After so many disappointing seasons with the interior offensive line, the Seattle Seahawks made a commitment last offseason to improve the unit. They started one big step at a time by drafting North Dakota State guard Grey Zabel in the first round, 18th overall pick, of the 2025 NFL Draft. This one was one of the last steps for the Seahawks to create one of the most productive offenses in the NFL.

Zabel wasn’t perfect in his rookie season, but he was good enough to validate the decision to draft him in the first round, and he showed improvement. Zabel is already a favorite among some Seahawks fans and some media outlets as they love his determination and spirit. It was a big jump from the FCS collegiate level to the NFL and this season, he has a chance to show why he might be a top-half-of-the-league guard.

Why Zabel Could Be Ranked Higher?

The Seahawks wanted a determined workhorse when looking for a guard. That’s exactly what they got in Zabel. Last season, he appeared in 1,051 snaps, which is only 10 fewer snaps than right tackle Abraham Lucas, who had the most offensive snaps. Zabel got better as the season progressed. Pro Football Focus gave him an overall grade of 81.5 and a run-block grade of 81.2 in Week 14 through the NFC Championship Game.

There were times last season when he looked like a monster against several defenders. He was pushing some defenders completely out of the way on pulling plays and even ran to defenders after the pass-catcher caught the ball. This is the mentality the Seahawks expect him to have going into his second season in the league. He has more experience and the complete trust of the team to be a franchise player on par with Lucas and left tackle Charles Cross. If he continues to improve, he will be another steal for the Seahawks.

Why Zabel Could Be Ranked Lower?​

There were times last season when he didn’t quite catch up to the learning curve of the NFL. Zabel allowed two sacks, four hits and 24 pressures in 2025. The Seahawks expect those numbers to decrease significantly as he is experienced and capable of playing at an efficient level. While Zabel is impressive, he might not be the best player the Seahawks have selected in the 2025 NFL Draft. That honor belongs to slot cornerback Nick Emmanwori, who is stepping up to be the steal of the draft.

Zabel is easily one of the best second-year players and is one of the top offensive linemen, but there are players behind him because they haven’t proven to be consistently explosive for the Seahawks. There is going to be even more pressure on him this upcoming season. The Seahawks hired a more run-friendly coach in Brian Fleury as offensive coordinator. His ranking at the end of the season might be much better if he improves, or worse if he fails to reach expectations.

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The mariachi band broke into song as soon as the Tijuana Municipal Little League team stepped back onto its home field Monday afternoon. Cheers and applause erupted for the team, which over the weekend earned the coveted spot to represent Mexico in the Little League Baseball World Series.

The team of 11- and 12-year-olds won the Mexico region tournament title on Saturday by defeating the Matamoros Little League team 8-2 in Tamaulipas. They ended the tournament with a 7-1 record.

“We are very proud of what you have done and what you are about to embark on, because this is just the beginning,” said Darío Venegas, president of the Tijuana Municipal Children’s and Youth Baseball League, before handing out rings to commemorate the team’s regional crown.

This marks the third time that the Tijuana Municipal team has advanced to the tournament in Williamsport, Pa., following appearances in 2013 and 2023. Francisco Fimbres has been the manager for all three trips, and he hopes that the third time could be the charm.

“I feel blessed with these players,” he said. “(They) make me believe that we can get that championship.”

But the proud coach acknowledged that there’s still work to be done and that he has learned from the last two tournaments. In 2013, Mexico lost to Japan in the international championship and finished third. In 2023, they fell to Curaçao in the international semifinals.

During his speech at the Jorge Campillo baseball field in Tijuana on Monday, Fimbres urged players and parents to enjoy the moment, as he said it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

He described this year’s group of players as “una generación campeona,” or a “winning generation,” whom he has followed since they were 8 years old. “These kids have too much baseball in them,” he said. “They’re growing up and learning a lot, which will be great for their development.”

In 2023, an interaction between Fimbres and one of his players went viral. During the second inning, with the bases loaded, he noticed that his pitcher was nervous. He went to the mound to encourage him and remind him to have fun and not be afraid of making mistakes. “What if he hits a home run? Exactly, nothing happens,” he told him. “You’re a good pitcher. You’re better.” For many, this moment captured the spirit of the Little League competition.

This time will be special for Fimbres. He shared that this might be his last stint with the Tijuana Municipal team.

Pitcher and outfielder Jean Paul Lavenant said that he felt happy for “Pancho,” as he fondly calls his coach, and hoped to get the title for him.

Lavenant named Major League players Jonathan Aranda of the Tampa Bay Rays and Alejandro Kirk of the Toronto Blue Jays as his inspirations. Both players came from the Tijuana Municipal league.

The players said they have their minds set on bringing home the championship. “Nothing is impossible,” said pitcher and infielder Emiliano Kerber.

Coach Marcelo Santamaría, who was part of the 2023 coaching team, said he hopes this opportunity leaves a lasting impression on the players. “It’s every young baseball player’s dream to participate in this tournament,” he noted.

That’s what they emphasized to the players throughout their journey to earn a spot in Williamsport. Tijuana Municipal will kick off its Little League World Series run on Aug. 20 against the Australian region.

“Would you rather experience it on TV or in person?” pitcher and outfielder Esteban Bautista recalled his coaches asking them before the Mexico region championship game.

In person, it will be.

Yukon king salmon on their Canadian spawning grounds more than 1,400 miles from the Bering Sea/Pacific Salmon Foundation photo

Yukon king salmon rebound beginning?

After a couple of years with cooler waters in the Bering Sea, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is reporting a Yukon River return of Chinook salmon that has, as of the start of the month, “passed the historical third quarter point and exceeded preseason projections.”

The report comes at a time when National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers have linked the extremely weak returns of the past several years to the start of “an acute marine heatwave period in the Bering Sea” that began late in 2016 and extended into 2020.

Yukon Chinook, the oversized salmon that most Alaskans simply call kings, were the big losers in this warming event while Bristol Bay sockeye salmon were the big winners. This is what happens when environmental conditions change, though you might not know it if all you read is highly subjective, mainstream media reporting on “global warming.”

The planet’s warming climate is an environmental disruptor that can cause all kinds of problems for plants and animals, and even humans, but it is a two-edged sword because that is the way environmental shifts work. There are losers, but there are also winners.

And there is no doubt the planet is warming. The big debate is about how much the future increase and how fast it comes. Scientists this year ruled out the sky-is-falling warning of a temperature increase of more than six to almost 10 degrees by 2021.

But as the Climate Directorate for the European Commission notes, the latest, ” most optimistic path – the new ‘best case scenario’ – would still lead to global warming of 1.7° C,  (3.06° F) temporarily exceeding the 1.5° C (2.7°  F) target in the Paris Agreement” on climate change.

What exactly this means for Yukon Chinook is hard to say, given that Arctic Ocean warming of late has focused more in the Barents Sea off the north coast of Europe than in the Chukchi and Bering seas off Alaska. The odds, however, would seem to favor a continued bounty of Bay sockeye while Chinook to the north continue to struggle.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is this year forecasting a Bay harvest of 33.5 million sockeye from a total return of 45.3 million of the fish. This is a historically very strong run, but it pales when compared to what happened during those heat wave years when Yukon Chinook were fading.

A sockeye explosion

In 2022, the Bay witnessed an unprecedented return of 79 million sockeye, according to state data, and the harvest topped 60 million. Meanwhile, there was over-escapement in almost every river system in the region because the harvesting and processing resources in the Bay couldn’t handle a return so big.

Escapement is the number of fish getting past fishermen to make it back to their spawning grounds. It is a scientifically calculated number intended to produce the greatest return of salmon per spawner in future years.

The goal in the Bay is to put about 11.8 million salmon on the spawning grounds. The escapement in 2022 was about 7.2 million over the goal even though the harvest that year dwarfed the previous record harvest of 44.3 million set in 1995.

The 16.2 million difference between the two, record harvests was bigger than the total harvests for all but two seasons in the Bay from 1938 to 1979 when the North Pacific Ocean was filled with colder water.

A so-called “regime change” at sea in the 1980s altered marine survival and sockeye harvests in the Bay – home to the largest wild sockeye fishery in the world and one of only a handful of Alaska fisheries that can claim to catch truly ‘wild’ salmon – began to explode.

By the end of the 2021 fishing season, the five-year average harvest had reached 41.1 million sockeye; the 10-year average stood at 33.4 million; and the 20-year average stood at 29.4 million, nearly double the historic, long-term average of 16.2 million.

The good, old days for Bay fishermen have come in the here and now, despite a catastrophic drop in prices paid for Bay salmon since farmed, Atlantic salmon took over global markets at the start of the new millennium.

Alaska sockeye salmon, and especially those increasingly rare Alaska king salmon, have hung onto a niche in the premium market dominated by farmed salmon, but the bulk of the Alaska harvest is now made up of so-called ‘wild caught’ salmon that compete globally with ‘wild-caught’ Russian salmon in markets for canned and pouched salmon and smallish pink salmon filets.

The ‘wild-caught’ label is used to disguise the fact that many of these fish are products of hatchery operations in Alaska and Russia. They are as wild, or not, as cattle put out to pasture to fatten. And the same applies to some non-Bay sockeye, such as those coming from hatcheries in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Bay salmon are a different story. These are truly wild salmon, and there is no doubt that they have benefited from warming.

Not all good

The same warning, however, has proven disastrous for  Yukon Chinook and the people who once depended on them for cash and food. The commercial fisheries that produced cash have been closed for years, and subsistence harvests for food have been sharply limited.

Alaska catches fell to less than 20,000 kings per year on average in this decade, and with a serious downward trend underway, the U.S. and Canada in 2024 signed an agreement to suspend “directed Chinook commercial, sport, domestic, and personal use fisheries in the mainstem Yukon River and Canadian tributaries for one full life cycle (of) seven years.”

Alaskans fishing the Yukon for chum salmon, which are comparatively far more abundant, do still harvest some kings as bycatch, but the number is small. And harvests, whether in-river or at sea, do not, according to the NOAA researchers, seem to be the key problem facing the Yukon fish.

The scientists reported finding that “elevated natural mortality in later, post-juvenile life history stages has increasingly limited population productivity and recovery potential in recent years following a protracted marine heatwave period. Collectively, our results emphasize how shifting conditions can induce, novel stage-specific survival bottlenecks in species with complex life cycles.”

Their peer-reviewed study published in Ecological Applications, the journal of the Ecological Society of America, has, however, come under fire from Alaskans who don’t want to believe the data and prefer to blame the decline on the bycatch of Yukon Chinook offshore trawl fisheries targeting pollock and bottomfish.

Former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, from Bethel near the mouth of the Yukon in rural Western Alaska, has repeatedly dissed the science. She is now running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and continuing to do so.

“I’ve seen the decline of our fisheries firsthand. I’ve seen our families suffer. And I’ve seen our fishermen have their livelihoods threatened. I’m running for Senate because it doesn’t have to be this way. We can take on the rigged system in D.C. and begin to restore abundance to Alaska,” she has said.

She contends that “the truth is that out-of-state factory trawlers and excessive bycatch are hurting Alaska. They are sweeping up more than 140 million pounds of bycatch….But instead of reining in the trawling industry, Alaska subsistence and sport fishing are hit with crushing restrictions, punishing Alaskans while protecting the corporations doing the damage.

“Instead of holding their corporate trawler donors accountable, D.C. politicians kick the can down the road with more studies. But we don’t need more studies to tell us what’s happening in front of our eyes.”

Whatever Peltola might see in front of her eyes, the scientists say there is no evidence that it is a bycatch problem. After modeling a huge pile of historical data, they concluded that ending all bycatch would put some more Chinook in the Yukon River, but not many more.

A few hundred fish

Simulations using various sizes of salmon returns to the Yukon showed that “the greatest difference occurred in 2007, in which the median run size from the zero-bycatch simulations was 433 fish greater than that of the fitted model,” they said. “In other years, median differences in run size between the fitted model and zero-bycatch simulations ranged from 32 to 398 fish.”

Basically, the models concluded what has long been observable. Bycatch numbers go up when Chinook are abundant and go down when Chinook are scarce. The Bering Sea pollock fishery, the biggest target of the anti-trawling campaign, posted a record bycatch of 122,195 Chinook in 2007, according to the North Pacific Management Council.

That now oft-cited number was an anomaly. It reflected a year when Chinook were unusually abundant in the region. The bycatch dropped to 20,000 the next year.

For the past decade, according to NPFMC data, the average stands at just shy of 19,000 fish per year. Genetic studies have shown these fish come from rivers all over North America, but the greatest proportion comes from Western Alaska rivers.

If bycatch could be wholly eliminated, the NPFMC estimates there would be an almost 2 percent improvement in the number of Chinook returning to those streams. As for the Yukon itself, the estimated improvement is 0.63 percent.

Such a change would be undetectable. The state sonar used to count salmon at Pilot Station on the Yukon has a “confidence level” of 90 percent. What this means is that the count is an estimate that comes from within a range that could be 10 percent higher or lower than the number judged to be the total return.

The numbers make the politics of the bycatch, at least as it applies to the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea, a classic red herring. There are no doubt some king salmon die when caught in trawls in the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS), but that fishery also happens to be the most intensely monitored fishery in the state.

The NOAA researchers noted that the trawl fleet has, since 2011, “been subject to 100 percent fishery observer coverage with full census counts of all salmon caught, and paired genetic and scale samples collected from one in 10 fish.”

Most Alaska fisheries operate without observers, and Alaska commercial salmon fishermen have opposed efforts to fit their boats with video cameras to provide remote monitoring because, according to the Southeast Alaska Seiners Association, “commercial permit holders are extremely sensitive to the confidential nature of
their fishing activities. Many see this program as opening their catch data to a number of unknown entities.”

The biggest of those “entities” would be the public. The state now hides data on how much money individual commerical salmon fishermen are making by mining the ocean for a common property resource and does not require they to report bycatch – such as starry flounder in Cook Inlet – that they discard.

Meanwhile, critics of the Bering Sea fishery claim that the federal monitoring now in place isn’t perfect, which is true, and argue that the Chinook bycatch could be significantly underreported. But even if observers were underreporting the catch by 100 percent, the improvement in the Yukon return would rise by only about 1.2 percent, according to the NOAA study, leaving it still well below the ability of the state sonar to detect a change.

Not that this is likely to alter the bycatch rant.

The Covid-19 pandemic days of “listen to the scientists” are now over, and Alaska has returned ot the days of people listening to what they want to believe, and some people – Peltola among them – deeply want to believe that the Yukon River would be full of salmon if the largest of U.S. fisheries – the pollock fishery – were shut down.

That weather and climate dictate how natural systems function is a hard thing to grasp in a now very urban America, where most people are out of touch with the natural world.