Shohei Ohtani homers in 3rd straight game, giving him 42 this year and starting a Dodgers rally
The Dodgers trailed 7-0 when Ohtani connected off Shaun Anderson with one out, driving his fourth homer in five games into the right field bleachers to tie Philadelphia's Kyle Schwarber for the NL lead. Seattle's Cal Raleigh leads the majors with 45 homers.
Ohtani also started a rally: Mookie Betts and Will Smith then singled before Max Muncy brought them home with his 17th homer, trimming the Dodgers' deficit to 7-4.
Ohtani has a 10-game hitting streak in August, his longest of the season, and he has four homers among his nine hits in the Dodgers' last five games. The two-way superstar is the presumptive frontrunner for his fourth MVP award.
Ohtani played his first six major league seasons in Anaheim, winning two MVP awards and a Rookie of the Year award while never playing on a winning team.
He is scheduled to pitch at Angel Stadium on Wednesday night for the first time since he left for a $700 million contract with the Dodgers and promptly won the World Series.
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Yahoo
6 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Roki Sasaki starts his path back to the Dodgers
The Dodgers had their first bobblehead promotion for Roki Sasaki in early August 2025. The promotion made sense when it was announced. One can never tell about the timing of these events when they are announced. Yes, Blake Snell had his first Dodgers bobblehead night while he was still on the injured list, which accordingly deflated the price on the secondary market. Good news requires celebration, as it was easy to forget that the Dodgers won the Sasaki sweepstakes, much to the agita of most of the league. However, the team has made some truly boneheaded moves on and off the field in 2025 (including introducing variable pricing to tours, signing Michael Conforto, etc.) At the beginning of the year, in my wildest nightmares, I would have envisioned that the Dodgers would seemingly drive Sasaki's development into a ditch. When I last left off coverage of Sasaki, after shenanigans involving burgers, Sasaki had an uneven debut in Japan, and a solid start in Texas was wiped out because Kirby Yates decided to pitch unscheduled batting practice to finish a game in Arlington. Sasaki so far in the majors has thrown exactly two pitches over 100 mph, and they were thrown to the first batter of the first inning of his major league debut in Tokyo: Ian Happ. The first was fouled off. The second turned into his first major league out. Sasaki made three more starts after Arlington, ranging from okay to literally terrible. Sasaki was holding back with his fastball, which was to address durability and control issues based on what was publicly said by the Dodgers. While Sasaki always had elite speed with his fastball, the ongoing issue was the trajectory of the pitch, per Mark Prior to The Athletic in May: 'It's not a shape that's going to generate a lot of swing-and-miss,' pitching coach Mark Prior said. 'On anybody. We know that. But he's trying to effectively get outs as best he can.' Sasaki has historically overcome that shape by pure velocity, laying out a 'homework assignment' to prospective clubs this winter in hopes of getting that back consistently. But that triple-digit fastball he hoped to reclaim has averaged 96.4 mph this season. Saturday, [May 3, 2025], it was 94.8 mph. That's largely by design. When he reared back for 101 mph in his first major-league inning, he sprayed fastballs across the Tokyo Dome. It wasn't sustainable.'Roki, everybody knows he throws 100,' Prior said. 'He's not throwing 100 with us. That's something that I think he was trying to train and get to it, which we tried to help as much as we could. But he also felt like it affected his command tremendously in those first couple outings.' Accordingly, hitters have hit six homers off Sasaki — all on the fastball. While hitters so far in 2025 have a .225/.351/.411 slash line against Sasaki, the batting average and slugging average against for the fastball are .253/.494. That swing is like going from 2025-Ryan McMahon (.225/.402) to 2025-James Wood (.260/.488). For reference, the league average is .246/.402. Sasaki went down with right shoulder impingement in mid-May and started throwing bullpen sessions last month with a timetable of a late August return. So far, Sasaki has a 1-1 record with a 4.72 ERA. He has roughly an equal number of strikeouts (24) to walks (22) and a FIP of 6.16. Here is what I thought the Dodgers would do after the team won the Sasaki sweepstakes. I figured the team would send Sasaki to Triple-A Oklahoma City for a couple of months to ease into the transition of playing baseball in the U.S. and polish his badly needed third pitch. Did I expect some East Meets West promotional shenanigans, say a samurai cowboy or Godzilla-like promotions, while in Oklahoma City? A little. History's timeline is weird; technically, there is overlap between samurai and Abraham Lincoln. Before Nippon Professional Baseball social media comes at me, yes, Sasaki was a professional for four seasons. But by his own admission, he was an unfinished project. I figured the Dodgers might bring Sasaki to Japan on the taxi squad before easing him into the grinder that is MLB's regular season. Instead, the Dodgers chucked Sasaki into the deep end of the figurative pool. I was taught how to swim by being tossed by my uncle into the deep end of my grandfather's pool. Granted, I nearly drowned a couple of times, which I still bring up at family get-togethers, but I do swim like a fish, though. Sometimes trauma is not the best teacher. While I was and remain enamored with Sasaki's ceiling, I was very clear about the areas that Sasaki needed to improve upon arriving in MLB (including durability and the viability of a third pitch, his slider): One can envision a Japanese Paul Skenes with a higher upside in the right light. But in the least flattering light, if you are having flashbacks to Dustin May with subtitles, you would not technically be wrong except for one aspect: Sasaki has yet to suffer an arm injury. (emphasis added.) I suppose the shoulder is not the arm injury that I was worried about, but I cannot help but feel like I monkey's paw'd myself. Yes, the Monster of the Reiwa Era arrived, but instead of the classic monster we all know and love, his inaugural campaign has had more in common with the 1998 Roland Emmerich flop that entirely missed the point of the character. If your action movie has Matthew Broderick as a lead, you have made a terrible movie. Also, when the copyright to the 1998 monster reverted to Toho Company, Ltd., the original Japanese creator, the company stripped God from the monster's name. It renamed the creature Zilla, which they brought back to hilarious effect in 2006. For the record, the designer of the 1998 version of Godzilla did not mind being mocked, as he was happy his creation was embraced, of sorts, in the Toho canon. Any final determination about Sasaki in MLB is wildly premature. The bloom is off, and anyone who was forecasting any award for Sasaki in 2025 looks silly now. But what is past is prologue; the question now is, where does Sasaki go from here? When Yoshinobu Yamamoto came over last year, I argued he made a bad first impression, but he had a pedigree unmatched by anyone in MLB. However, when it mattered most, Yamamoto was the most reliable arm in the Dodgers' rotation. Sasaki never had that pedigree, only the physical tools and stuff that exceeded just about every pitcher I could think of, not named Paul Skenes, in my forty years of following baseball. Dustin May is now gone, which makes using him as the benchmark for Sasaki a bit awkward. As an aside, May went on the record saying that the Dodgers pushed him out, which is a bit rich considering that I was arguing for the Dodgers to demote him last month. When Sasaki returns, he and the Dodgers will have a second chance to make a first impression. I fear that Sasaki's baseball comparison now is Bobby Miller, a once-cant-miss prospect who managed to get relegated to the bullpen in record time after getting a bobblehead after a promising rookie campaign. While wonder is the cost of experience, I freely admit it when I am a fan of someone, especially one who wears their emotions on their sleeves. Saying the worst-case scenario out loud does not make it true; in fact, sometimes you have to face things head-on to literally eat your words. I got a Sasaki bobblehead on the secondary market for $50, because sometimes I am a sucker for a gesture. My hope is that Sasaki can build something this year. If unchanged, at worst, the Dodgers turned a moderately successful pro from Japan with amazing stuff into a Double-A, which is an indictment of everyone involved. At this point, Sasaki can only reasonably get better. I have to believe that the Dodgers' pitching staff can figure this puzzle out. Sasaki threw a bullpen session this week, and the team is being flexible as to plans for the coming stretch drive. What Sasaki does next is an open question. Sasaki pitched three innings in a simulated game last Friday at Dodger Stadium, and will start a rehab assignment Thursday night for Oklahoma City. Not to be Yoda, but there is another that I have kept tabs on during the NPB season as a person of interest in the interim. Being photographed in Dodger gear will do that, but this sneak peek may take a couple of years, barring a lockout. To conclude this recap of Sasaki, we shall shift gears to a time that seems so very long ago. I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to highlight something right that the Dodgers did last month that escaped just about everyone's notice in my circle. Thirty years ago, the original maverick from Japan touched down in Los Angeles: Hideo Nomo. The Dodgers released a documentary about Nomomania, which is well worth your time to watch, and includes everyone from Nomo to front office personnel to Mike Piazza. Fernandomania was two years before I was born. Like Stephen Nelson, I was a 12-year-old boy poorly mimicking Nomo's tornado windup in trying to throw Tom Candiotti's knuckleball. While a generation of fans holds a special place in their heart for Clayton Kershaw as a once-in-a-lifetime talent, for me, that spot was filled by an awkward maverick who absolutely challenged and transformed my view of baseball.
San Francisco Chronicle
7 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
From Red Grange to Travis Hunter, the AP All-America team has been the 'gold standard' for a century
For 100 years, The Associated Press has honored the best of the best in college football with its annual All-America team. Nearly 2,000 men — from Red Grange to Travis Hunter — have earned the distinction of AP All-American in a tradition that rivals the longest in the history of the game. 'For anyone named an AP All-America, the honor has immediate cachet,' said John Heisler, who worked in media relations at Notre Dame for 41 years and is the author of 11 books on the Irish's football history. 'If anyone received multiple All-America honors, it always seemed like the AP recognition would be at the top of the list.' Notre Dame leads all schools with 85 AP first-team picks since the news organization's All-America honors debuted in 1925. The Irish are followed by Alabama (83), Ohio State (79), Southern California (77) and Oklahoma (75). The Southeastern Conference has had the most first-team picks with 340. The Big Ten has had 331. Independents, which anchored the sport's power structure into the 1950s, have had 309. There have been 204 players twice named first-team All-American, including 12 three-time picks. Malcolm Moran, who covered college football for four decades at The New York Times and other major newspapers, said the AP All-America team drove growth of the sport because it introduced football stars to pockets of the country where exposure to the game was limited to newsreels. 'The thing that connected 3,000 miles of players," said Moran, now director of the Sports Capital Journalism Program at IU Indianapolis, 'was the AP All-America team.' It still does. 'The AP All-America teams are probably the most consistent throughout the last 100 years and have been considered the measure most often used when chronicling the history of college football's greatest players,' said Claude Felton, who retired as senior associate athletic director at Georgia last year after overseeing the Bulldogs' sports communications for 45 years. How it began Walter Camp, regarded as the 'Father of Football,' is credited with being the first to honor the top players across the college game. Camp starred as a player at Yale and later was its coach, and he was the sport's chief rules maker and ambassador in the early days. He saw football as a means to develop manly traits necessary for success in the male-dominated corporate and industrial worlds at the turn of the 20th century, Camp biographer Julie Des Jardins said. Camp named 11 players to his first All-America team, in 1889, and their names appeared in This Week's Sport, a publication owned by Camp associate Caspar Whitney. Camp selected All-America teams every year until his death, in 1925. Famed sports writer Grantland Rice selected the Walter Camp teams into the 1950s, and coaches and college sports information directors have picked the teams for the Walter Camp Football Foundation since the 1960s. What constitutes an All-American has evolved since the days of Camp, who didn't necessarily look at the All-Americans as individual standouts. To Camp, it was more about team. 'He almost looked at them as the ones who were doing all the work under the hood,' Des Jardins said. 'He really glorified the center because you could barely see what he was doing. But the center was essential. And he also was part of the machine that made the machine work better than the sum of its parts.' By the 1920s, when a multitude of media outlets were naming All-America teams, individual performance was the main criteria. Grange, Bronko Nagurski, Davey O'Brien, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard became synonymous with gridiron greatness in an era when sports fans relied on the nation's sports pages and magazines to be arbiters of who was best. The NCAA football record book lists 22 organizations that have named All-America teams, and there have been dozens of others. Most have come and gone. The AP team Like Camp, Alan J. Gould, the AP sports editor in the 1920s and '30s, saw All-America teams as a way to promote the sport and create a national conversation. He unveiled the inaugural All-America team the first week of December in 1925. Those early teams were selected by consensus of 'prominent eastern coaches,' according to dispatches at the time. As it was then and remains today, the picks can be fodder for debate, the conversation around game days and postseason hopes. In a write-up about that inaugural team, it was noted that Dartmouth coach Jess Hawley chose three of his own players — not surprising given the undefeated team's dominance that year — but one of his omissions prompted second guessing. 'Hawley honors three of his own stars, Parker, Diehl and Oberlander with places on the team but does not pick his brilliant end, Tully, who has been placed on nearly every all-star team named so far," the AP story said. No worries. George Tully got enough votes from other coaches to make the AP All-America team anyway. The methods for selecting the AP All-America teams have varied over the years. Coaches' picks gave way to a media panel headed by the AP sports editor and made up of sports writers from the AP and newspapers across the nation. Later, the teams were picked by a small group of AP sports writers. For the past two decades, the teams have been selected by some five dozen media members who vote in the weekly AP Top 25 football poll. 'The AP was the one I that cared about -- the writers telling me that I was the player that deserved to be All-American,' 2004 All-America receiver Braylon Edwards of Michigan said. "That was the one that I was waiting for.' Exposure for the AP All-America team was elevated when selected players were featured during a segment of entertainer Bob Hope's Christmas television special. Each player, including the likes of Earl Campbell, Billy Sims and Marcus Allen, would jog on stage. Hope would make a funny remark and then the next player would come out. The tradition lasted 24 years, until 1994. 'That's the first thing I thought of when I saw 'AP All-American.' I thought of Bob Hope," Moran said. Where the AP once was the chief purveyor of national college football news, there are now myriad outlets where fans can get their fix. But through all the changes in the media landscape, the AP All-America team has endured and continues to have the most gravitas. 'This," Moran said, 'has been the gold standard.' ___
NBC Sports
8 minutes ago
- NBC Sports
AP All-America honor resonates for some of college football's all-time greats
Desmond Howard walked up a ramp in Schembechler Hall, looking at black-and-white pictures hanging on a white wall where Michigan honors its All-America football players. The 1991 Heisman Trophy winner stopped to point out the image of two-time AP All-America receiver Anthony Carter, who starred for the program several seasons before Howard crossed the Ohio border to become a Wolverine. Howard grinned after taking a few more steps and seeing his high-top fade hairstyle captured in a photo that cemented his legacy for the college football program with the most wins. 'You're remembered as one of the greats, that's for sure,' Howard told the AP. 'You put on the V-neck sweater with the maize block 'M,' and you take your picture and you know that you're in a special group.' With the 2025 season here, the AP named an all-time All-America team to mark the 100th anniversary of the first team from the early days of the sport. Many outlets have named All-America teams over the decades, but only a few such as AP have stuck around. A number of player sspoke with AP about what the honor meant: Hugh Green, Pittsburgh When the three-time All-America defensive end is asked who was the most influential people in his life, he says Bob Hope. Hope's annual Christmas specials featured AP All-Americans from 1971 to 1994 and Green recalled the late comedian pulling him aside during commercial breaks to rave about his play in games that were not on TV. 'Kids today might take it a bit different, but we should always have a person that has his credentials do the AP All-American show every year,' Green said. 'That was something very special and unique.' Herschel Walker, Georgia Walker won a national championship as a freshman with the Bulldogs and said he got too much credit over teammates like the offensive linemen who paved the way for his success. The three-time All-America running back is proud, though, to have shown that someone from Wrightsville, Georgia, with a population of about 3,000 people, could make it big. 'I wanted to inspire people from my little hometown — or kids from small towns around this country — to let them know you can do it too,' he said. Anthony Carter, Michigan The late Bo Schembechler was known for a run-heavy offense at Michigan, but that didn't stop a 155-pound freshman from becoming a big-play threat right away and eventually a two-time AP All-America. 'No one thought I would last in the Big Ten,' Carter said. 'To be an All-American means a lot, coming out of Michigan because we didn't throw the ball a lot. I wouldn't have achieved what I did without a lot of great teammates.' Orlando Pace, Ohio State Buckeye Grove is a small patch of land with a sea of trees a few steps south of Ohio Stadium, a place where Ohio State honors its All-America football players with a buckeye tree and a plaque. 'When you get older, you kind of appreciate those things,' said Pace, a two-time All-America offensive tackle. 'I have kids that go to Ohio State, and I always tell them to go by and check out my tree.' Greg Jones, Michigan State He played in 20 games, including the playoffs, as a rookie linebacker for the New York Giants when they won the Super Bowl in 2012. His NFL career ended after a six-game stint the next season in Jacksonville. His back-to-back All-America honors, however, still shine as accomplishments. 'It's etched in history,' Jones said, holding one of the plaques with his All-America certificate. 'Obviously, you can get cut from an NFL team, you can lose your job, but that can stay forever.' Braylon Edwards, Michigan The Wolverines' all-time leader in receptions, yards receiving and touchdown catches was aware two decades ago that there were a lot of college football All-America teams, but recalled one being the most coveted. 'The AP was the one I that cared about,' Edwards said. 'The writers telling me that I was the player that deserved to be All-American, that was the one that I was waiting for.' James Laurinaitis, Ohio State When the three-time All-America linebacker takes recruits on tours as an assistant coach, Buckeye Grove is always a stop on the visit. 'It's pretty cool to kind of honor that tradition,' he said. Ndamukong Suh, Nebraska He is the only Associated Press College Football Player of the Year to exclusively play defense, but still laments that he finished fourth in Heisman Trophy voting. He was an AP All-America in 2009. 'The Associated Press saw something special in me that the Heisman didn't,' Suh said. 'I am all 10 toes down with The Associated Press.' Aidan Hutchinson, Michigan As the son of second-team AP All-America defensive tackle Chris Hutchinson, earning a spot on the All-America wall alongside his father was a goal for Aidan Hutchinson during his senior year four years ago. 'There's a lot of All-American teams, but AP is different,' he said. 'It's legendary.' Terrion Arnold, Alabama The Crimson Tide recognizes its All-America players on a wall in their training facility, intentionally putting the displays in a room recruits visit on campus, and at various locations at Bryant-Denny Stadium. 'Just walking in there and being a little kid and just thinking, one day that would be me, and then just going out there and fulfilling that dream,' Arnold said. 'It's also one of those things when I take my future family to Alabama, and look at it, `Son, this is what your dad was like.''
