No error, but LF Morabito and CF Taylor both missing a ball in the gap then Taylor stares at Morabito after he hit the wall, rather than chasing the ball, in what's surely a Mets moment.
For all making plans, on the "Plan Your Visit/Conditions" webpage:
>Titus Canyon Road: Is temporarily open after initial repairs. It may be closed occassional days. It will be closed for the second phase of repairs October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027.
So, there's an exact date.
(An NPS news release republished on the Eastern Sierra website from about the same time said through end of April for Phase 2, but with the caveat that it could run later. I'd take the Sept. 30 as likely more than April 30.)
Love them for the color and the shooting challenge. Arrowleaf clover and Indian blanket.
Hagerman NWR, north Texas, earlier this month
It alliterates! From my March vacation. I've been to Salt Creek before, but man, I don't remember the biting flies being that bad before. I don't know if it was the record-crushing heat wave, the leftover bits of Lake Manly downstream, or what.
Anyway, the pipit was a semi-lifer. I'd seen one once before, but only a crappy photo.
In what's likely his second-last rehab start, he hit 100 (rounding up) and threw 5.1 innings.
>Cole threw 56 pitches for strikes and averaged 97 mph with his fastball.
>He allowed one run and six hits with six strikeouts and one walk in his sixth minor league start. It was his first at Triple-A after two for High-A Hudson Valley and three for Double-A Somerset. He was pulled with an 0-2 count to Eric Wagaman and relieved by Yerry De Los Santos with a 2-1 lead.
With Fried on the IL, the Yankees will be waiting.
Hit by a 111-mile comebacker through the box by Spencer Jones.
>"He's going to be down a long time," Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said.
>A team trainer, Mendoza and catcher Luis Torrens checked on Holmes after he absorbed the comebacker, but he didn't show any obvious signs of discomfort and stayed in the game.
He actually stayed in the game for the rest of the fourth and two outs into the fifth.
No video at the ESPN link, but you can find it on Shitter linked off the CBS story. It notes how this hits an already depleted rotation, which had Holmes as about the only bright spot.
More from my late March vacation. With Furnace Creek hitting 110 that day, it made me mindful of that being near the top end of temperature for borax extraction, as well as the fun of driving those 20-mule teams. I drove into Mustard Canyon and then got a "badlands" shot.
Up two spots from last week.
Per Schoenfield's summary:
>Michael McGreevy delivered back-to-back scoreless starts, allowing just four hits over 12 innings, to lower his ERA to 2.18. He's allowed batters a .184/.232/.310 line, giving him the 10th lowest OPS among qualified starters. He doesn't whiff a lot of batters, but he's riding a low BABIP. He's held right-handed batters to a .135 average, mostly using a sinker/sweeper combo but changes that to a four-seamer/changeup/curveball/cutter arsenal against lefties. With a fastball that averages 90.9 mph, we'll see how sustainable this is but it's all working now.
And another post here, yes, McGreevy is lucky. And team pitching remains so in general.
But we'll enjoy it while it lasts, eh?
The Big Dumper has a Big Oblique Strain and is on the 10-day IR.
>On Wednesday, Raleigh left the Mariners' 4-3 loss to Houston in the eighth inning after appearing to aggravate an injury to his right side. Raleigh missed three games from May 2 to May 4 with soreness on his right side.
So, possibly more than 10 days before he comes back?
Got there relatively early in the morning, so much of the canyon was still largely blocked out from direct sunlight at the start of the hike. With sun exposure, I shot some stuff of faulting and rock lines.
Supposed to come back off IR from an oblique strain. Roberts said he'll bat second or third, even though he was basically doing nothing before going on the IR.
That's the cue for Dodgers fans to bitch about Roberts setting lineups.
No info as of the time of that story on who Roberts sends down.
First time I've noticed one, I think, and knew it wasn't a monarch. North Texas
Some people have wondered if, especially for batters, MLB can't find something better than the head tap for an ABS challenge.
Well, Ben Lindbergh has a great round-up of accidental head taps, attempts to cancel tapping your head, whether you didn't mean to challenge or whether you thought better of it, trying to deke the other team and much more.
Riffing on an old joke here, Boggs said he is officially cancer free, two years after a prostate cancer diagnosis.
He had a good choice for where to make the announcement.
He threw out the first pitch at Fenway last night, as part of a special anniversary event:
>Boggs was alongside other living Red Sox greats who've also had their numbers retired. The group, which included Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk, Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz and Jim Rice, was on hand to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the club's first home game, a 12-4 victory on May 8, 1901, at Huntington Avenue Grounds over the Philadelphia Athletics.
The Sox completed the night by winning the game.
Put that, and his top speed of 103.6 from last night, in your record books.
>Milwaukee's Jacob Misiorowski set a standard for velocity by a starting pitcher while keeping up his habit of performing best in high-profile situations.
>Misiorowski threw 10 pitches of at least 103 mph while striking out 11 over six dominant innings in the Brewers' 6-0 home victory over the New York Yankees on Friday night. He had three pitches of 103.6 mph, the highest velocity any starter has reached since Statcast tracking began in 2008.
He was almost that hot in the first inning alone, where he struck out the side, including Judge.
>All 10 of the pitches Misiorowski threw in the first inning went at least 102.4 mph.
Note the story says "starter." It later adds that Chapman has done this before.
But he didn't do it with less than one full year of service time.
Dang. How hard does his arm ache?
And, also looking at why so many teams took a pass on him, Jesse Rogers offers a backgrounder from ESPN.
First, something has changed from his time in Japan, pitchers here say. Here's Snakes reliever Ryan Thompson:
>"I threw him one pitch, and he hit it 700 feet. If I had a longer at-bat, maybe I could figure him out," Thompson said.
He goes on with:
>"All we know is the way he's hitting here is different from the way he was hitting in Japan," Thompson told ESPN not long after giving up that 451-foot blast to Murakami. "His holes are not his holes anymore. Maybe why other teams weren't pursuing him is because he had different holes when he was with Japan. He's changed his approach."
Still early in the season, but maybe this is a different batter?
>"He's done a great job of maintaining strength and flexibility. He looks very physical in the box," Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said. "On top of that, there is a certain readiness that he's showing to hit every pitch. He didn't miss against us. Everyone said there is a lot of swing-and-miss but that wasn't the case against us. The league is taking notice."
>Despite his eye-opening start, Murakami is steadfast in his desire to get better. He believes he's just scratching the surface in his adjustment to the majors.
>"It's still a learning curve," he said through the team interpreter. "I'm still getting used to it, but I'm seeing the ball very well."
The worries by MLB teams were legit, we're reminded:
>Murakami struck out 977 times in 892 career NPB games, including 180 times during a subpar 2024 season. His strikeout rate was more than 28% in each of his final three seasons in Japan and his 72.6% in-zone contact rate would have been the second worst in MLB in 2025.
Executives are now second-guessing themselves.
>"It was a bad miss by everyone," one American League official said. "In-zone miss scares people, and it was hard to project that versus improved pitching. It's one of the blind spots of hitting projection models, so it winds up hurting the confidence for every team."
>An NL executive added: "Guilty of weighing the strikeouts too much. I probably did not give him enough of the benefit of the doubt about getting on base."
As for the "misses," not from his bat, but MLB teams? Bet the Mets wish they had pivoted to him after moving on from Polanco. Whether at 1B, or his NPB 3B, a number of teams could have used him, and afforded him on a White Sox-level contract.
And, yes, he's adjusting to 1B instead of 3B. Rogers reports that, there, he's almost error-free but with about zero range factor.
There's more, though.
Rogers notes he's got a serious pre-game prep system, and also that he's already becoming a clubhouse presence.
That said, what's his future beyond just the bat? Sox GM Chris Getz worries about long-term retention. We'll see, I guess. He'll be 28 in two years, and if the rest of his 1 3/4 seasons are 75 cents on the dollar of what he's shown so far this year, he'll be a hot ticket.
March 24-25. Fifth trip there; finally got to see Lake Manly.
A few notes. You're not supposed to be walking way out in the water like some people are, nor rolling a baby stroller out there, which may be what created the parallel lines in one photo. And, it is posted (along with no kayaking or canoeing).
I was reminded of the Arctic Ocean in reverse — rather than ice floes melting into the ocean, salt clumps emerge from the evaporating lake. (A couple of photos are from where Manly had already evaporated and it was back to "just" Badwater Basin.)
One photo near the end, I moderately played with some Photoshop filters to emphasize that. I came in from Shoshone; another photo near the end is the road "inviting you in."
Finally, the last photo? The famous Furnace Creek Visitor Center thermometer. If you'd heard about the big "hottening up" in late March, yes it was THAT hot.
I shot a lot of photos. I'll be dropping other slideshows from Zabriskie Point, Dante's View and elsewhere.
Having shot Manly Beacon as the center of focus before, I actually wanted to get all of Red Cathedral, and the "painted desert" below it, in a wider-angle shot. I then shot to the south, with some good color and saturation. And, on the way to Zabriskie, I got Furnace Creek Inn with alpenglow behind, and the start of Golden Canyon. (No time to go in.)
Namely, he's confused about why his tendinitis, which led the Jays to put him on the IR April 27, isn't getting better. He said he'll seek further medical opinions than what he's gotten:
>"I can still tell there's something off in my arm," Scherzer told reporters Wednesday after a throwing session at the Rays' Tropicana Field. "So, it's as confusing as anything I've ever had because, usually, you go get an MRI, you would see something. I would think that would show up, and yet there's nothing in there on an MRI. There's no strains; there is no inflammation per se. So, I'm going to have to talk to more doctors to figure out a course of action here.
Related to that, the Jays' course of action is that right now, they don't know their course of action:
>Blue Jays manager John Schneider said he's not sure when Scherzer will be able to return.
>"It's kind of cloudy right now," Schneider told reporters. "There's no real firm timetable as to when he's going to really start getting after it. I think we'll know more in a couple of days."
Given that he didn't get past the third in three of his five starts, the problem is fairly bad, whether it's been nailed down yet or not.
Part of the answer, Max, is surely and simply "age." You're 41.
There is one course of action for that. If you don't choose it yourself at the end of this year, apart from any lockout, teams may choose it for you.