Brittney Sykes scores 10 of her 19 in 4th, Mystics beat Storm 74-69
Kiki Iriafen finished with 10 points and 10 rebounds for Washington (11-10) and her six double-doubles this season are tied with Chamique Holdsclaw for franchise's single-season rookie record.
Ezi Magbegor scored a season-high 19 points, Nneka Ogwumike added 16 and Skylar Diggins had 10 for the Storm. Tiffany Mitchell, who was signed by Seattle on Thursday after the nine-year veteran was waived by Las Vegas on June 30, finished with 12 points.
Ogwumike made a layup to cut the deficit to 70-69 with 40.8 seconds to play but Sykes answered with a driving layup late in the shot clock before Diggins stepped out of bounds with 17 seconds remaining. Sykes made to free throws to cap the scoring.
Diggins finished with four assists and moved into a tie with New York's Natasha Cloud for eighth in WNBA history with 1,638 career assists.
The Mystics used a 15-4 run to take a 62-61 lead with 4:28 left in the game. Citron capped the spurt with a 3-pointer and then a driving layup.
The Storm's Gabby Williams limped off the court in the closing seconds. She finished with six points on 2-of-9 shooting, and had five rebounds and four assists.
Seattle shot just 36% (25 of 69) from the field.
The Mystics play Tuesday at Los Angeles. The Storm host Golden State on Wednesday.
___
AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball
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MLB players have even ditched their clubs midseason in hopes to unlock something to improve their pitching repertoire. Boston Red Sox right-handed pitcher Walker Buehler left the Dodgers last season to test himself at the Cressey Sports Performance training center near Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., before returning to eventually pitch the final out of the 2024 World Series. Driveline is not alone. Ben Brewster, co-founder of Tread Athletics, another baseball development company based in North Carolina, said high-school-aged players have been attracted to his performance facility because they see the results that MLB players and teammates achieve after continued training sessions. Tread Athletics claims to have a role in more than 250 combined MLB draft picks or free agent signings, and says it has helped more than 1,000 high school players earn college opportunities. Kansas City Royals left-hander Cole Ragans achieved a 4.4-mph increase from 2022 to 2023, the largest in MLB that year. With the velocity increase after his work at Tread Athletics, Ragans went from a league-average relief pitcher to a postseason ace in less than a year. So what makes Ragans' development different from that of a teenage prospect reaching out to Tread Athletics? 'Ragans still could go from 92-94 miles per hour to 96 to 101,' Brewster said. 'He still has room, but relatively speaking, he was a lot closer to his potential than, like, a random 15-year-old kid throwing 73 miles per hour.' Meister knows Ragans well. When the southpaw was a member of the Rangers' organization, the orthopedic surgeon performed Tommy John surgery on Ragans twice. (Ragans has also battled a rotator cuff strain this season and has been out since early June.) 'These velocities and these spin rates are very worrisome,' Meister said. 'And we see that in, in and of itself, just in looking at how long these Tommy John procedures last.' Throwing hard is not an overnight experience. Brewster shared a stern warning for the pitching development process, using weightlifting as an example. He said weightlifters can try to squat 500 pounds daily without days off, or attempt to squat 500 pounds with their knees caving in and buckling because of terrible form. There's no 100% safe way to lift 500 pounds, just like there is no fail-safe way of throwing 100 mph. There's always risk. It's all in the form. Lifting is a science, and so is pitching — finding the safest way to train to increase velocity without injury. 'The responsible way to squat 500 pounds would be going up in weight over time, having great form and monitoring to make sure you're not going too heavy, too soon,' Brewster said. 'When it comes to pitching, you can manage workload. You can make sure that mechanically, they don't have any glaring red flags.' 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Meister said baseball development companies may look great on the periphery — sending youth players to top colleges and the professional ranks — but it's worth noting what they aren't sharing publicly. 'What they don't show you is that [youth athletes] are walking into our offices, three or six months or nine months later.' Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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Is there a way to mitigate pitching injuries? The Rays (and Dodgers) may shed some light
Tommy John surgery was never supposed to go this far. It was once a cross-your-fingers-and-pray fix for a career-ending injury. Now, MLB teams cycle through as many as 40-plus pitchers a year, knowing that surgery is a phone call away. Just ask John himself, a left-hander who never threw all that hard, only reaching the mid-80s on his sinking fastball. The soft-throwing lefty was having his best year as a Dodgers starting pitcher in 1974. He didn't have the strikeout acumen of teammate Andy Messersmith, or the ace makeup of future Hall of Famer Don Sutton. But what John did have was consistency. John consistently pitched late into games, and sent opposing hitters back to the dugout without reaching first base. Read more: Pitching injuries continue to be an issue in MLB. How it's impacting pitchers at all levels 'The game of baseball is 27 outs,' said John, now 82. 'It wasn't about throwing hard. It's, how do I get you out?' He was the first to go under the knife. The first to lead pitchers through a dangerous cycle of throwing as hard as possible, knowing the safeguard is surgery. 'I threw one pitch and boom, the ligament exploded,' John said. John's arm injury left a sensation akin to what an amputee feels after losing a limb. In 1978, he told Sports Illustrated, 'It felt as if I had left my arm someplace else.' He didn't feel pain. He felt loss. His left arm was his career. It was the direct cause for his toeing the Dodger Stadium mound in the first place. Then, John went on to pitch another 15 years in MLB. It's the same loss that Hall of Fame Dodgers left-hander Sandy Koufax felt when he retired at age 30 after numerous arm injuries, which could have likely been fixed if current elbow and shoulder surgeries had existed in 1966. It's the same loss that Texas Rangers team physician Keith Meister sees walking daily into his office. Today, Meister can view MRI scans of elbow tears and can tell pitchers where and how they hold the baseball. The tear patterns are emblematic of the pitches being thrown in the first place. The solution — Tommy John surgery, a once-revolutionary elbow operation — replaces a torn or partially damaged ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow with a tendon from somewhere else in the body. The operation is no quick fix. It requires a 13- to 14-month recovery period, although Meister said some pitchers may require just 12 months — and some up to 18. Meister, who is currently tallying data and researching the issue, wants to be part of the change. Midway through an October phone interview, he bluntly stopped in his tracks and asked a question. 'What is the average length of a major-league career for a major-league pitcher?' he said. Meister explained that the average career for an MLB pitcher is just 2.6 years. Along with numerous other interviewees, he compared the epidemic to another sport's longevity problem: the National Football League running back. 'People say to me, 'Well, that sounds like a running back in football,'' Meister said. 'Think about potentially the money that gets saved with not having to even get to arbitration, as long as organizations feel like they can just recycle and, you know, next man up, right?' Financial ramifications play close to home between pitchers and running backs as well. Lower durability and impact have led to decreasing running-back salaries. If pitchers continue to have shorter careers, as Meister puts it, MLB franchises might be happy to cycle through minimum-salary pitchers instead of shelling out large salaries for players who remain on the injured list rather than in the bullpen. The Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays have shuffled through pitchers at league extremes over the last five years. In the modern era — since 1901 — only the Rays and Dodgers have used more than 38 pitchers in a season three times each. Tampa used 40-plus pitchers each year from 2021 to 2023. 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They're healthy, they're able to pitch, they're able to post and they're able to go deeper into games,' Meister said. 'Maybe teams will see this and they'll be like, 'Wait a minute, look what these guys won with. Look how they won. We don't need to do all this crap anymore.'' The Dodgers, on the other hand, rank ninth in sweeper usage (1,280 thrown through Friday) and have used 16 starting pitchers (14 in traditional starting roles). Meanwhile, their starting pitchers have compiled the fewest innings in MLB. Rob Hill, the Dodgers' director of pitching, began his career at Driveline Baseball. The Dodgers hired him in 2020. Since then, the franchise has churned out top pitching prospect after top pitching prospect, many of whom throw devastating sweepers and change-ups. Read more: Hernández: Secret to Yoshinobu Yamamoto's 2025 success? His hero-like effort in NLDS Game 5 As of Saturday, the Dodgers have 10 pitchers on the injured list, six of whom underwent an elbow or shoulder operation — and since 2021, the team leads MLB in injury list stints for pitchers. 'There are only probably two teams in baseball that can just sit there and say, 'Well, if I get 15 to 20 starts out of my starting pitchers, it doesn't matter, because I'll replace them with somebody else I can buy,'' Meister said. 'That's the Yankees and the Dodgers.' He continued: 'Everybody else, they've got to figure out, wait a minute, this isn't working, and we need to preserve our commodity, our pitchers.' Outside of organizational strategy changes, like the Rays have made, Meister has expressed rule changes to MLB. He's suggested rethinking how the foul ball works or toying with the pitch clock to give a slightly longer break to pitchers. He said pitchers don't get a break on the field the same way hitters do in the batter's box. 'Part of the problem here is that a hitter has an ability to step out of the box and take a timeout,' Meister said. 'He has to go cover a foul ball and run over to first base and run back to the mound. He should have an opportunity take a break and take a blow.' Meister hopes to discuss reintroducing 'tack' — a banned sticky substance that helps a pitcher's grip on the ball — to the rulebook, something that pitchers such as Max Scherzer and Tyler Glasnow have called a factor in injuries. Meister has fellow leading experts on his side too. 'Myself and Dr. [Neal] ElAttrache are very good friends, and we talk at length about this,' said Meister. Meister explained that the lack of stickiness on the baseball causes pitchers to squeeze the ball as hard as possible. The 'death grip on the ball,' Meister said, causes the muscles on the inner side of the elbow to contract in the arm and then extend when the ball is released. The extension of the inner elbow muscles is called an eccentric load, which can create injury patterns. The harder the grip, the more violent the eccentric load becomes when a sweeper pitch, for example, is thrown, he said. 'Just let guys use a little bit of pine tar on their fingertips,' Meister said, adding that the pitchers already have to adjust to an inconsistent baseball, one that changes from season to season. 'Not, put it on the baseball, not glob the baseball with it, but put a little pine tar on their fingertips and give them a little better adherence to the baseball.' According to the New Yorker, MLB is exploring heavier or larger baseballs to slow pitchers' arm movements, potentially reducing strain on the UCL during maximum-effort pitches. Read more: Four major questions the Dodgers face in the second half of the season Meister, however, said there does not seem to be a sense of urgency to fix the game, with a years-long process to make any fixes. In short, Meister is ready to try anything. For a man who has made a career off baseball players nervously sitting in his office waiting room, awaiting news that could alter their careers forever, Meister wants MLB to help him stop players from ever scheduling that first appointment. 'To me, it's not about the surgery any more as much as it is, what can we do to prevent, and what can we do to alter, the approach that the game now takes?' Meister said. 'It's very, very dangerous.' Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
