff contenders. In our historical dataset, teams that went from a harder schedule (in terms of opponent SRS ratings) during one season to an easier projected schedule (based on a weighted multi-year average of SRS for its opponents) in the following preseason tended to be more likely to catch the initial polls by surprise. Factoring in schedules, teams like Virginia Tech, USC, FSU, Kansas and Washington (among others) are being underrated in their playoff potential. This might be the most fascinating result in our entire experiment. In the historical data, there was a real effect where unranked teams whose coaches were in either their third or fourth season at a particular stop (consecutively, not overall) were more likely to finish among the top 12 in the pre-bowl rankings even after controlling for everything else. Why might this be? My theory is that those seasons come in the sweet spot of a coach's tenure. By that point, they've had enough time to install their systems, bring in players who fit their style and establish the culture they want — but at the same time, their message is still fresh, morale is still high and opponents may not have fully adapted to their tendencies yet. Among our common dark-horse candidates from the rest of the factors above, teams with coaches in the third or fourth year with their current program include USC's Lincoln Riley, Jeff Brohm with Louisville, Hugh Freeze with Auburn, Brent Pry with Virginia Tech and Matt Rhule with Nebraska. This is the least important factor. It's not impossible for a newer — or older, in the case of Kirk Ferentz in his 27th year at Iowa — coach to also surprise from unranked territory, but there does seem to be something about that sweet spot that makes a team more primed to break out. Now, we combine all of the predictive factors from above into a single ranking, weighted by the importance of each sub-category: Based on past trends, we would expect USC to be most likely to rise from outside the top 25 to serious playoff contention by the end of the regular season, followed by Louisville, Auburn, Virginia Tech and a bunch of Big Ten and Big 12 schools. Not all of these teams jumped off the page in every category, but most were coming off a decent SRS season and/or had a subpar season by their standards. They're all in power conferences. The highest-ranked non-power candidate was Tulane at No. 27. Advertisement The odds are that at least a few of these teams — or teams like them a bit further down the ranking — will make the jump into the playoff conversation, as an average of 2.75 teams per year started unranked and finished 12th or higher in the pre-bowl AP poll each year in our sample. We've trended toward even more of that chaos in recent years; four teams have done that per season since 2021. So if you're thinking about this week's polls, remember that while the AP's preseason top 25 is stacked with the sport's most obvious playoff threats, history says the field won't be limited to just those hyped-up names. Every season brings a few gate-crashers from outside the group of teams we thought we knew to watch, and our list is full of schools that check the right boxes to be those spoilers in 2025. (Photo of Lincoln Riley: Kirby Lee / Imagn Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
