Sports
Opinion: End the blows against the beauty of baseball
The following confession may come as a shock to those who know me: I am now a conservative. When it comes to baseball, that is.
I watched the blown check-swing call that allowed the Dodgers to win a game against the Rockies last month in an improbable comeback and to the fury of Colorado fans. The ump’s clear mistake will only add to demands that check-swing calls be included in the instant replay protocol.
But check-swing subjectivity is a fundamental part of the way baseball is supposed to function: humanly, in sublime, sometimes maddening imperfection. MLB interventions to “fix” it — larger bases, the ghost runner at second base in extra innings, batters limited to one timeout per at-bat and, worst of all, the pitch clock — are blows against the beauty of the game.
Admittedly, these changes seem to be quite popular. Games had been running longer and longer with incessant pitching changes, dawdling batters and, yes, replay reviews. But what monstrous hubris to think we know better than baseball’s Original Framers! Ninety feet between bases, 60 feet, 6 inches between pitching rubber and home plate — these are divinely induced measurements. Start messing with tradition and the heart of the game is lost to hyper-regulated “reality.”
Baseball is not reality. It is myth performed by real bodies. And imperfection, which is also the unexpected, beyond the reach of metrics, is where the magic comes from — magical triumph and magical heartbreak, larger than life, operatic.
There is no doubt that soccer is the “beautiful game,” but baseball gives it a run for its money. Its own beauty has resulted from the gradual accrual of tradition, which has given us a poetics.
Languor is one of baseball’s essential characteristics. Seemingly nothing happens for long minutes; no one scores, no “bang-bang” double plays, just lazy fly balls and dribbled grounders; you are swayed by the lullaby of sun and beer into a somnambulant state.
And then “just like that,” as Vin Scully used to say, there’s a majestic home run blast, a leaping catch, a fierce duel between pitcher and batter, a spectacular strikeout. The explosion of affect is all the more powerful for having emerged so suddenly from the caesura. (Soccer fans experience a version of these symphonic changes of tempo on the pitch.)
Baseball’s temporality is inseparable from its physical dimensions, the space-time of the game. The vast swath of grass between outfielders, the closer quarters of the infielders, the tunnel of focus that connects pitcher, batter, catcher and umpire.
The imperfection of umpires is indispensable in the gestalt. Video appeals rob us of the opportunity to yell at the ump to get glasses, or suffer much worse things. A blown call can lead to simultaneous jubilation and heartbreak, with the losers rending their garments and smarting from the insult of being “robbed.”
All as it should be.
I say: Bring back smaller bags and keep stealing a base a rare art! I say: No more ghost runner (what did he do to deserve to be there?) and go on all night with punch-drunk players if that’s what the game demands. And most of all I say: Smash the pitch clock with an Adirondack bat. The timer is an abomination under baseball heaven, depriving us of the organic crescendo of tension in an epic at-bat in the late innings of a close World Series game (Kirk Gibson, 1988).
When I interviewed Scully after the Los Angeles riots-uprising of 1992, I asked him what he‘d said on the air about the chaos unfolding that first night, as a game was underway at Dodger Stadium. “I didn’t say a word,” he told me. He thought first of his responsibility to the fans and their safety — what if he caused panic? And he added: “There should be one place left where the rest of the world doesn’t intrude.”
He might as well have said baseball is sacred. Not to be messed with. Not even (as if it were possible) by history itself.
On all this, I come down as far more conservative than, say, old-school, bow-tied traditionalist George Will, who for once approves of the “progressive” in the form of the new rules he thinks augur a return of baseball to its one-time status as national pastime. The game, awash in play-by-metrics, Will has argued, is bloated not by poetic languor but by analytical ennui.
True that, Mr. Will. We agree about baseball’s slow death-by-numbers. At the end of the day, all the measurements miss the point — the ineffable beauty of a summer afternoon ever so slowly turning to night at the ballpark.
Some of us know when a cure is worse than the disease.
There is a reason baseball was famously the preferred sport of American literati in the mid-20th century. And the pitch clock wasn’t part of the poetry.
Rubén Martínez is a literature professor at Loyola Marymount University, the author of numerous books and co-creator and executive producer of the performance piece “Little Central America, 1984.”
Sports
Danish soccer star suffers medical scare during match years after on-field cardiac arrest
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Denmark’s Christian Eriksen collapsed during his team’s international friendly match against Ukraine on Sunday.
Eriksen, who has a history of collapsing on the pitch, did so again as help rushed out to meet him near midfield.
Thankfully, the Danish Football Union said in a statement that he was “conscious and feeling well under the circumstances.” The 34-year-old’s incident led to the game being abandoned.
Christian Eriksen of Denmark looks on during the UEFA International Friendly match between DR Congo and Denmark at Stade Maurice Dufrasne in Liege, Belgium, on June 3, 2026. (Ulrik Pedersen/NurPhoto)
Denmark was up, 2-1, on Ukraine in the 61st minute at the time of Eriksen’s collapse.
Eriksen previously starred for Tottenham and Manchester United in the English Premier League. He currently plays for VfL Wolfsburg in 2. Bundesliga.
SOCCER PLAYER DIES AT 21 AFTER COLLISION WITH OPPONENT DURING MATCH
During the European Championship between Denmark and Finland in June 2021, play was suspended after a terrifying scene where Eriksen suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch in the first half of the game.
Play immediately came to a halt at Parken Stadium in Copenhagen, where Eriksen was lying on the grass unresponsive. CPR was needed to resuscitate him, as medical staff and teammates made a circle around his body in clear distress, hoping for the best.
Denmark’s and Ukraine’s players accompany Christian Eriksen to an ambulance during a friendly match at Odense Stadium in Denmark on June 7, 2026, after he collapsed on the field. (Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images)
Eriksen received 10 minutes of medical care and was later taken off the pitch on a stretcher with an oxygen mask around his mouth. Images began to circulate on social media at the time, showing Eriksen awake and having a hand on his forehead.
Eriksen was later transferred to a hospital and was stabilized.
Since that moment, Eriksen was fitted with a heart-starting device called an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator.
Denmark’s team doctor Morten Boesen released a statement via multiple outlets, stating Eriksen’s “pacemaker is responding as it should.”
Christian Eriksen of Denmark looks on during a UEFA international friendly between DR Congo and Denmark at Stade Maurice Dufrasne in Liege, Belgium, on June 3, 2026. (Ulrik Pedersen/NurPhoto)
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“He was briefly unconscious, but regained consciousness very quickly, and we were quickly in contact with him,” Boesen’s statement read.
“He will not undergo further examinations at the hospital to determine what caused the incident. We are in ongoing contact with him and the doctors at the hospital. But Christian is doing well, and he asked me to send his regards to all the players and tell them that he was okay.”
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Sports
Commentary: Dodgers show courage by permanently honoring LGBTQ+ pioneers Glenn Burke and Billy Bean
Let’s go Dodgers. High fives all around.
Because this time, with the newest historical exhibit at Dodger Stadium, the team got it right.
Amid all the historical installations and tributes in the open-air museum that is the Centerfield Plaza, and just a few feet from a Fernando Valenzuela mural, a new display honors Glenn Burke and Billy Bean, two former Dodgers outfielders who were the first and second professional baseball players to come out as gay.
It’s not a fleeting mention on Pride night, it’s a permanent record. A static reminder of progress made — and still to be made. And a much-deserved thank-you.
A wall inside Dodger Stadium honors former Dodgers and LGBTQ+ pioneers Billy Bean and Glenn Burke.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
“It’ll be here tomorrow, it’ll be here on the weekend and if you come next month, it’ll be here,” said the Dodgers’ team historian Mark Langill, who pointed to a spot just down the hall where in 1976 he was an 11-year-old getting Burke’s autograph.
Baseball is steeped in such history. The personal, the statistical, the societal. And the Dodgers’ is incomplete without their stories — Burke’s and Bean’s.
But the Dodgers have not, of course, always gotten this stuff right.
In 1978, they did Burke wrong, trading him — he believed — after management learned he was gay.
In his three seasons in L.A., Burke had proved himself a capable reserve outfielder who was popular with his teammates.
As far as we know, in 1977, he was the first guy to initiate a high five — spontaneously reaching above his head to slap hands with Dusty Baker after the home run that made Baker the fourth Dodger, along with Ron Cey, Steve Garvey and Reggie Smith, to hit at least 30 home runs that season, a MLB first.
Glenn Burke, left, goes to give a high-five to teammate Dusty Baker after Baker hit a home run in 1977. It is believed to be the first instance a high five was exchanged.
(Los Angeles Times)
There’s a fantastic photo of the historic high five included in the tribute to Burke and Bean, which is situated on a hallway wall beneath the left-field bleachers, beside the “Dodger Dugout” augmented reality photo booth.
Burke was also the first guy in that Dodgers clubhouse to crack a joke when the team needed it, his former teammate Rick Monday said.
“When called upon, he could play really well,” Monday said before the Dodgers took the field against the Angels on Friday, when the Dodgers and many of their rainbow-sporting fans celebrated the team’s 13th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night. “And when we needed a moment of levity, Glenn was not afraid to come forward and put a smile on people’s face.”
But shortly before he died of AIDS in 1995 at 42, Burke published an autobiography, “Out at Home,” in which he described the team’s management being “afraid of my sexual orientation, even though I never flaunted it. To this day, the Dodgers deny trading me because I was gay. But it was painfully obvious.”
“Oh, what he had to deal with and keep it hid,” said Joyce Burke-Henderson, one of Glenn’s sisters at Friday’s pregame unveiling, where family members of both players gasped and cried and cheered the installation’s reveal.
“But as time went on, people did know. And then I think he came to the point where he just didn’t care and he just told it like it was.”
Joyce Henderson, sister of Glenn Burke, speaks about her brother during a ceremony honoring the former Dodger and LGBTQ+ pioneer at Dodger Stadium Friday.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
Burke came out in 1982, three years after playing his 225th and final big league game, in an Inside Sports article, “The Double Life of a Gay Dodger.”
“We just appreciate that now people are opening their eyes and just trusting in the Lord,” Burke-Henderson said Friday, “that things will go forward and work out and everybody will be loved regardless of their situation.”
The Dodgers first honored Burke in 2022, at their ninth Pride Night.
The next season, they made a mess of the Pride festivities, inviting and uninviting and then reinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group known for its work in support of AIDS patients and whose members dress in drag, as nuns.
In 2023, the Dodgers also invited Bean — who was MLB’s senior vice president for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. He appeared in a pregame ceremony on the field while protesters gathered outside the stadium.
Bean died the next year, at 60, 11 months after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
Greg Baker, husband of the late Billy Bean, wipes away tears during a tribute honor Bean as a LGBTQ+ pioneer at Dodger Stadium on Friday.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
Once a Northeast Santa Ana Little Leaguer, Bean became valedictorian at Santa Ana High, played for Loyola Marymount and went on to appear in 272 big-league games — including 51 for the Dodgers in 1989 — before abruptly walking away from baseball in 1995.
It got to be too much, he’d explain later, continuing to hustle to keep his baseball career afloat while keeping his sexuality secret, acutely aware of the blowback he’d get if it got out.
“For nine years,” he told the New York Times, “I felt as though I had one foot in the major leagues and one on a banana peel.”
“When he left baseball suddenly, I knew something was wrong,” Bean’s mother, Linda Kovac, said Friday, pausing to wipe away tears. “He was playing very well, it wasn’t like he was kicked out or anything. And it just didn’t make any sense.”
When Bean finally told his family he was gay, in 1996 — three years before clueing in an unsuspecting public via a Miami Herald article — none of his loved ones blinked. That included his stepfather, Ed Kovac, the homicide cop and former Marine who’d had a partner on the force who was gay.
“He worked with someone that he respected, side by side, on criminal cases,” Linda said. “We’re still friends with that guy.”
Linda and Ed Kovac, parents of Billy Bean, hold hands in front of a tribute dedicated to their son at Dodger Stadium on Friday.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
Knowing someone — or of someone — who is gay or lesbian has long tended to dispel falsehoods and quell fears that might exist.
“One of the most important things any one of us can do in our community is be out, to be proud,” said Greg Baker, Bean’s husband. “The fact that someone can be out in a world that typically doesn’t have a lot of role models of the same ilk, it’s a brave thing to stick your neck out. It’s also very important.”
And it’s not a surprise, Baker said, that more athletes aren’t out in sports like baseball. Not with Gallup polling released last week telling us that with public acceptance of same-sex marriage and relationships in the U.S. has flattened after two-plus decades of growing support — down from 71% to about 65%.
“I want to thank the Dodgers organization,” Baker said. “It’s brave of them in this day and age to spotlight someone in our community when other organizations are trying to erase us.”
The Dodgers have done the opposite, putting up a permanent marker. A long time coming, a tribute to last.
Sports
Golden Knights beat Hurricanes in double OT Game 3, one of the wildest Stanley Cup Final games of all-time
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The Stanley Cup Final shifted to Las Vegas for Game 3 with the Vegas Golden Knights and Carolina Hurricanes knotted at 1-1 after splitting the opening two games in Raleigh.
And, as you’d expect from the Golden Knights, this one got started with some theatrics, plus a little help from the city’s latest hope at quarterback, who was getting in on the festivities.
That’s right. Who better to put on siren duty than Raiders draft pick and reigning Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza?
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There was a big surprise when the game got underway: Golden Knights defenseman Brayden McNabb — who took a slapshot straight to the face on Thursday in Game 2 — was in the Vegas lineup, albeit with a full cage.
It goes without saying, but hockey players are just built different.
The first period was physical but ultimately scoreless, with Carolina getting more offensive opportunities, leading Vegas in shots 7-2.
Vegas captain Mark Stone found the back of the net just 36 seconds into the second period; however, it was ruled offside after a Carolina challenge.
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A few minutes later, Golden Knights forward Jack Eichel found the back of the net, but Carolina challenged this goal as well after Vegas’ Ivan Barbashev made contact with Canes goalie Frederik Andersen’s head.
It was another cut-and-dried review that kept a Golden Knights tally off the board.
The first penalty of the night was a self-inflicted one, when the Hurricanes were called for too many men, and it didn’t take long for Tomas Hertl to make them pay.
Then, just moments later — 16 seconds to be exact — Mitch Marner was credited with a goal after Carolina defenseman Sean Walker tipped his shot into the back of his own net.
But, hey, those own goals are no fun; Marner wanted to get one the old-fashioned way, which he did.
What’s that, you want more?
Well, Mitch Marner — who is having the playoffs of his life — had more for you.
That’s right, Marner potted a hat trick in just six minutes and 10 seconds. That’s an NHL record.
Although, I bet The Rocket’s first goal of his lightning-quick hatty wasn’t an own goal, but hey, they count the same.
Vegas star Mitch Marner took over in the second period of Game 3 with a natural hat trick in just six minutes and ten seconds. (Photo by David Becker/NHLI via Getty Images)
What a performance. Maybe he was just doing that so that the next time the team puts him on a rally towel it actually looks like him.
After the second intermission, Andersen was pulled in favor of Brand Bussi, who made his Stanley Cup Playoffs debut.
Carolina was in a state of disarray in the third, and after going on a power play, Sebastian Aho slashed Marner, who was headed to the net on a short-handed breakaway.
Marner was awarded a penalty shot, but Bussi didn’t give him much to shoot at, and Marner missed his attempt on the backhand.
While it may have looked bleak after a dominant second for Vegas, in the third, Carolina dropped the fastest three goals in Stanley Cup Final history to make it a game. (Photo by Josh Lavallee/NHLI via Getty Images))
Carolina’s Jordan Martinook got the Hurricanes on the board a little under halfway through the third period to make it 4-1.
Just moments later, Taylor Hall tacked on another one to cut Vegas’ lead to 4-2.
And, while they’re doing goals, how about you just throw a Jordan Staal tally in there?
Carolina scored those three goals in 39 seconds, the fastest three goals by a single team in Stanley Cup Final history, making what looked like a no-doubt Vegas win into a game once again.
Carolina killed off a delay-of-game penalty, which was crucial for staying in the game.
Then, Vegas’ Shea Theodore airmailed a puck into the stands for delay of game, giving Carolina a late power play.
Then — as if it couldn’t get wilder — Andrei Svechnikov tied the game on the power play and with the goalie pulled.
And with that, it was off to overtime for the second game in a row.
In the extra frame, both teams got their share of chances and opportunities to put a pin in this one and hit the craps tables, but the first overtime period didn’t yield a winner.
In the second overtime, we finally got a winner, and as wild as this game was, it was only fitting that the game-winner would be unbelievable.
That’s the same Shea Theodore, by the way, who skied the puck into the stands to set up the tying goal, and he did it after 39 minutes of ice time.
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Vegas players Brett Howden (21), Shea Theodore (center), and Mitch Marner (93) celebrate the game-winning goal in double overtime. (Lucas Peltier-Imagn Images)
What. A. Game.
I think after this one, Game 4 — which will be on Tuesday in Las Vegas — is officially appointment viewing.
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