Front Row Seat: Padres finish off the regular season with a sweep
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John Gennaro
San Diego Padres
Padres accelerate into playoffs with hot bats, series sweep - MLB.com
The Padres will be riding plenty of good vibes into Chicago.
They completed their regular season with a sweep of the Diamondbacks, including a 12-4 thrashing on Sunday afternoon at Petco Park. San Diego finished its regular season at 90-72 – marking consecutive seasons with at least 90 wins for the first time in franchise history.
John Gennaro
After stumbling through season’s final month, Padres get to the part that matters - San Diego Union-Tribune
The Dodgers were 32-37 from July 4 through Tuesday. The Cubs went 13-15 from Aug. 26 through Thursday. The Reds won enough over the final two weeks that a loss on Sunday did not matter, but they went 8-16 from Aug. 20 to Sept. 16. The Tigers were 7-20 from Aug. 24 to Sept. 24, losing their division lead before clinching a wild-card spot the day before the season ended. The Blue Jays went 1-6 before closing with four straight victories to win the American League East.
All that at least provides some perspective when considering the Padres lost 15 of their 24 games from Aug. 24 through Sept. 19 and often looked bad doing it.
Padres GM A.J. Preller hoops, puts ketchup on steak and builds winners no matter the cost - The Athletic
If you want to know how Preller operates, go watch him play basketball, virtually the only thing he spends time on that’s not Padres baseball.
It’s how Preller clears his mind. Many Padres transactions have come after a session of hoops. Preller’s car is stuffed with basketballs, and he has been known to dribble in the aisles of team charters. In certain road cities, Preller has basketball games he always plays in. In others, he’ll show up to local courts and play with strangers who have no idea they’re squaring off with the GM of the Padres.
“He can dribble, and he’s not afraid to take you to the hoop. That son of a b—- can shoot, too,” said former Padres first-base coach Wayne Kirby. “I call him a ball hog.”
San Diego FC
San Diego Still Can't Score at Home - Chromatic FC
San Diego FC’s regular season home campaign concluded with a 1-0 loss against the San Jose Earthquakes, a defeat that unfortunately highlights a struggle for the first-year club: an inability to score at home and win at home. Saturday night, San Diego FC looked like an expansion team and the loss is the culmination of this recurrent theme. With only two games left in the regular season, San Diego now needs to find form with the pieces they have.
John Gennaro
Ryder Cup
Rory McIlroy and Team Europe get the last laugh after a weekend of abuse from Bethpage Black’s fans - CNN
After a weekend of absolute bedlam at Bethpage, the dust is settling on an extraordinary Ryder Cup competition.
The headline is that Europe pulled off a stunning victory on foreign soil, a win that was at times breathtaking and breathless, exhilarating and excruciating in equal measure.
The American team was in danger of complete humiliation, but on Sunday the US golfers managed to recover and almost pulled off what would have been arguably the greatest comeback in sports.
Ryder Cup: Rory McIlroy calls out ‘unacceptable, abusive behavior’ from fans at Bethpage Black after win - Yahoo Sports
While fans are expected to be much rowdier at a Ryder Cup than they would be at a traditional PGA Tour event, for example, there were several clear instances this past weekend on Long Island where fans appeared to take things too far.
McIlroy had to repeatedly step away from his ball during his match with Shane Lowry on Saturday afternoon as people shouted obscenities and insults his way, and Justin Thomas was constantly having to put his hands up to try and quiet the crowd. As their group made the turn, plenty of police officers actually showed up to start to rein in the crowd. Some people were ejected from the crowd, too, and the PGA of America started flashing behavior warning signs on the scoreboards.
San Diego State Aztecs
PLASCENCIA HITS A 25 YARD FIELD GOAL AS TIME EXPIRES TO GIVE SDSU A 6-3 WIN OVER NORTHERN ILLINOIS - Mountain West Connection
This game was defense personified. Another Chris Johnson interception. Owen Chambliss with 11 tackles. Players are stepping up. The effect of Trey White has yet to be felt. The defense forced seven NIU punts for a 42.6 yard average.
The Aztecs have their own punting weapon in Hunter Green who had a 47 yard average with 5 inside the 20. It has become a game of field position. The Aztecs are confident in not giving up the big play and they are able to hold offenses to punts.
The season has seen two shutouts, a three point game and an aberration against Washington State where they gave up 36 points. That in hindsight could be a good wakeup call. Keep focused on each opponent and play your game plan. It seems to be working for the Aztecs right now.
3 Thoughts … on the Aztecs’ 6-3 win at Northern Illinois - San Diego Union-Tribune
SDSU comes into Friday night’s Mountain West opener against Colorado State as one of seven MW teams with winning records, along with UNLV (4-0), Fresno State (4-1), Hawaii (4-2), Boise State (3-1), New Mexico (3-1) and Utah State (3-2).
The Aztecs are 6 1/2-point favorites against the Rams (1-3), who lost 20-3 on Saturday at home to Washington State.
WNBA Playoffs
Fever avoid playoff elimination, force deciding Game 5 vs. Aces - ESPN
The Fever have found themselves with their backs against the wall time and again this season, including Sunday in Game 4 against the second-seeded Las Vegas Aces, Indiana's third time facing elimination this postseason.
But the stakes don't seem to faze them – in fact, as Fever coach Stephanie White said afterward, "it's when we've been at our best."
The No. 6 seed Fever rallied from two consecutive losses to win 90-83 in Game 4 and force a series-deciding Game 5 on Tuesday in Las Vegas (9:30 p.m. ET, ESPN2).
Minnesota Lynx couldn’t get back to WNBA Finals. Next year’s quest might get even harder - The Athletic
The Lynx did leave everything out on the PHX Arena floor on Sunday night, when their mission to return to the WNBA Finals ended a year after falling short in the title series last season. McBride especially put up a fight, scoring a playoff career-high 31 points and nearly single-handedly forcing a Game 5. But after losses in three consecutive games, the top-seeded Lynx’s season came to an abrupt halt.
USC star JuJu Watkins to miss 2025-26 season to focus on recovery from ACL tear - The Athletic
JuJu Watkins announced what many had long suspected Sunday, posting on social media that she will miss the entirety of the 2025-26 NCAA season. Watkins tore her ACL in the second round of the 2025 NCAA Tournament on March 24. A 12-month recovery timeline would have her back towards the end of the regular season and into the postseason, so the 20-year-old elected to eliminate the possibility of returning before the 2026-27 season.
Odds & Ends
The Mets Went Out Like Chumps - Defector
The New York Mets—slowly and surely, improbably and inexorably—crashed out of the playoff race, and now there are no more games left to get back in it. This in itself is not unique. Many teams miss the playoffs. Some miss the playoffs every year! Likewise, there have been previous rosters that have found their Octobers surprisingly free despite an ownership hellbent on spending for hardware, possibly even to the level of the Mets' $340 million or so payroll, once inflation has been accounted for. There have even been nosedives as steep as New York's, which saw them go from the sport's best record in June to a mere 83 wins when all the beans were counted.
Perhaps Mets fans would be feeling a little better today about the long winter ahead if it had just been the collapse; the three-and-a-half monthlong fracturing, buckling, and subsidence of a contender, which seemed to have so many of the right pieces but no sense of how to fit them together. From that day in Mid-June when they were 21 games over .500, only two teams had worse records than the Mets: the woeful Nationals, and the I-wish-I-hadn't-just-spent-that-adjective Rockies. But it wasn't only the collapse. It was that you could see it coming from so far away, the lip of the abyss approaching and the Mets powerless to change course. They went out like chumps.
San Diego Wave FC Falls 2-1 to Orlando Pride at Snapdragon Stadium - San Diego Wave FC
San Diego Wave FC (8-7-7, 31 points) fell 2-1 to defending NWSL Champions Orlando Pride (9-8-5, 32 points) on Friday night at Snapdragon Stadium. Brazilian international Dudinha scored her first NWSL goal, but a second-half strike from Carson Pickett lifted Orlando to the win.
The Winners and Losers of the NFL Week 4 - The Ringer
Jerry Jones didn’t lose, which has to feel like a win, since Jones’s Cowboys seemed destined for nationally televised embarrassment in Micah Parsons’s much-hyped return to Dallas on Sunday Night Football. Instead, Jerry was treated to a highly entertaining game with an unsatisfying ending—a 40-40 tie. Is this what watching the Sopranos finale felt like in real time? I’ve had a good time watching it, but where is the payoff? I was expecting a parade of Jerry jokes and Cowboys schadenfreude. I would have settled for making fun of the Packers for dropping another winnable game! Ties stink.
What is ‘the CLA?’ Inside the revolutionary coaching method quietly fueling the world’s best athletes - The Athletic
The CLA, which stands for Constraints-Led Approach, is a method of learning that has made its way from academia to the mainstream and draws from innovative research in psychology and neuroscience. It replaces traditional block training, where an athlete learns a single movement pattern step-by-step and, instead, places them in game-like situations with special rules that force them to adapt their moves on the fly. It’s founded on the principle that training perfectly yields imperfect results.
“It changed my career,” said Los Angeles Sparks guard Kelsey Plum, a four-time WNBA All-Star and two-time champion. “Before, I was very skilled. But I don’t think I was ever very purposeful.”
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