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Bryce Miller: Questions answered, Padres send entire outfield to All-Star Game

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Bryce Miller: Questions answered, Padres send entire outfield to All-Star Game


Far out, this Padres outfield.

Who could have predicted the entire group, from foul line to foul line, would be named to the All-Star Game?

How is it possible — fathomable — that the biggest collective question mark on the team as spring sprung would become its muscle-flexing strength?

As shadows began to creep across the left field-side sections of Petco Park on Sunday, fans learned that rookie center fielder Jackson Merrill would join National League starters Jurickson Profar and Fernando Tatis Jr..

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Rewind to the early months of 2024, when the hand-wringing over the outfield left those hands red and raw. Sure, Profar seemed like a versatile depth option, but he couldn’t be the everyday left fielder.

Right?

Was President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller really going to roll a set of oversized dice on Merrill in center, a premium position with a guy who had played just 46 games in Double-A … without a sniff of Triple-A?

And even though Tatis won a platinum glove during his debut in right, he still was more wired to play shortstop.

It did not seem like an outfield plan as much as a stab in the dark after a few too many spiked eggnogs at the company Christmas party. It came off as survival mode in a season where the Padres were counting pennies as competitive balance tax penalties loomed like storm clouds.

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Then a funny thing happened on the way to simply getting by. Profar hit and hit and hit some more. As soon as he settled into his cleats, Merrill began to do the same.

All-Stars in the outfield? More like an outfield full of All-Stars.

“No one was seeing that necessarily at the beginning,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said.

Um, no. They weren’t.

It’s hard to know whether to start cutting a bonus check for Preller’s fine footwork or write it off as being cornered by options and economics, shrugging shoulders at how it all worked out.

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No one was saying, “Man, the Padres have the best outfield in baseball.” It was more like, “The Padres have an outfield. Maybe. For now.”

Instead of white hot, the consensus had been to brace for a white-knuckler.

FanGraphs’s overarching metric of a player’s total worth, wins above replacement (WAR), has the Padres’ trio ranked Nos. 6-8 in baseball.

The Yankees claim the top two with Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, but no team has an entire group ranked anywhere close.

Not only did the Padres put together an outfield, they assembled three guys who became so dependable, so bankable as a unit — Tatis injury pending — that it buoys hope this team might have enough to reach the playoffs.

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Those question marks became exclamation points.

“It’s pretty cool,” Merrill said of the entire outfield making the game. “I think definitely ‘Tati’ and ‘Pro’ really deserved it. I’m really appreciative that they took me under their wings. It kind of made me more comfortable and able to play the way I have.”

Jurickson Profar celebrates a first-inning home run against the Diamondbacks. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Pick the more improbable storyline.

Is it Profar, an All-Star for the first time in his 11th season? His .408 on-base percentage leads the entire National League. His .906 OPS is the best of his career.

Profar’s average OPS+, part of the analytics soup that compares players to an average big leaguer, with 100 being the baseline, has been a 97. This season? A head-shaking 155.

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The career batting average of .245 has ballooned to .315.

He was, as bizarre as it now seems, sitting unsigned in February. At $1 million plus bonuses, he became baseball’s equivalent of a winning Powerball ticket.

Or is it Merrill, the guy who climbed on a rocketship and zoomed past Triple-A, barely 21, who made the toughest leap in the game without as much as a hiccup?

Merrill began Sunday at No. 3 in baseball for home runs since June 12 (9), fifth in slugging and tied for in extra-base hits. Just-hitting-stride type of stuff.

The confidence, the swagger, the production while holding down the toughest and trickiest outfield spot astounds daily. A season ago, he was in the Futures Game … as a shortstop. The future came fast.

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When Tatis returns to the lineup, the group could become a high-performance engine, not an afterthought.

“‘Pro’ was out there for a lot of clubs to sign and signed late …,” Shildt said. “(Merrill had) a little bit of time in Double-A, Triple-A’s a rumor, comes here and immediately changes positions in spring training and goes and makes an All-Star team.

“That’s pretty special.”

It’s the first time in franchise history that the Padres placed three outfielders in the All-Star Game. Merrill became the first Padres rookie to make the cut and will be the youngest player in the game at Arlington, Texas.

The last time players this young made teams, it was 2013 with Bryce Harper, Jose Fernandez and current teammate Manny Machado.

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When Merrill’s selection was announced at Petco, he offered an understated wave from the dugout rail.

“The buy-in,” said second baseman Jake Cronenworth, a two-time All-Star himself. “Sometimes guys get moved to position where they might not be comfortable, but he’s gone out and made a point to get better every night and put himself in position to succeed.

“In spring training, from Day 1 when he got there, it seemed like he wasn’t upset about it. He wanted to go out there and the best center fielder his possibly could.

“It’s just his maturity, the way he works every day. Your age doesn’t matter. When you show up and put the time in, you get rewarded for that.”

Merrill finally relented, admitting a bit of satisfaction.

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But only a bit.

“Everybody kind of went crazy,” Merrill said of the news, which was shared during a team meeting. “And I was like, sitting there, smiling. It was really surreal. Just kind of take it in for a sec, but I’m just grateful for everyone around me.”

When Merrill looks to his left and his right, can you blame him?



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San Diego, CA

Hawaii vs. San Diego State FREE LIVE STREAM (10/5/24): Watch college football, Week 6 online | Time, TV, channel

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Hawaii vs. San Diego State FREE LIVE STREAM (10/5/24): Watch college football, Week 6 online | Time, TV, channel


The Hawaii Rainbow Warriors led by quarterback Brayden Schager, face the San Diego State Aztecs, led by quarterback Danny O’Neil on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024 (10/5/24) at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego, Calif.

How to watch: Fans can watch the game for free via a trial of DirecTV Stream or fuboTV. You can also watch via a subscription to Sling TV.

Here’s what you need to know:

What: NCAA Football, Week 6

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Who: Hawaii vs. San Diego State

When: Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024

Where: Snapdragon Stadium

Time: 8 p.m. ET

TV: CBS Sports Network

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Live stream: fuboTV (free trial), DirecTV Stream (free trial)

***

Here are the best streaming options for college football this season:

Fubo TV (free trial): fuboTV carries ESPN, FOX, ABC, NBC and CBS.

DirecTV Stream (free trial): DirecTV Stream carries ESPN, FOX, NBC and CBS.

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Sling TV ($25 off the first month)– Sling TV carries ESPN, FOX, ABC and NBC.

ESPN+($9.99 a month): ESPN+ carries college football games each weekend for only $9.99 a month. These games are exclusive to the platform.

Peacock TV ($5.99 a month): Peacock will simulstream all of NBC Sports’ college football games airing on the NBC broadcast network this season, including Big Ten Saturday Night. Peacock will also stream Notre Dame home games. Certain games will be streamed exclusively on Peacock this year as well.

Paramount+ (free trial): Paramount Plus will live stream college football games airing on CBS this year.

***

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Here’s a college football story via the Associated Press:

The ebb and flow of the college football season hits a low this week if measured by the number of Top 25 matchups.

The only one is No. 9 Missouri at No. 25 Texas A&M, the fewest since there were no ranked teams pitted against each other during Week 3 last season.

Maybe it’s karma for the weekend we enjoyed last week. Bookending it were the Miami-Virginia Tech did-he-catch-it-or-not ending and that fantastic Alabama-Georgia finish.

Of course, there still are important games this week besides the Southeastern Conference showdown in College Station, Texas.

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No. 12 Mississippi, upset by Kentucky at home, is in bounce-back mode on the road against a South Carolina team that beat the Wildcats by 25 points in Week 2.

No. 22 Louisville has a tough follow-up to its loss to Notre Dame when high-scoring SMU visits.

No. 3 Ohio State faces its biggest challenge to date when breakout star Kaleb Johnson leads Iowa into the Horseshoe.

Texas Tech, picked in the bottom half of the Big 12 preseason poll, has won four of five to start the season and gets a measuring-stick game at Arizona.

And don’t forget the Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy series, which gets underway with unbeaten Navy at struggling Air Force.

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Best game

No. 9 Missouri (4-0, 1-0 SEC) at No. 25 Texas A&M (4-1, 2-0), Saturday, noon ET (ABC)

Missouri hopes to play like a top-10 team in its road opener. The Tigers had to erase a 14-3 halftime deficit to beat Boston College and had to go two overtimes to get past Vanderbilt. They’ve had a week off to sort things out, mainly uncharacteristic red-zone and third-down struggles against Vandy.

The Aggies have won four straight since a close loss to Notre Dame. Marcel Reed has started the last three games at quarterback in place of the injured Connor Weigman. A&M coach Mike Elko said Weigman would be a game-time decision. Whoever starts, he’ll be going against the toughest defense the Aggies have faced.

BetMGM Sportsbook lists the Aggies as 2 1/2-point favorites.

Heisman watch

Ashton Jeanty is the best player in the Group of Five. How about the best in all of college football?

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The folks at Boise State would argue he is, and the betting public is starting to take notice. He’s the No. 4 choice on BetMGM Sportsbook at 10-1 odds to win the Heisman Trophy, still well behind Alabama’s Jalen Milroe, Miami’s Cam Ward and Colorado’s Travis Hunter.

Alabama’s Derrick Henry was the last running back to win the Heisman, in 2015, and no player from a Group of Five school, as it would be defined now, has ever won it.

Jeanty is the nation’s leading rusher and has gone over 200 yards twice in four games. He had 259 yards and four touchdowns against Washington State last week, with 234 yards coming after contact. He forced 17 missed tackles.

He could put up equally prodigious numbers against Utah State’s porous defense Saturday.

Numbers to know

0 — First-quarter points allowed by Clemson.

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9 — Mississippi WR Tre Harris’ nation-leading number of plays of at least 30 yards.

38 — Navy has scored at least this many points in its first four games of a season for the first time in the program’s 144-year history.

1971 — Year of Iowa State’s most recent conference road shutout before last week’s 20-0 win at Houston.

1994 — Year Duke last opened a season 5-0.

Under the radar

Rutgers (4-0, 1-0 Big Ten) at Nebraska (4-1, 1-1), Saturday, 4 p.m. ET (FS1)

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The Scarlet Knights probably merit more attention for their best start since 2012. They’re coming off close wins at Virginia Tech and at home against Washington. A road win against a Nebraska team on the rise under second-year coach Matt Rhule almost certainly would end their 12-year absence from the Top 25.

The Cornhuskers are looking for their offense to be sharper than it was in an ugly win at Purdue last week. A victory over Rutgers would move Nebraska within one win of bowl eligibility for the first time since 2016.

Hot seat

Florida State’s Mike Norvell has seen his fortunes turn dramatically.

A year ago, the Seminoles were on their way to 13-0 and an ACC championship before they were snubbed by the College Football Playoff committee because of an injury to their quarterback. A 63-13 Orange Bowl loss to Georgia was considered a one-off considering the Seminoles were No. 10 in the preseason Top 25 and predicted to win the ACC.

But here they sit, 1-4 with No. 15 Clemson up next. The offense is averaging just 15.2 points, the passing game has produced just four touchdowns and six interceptions and the run game is the fourth-least productive in the country. Brock Glenn will take over at quarterback for the injured DJ Uiagalelei.

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Norvell was rewarded for last season with an eight-year, $84 million contract extension, and the Tallahassee Democrat reported his buyout would be $65 million. That should be enough to make his bosses think twice, or three times, about making a change.

(The Associated Press contributed to this report)

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San Diego, CA

Opinion: Bullying against Palestinian Americans in San Diego must stop

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Opinion: Bullying against Palestinian Americans in San Diego must stop


As the one year anniversary of Oct. 7 looms, Palestinian San Diegans have been counting their dead. The assault on Lebanon has the early patterns that resembles Gaza and the West Bank. I talked to my aunt who lives outside of Beirut. In her 83 years she has seen too much. For her children, now aging themselves, their entire lives have been consumed by war. The numbers of direct family members lost are in the hundreds, perhaps thousands in San Diego County alone.

If that is not enough, individuals and organizations in San Diego have launched rampant bullying campaigns to disrupt and sabotage planned cultural and civil rights events and educational support in San Diego hotels, museums, parks, universities, and schools. Below is a partial list of several incidents and crimes where litigation is pending so few details are able to be disclosed. One is the Council on American Islamic Relations, CAIR San Diego, when their Sept. 14 annual gala’s location was abruptly moved. It resembles a similar incident in Arlington, Va.

The Mingei Museum in Balboa Park in July reportedly postponed a Palestinian Tatreez (embroidery) workshop, indicating threats of protest and violence the week before the scheduled Monday night event.

The San Diego based National Conflict Resolution Center forcibly removed Imam Taha, a board member and recipient of a Peacemaker Award without his consent.

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The County Board of Supervisors and mayor Todd Gloria have refused to meet with our community, not only to acknowledge individual and collective traumas, but to remediate recent hostile resolutions and misrepresentations against Middle Easterners and North Africans.

Where is the alarm? Rather, San Diego’s elected officials, civic institutions and colleges accept bullying that limits and sabotages Palestinian Americans’ right to grieve or publicly memorialize the past year of carnage and slaughter, strongly claimed by international law to be a genocide and a scholasticide.

An alternate reality has been concocted to justify extreme actions against Palestinian Americans throughout the country. In San Diego County, the American Jewish Committee and its affiliates such as the Anti-Defamation League have been deemed non-reliable sources by Wikipedia. Palestinian American resources for Oct. 7 are readily available.

Palestinian American students have been the most vulnerable. In Chicago on Oct.14, 2023, 6-year old first grader, Wadea al-Fayoume, was stabbed to death by his landlord. He was unanimously commemorated last month by the U.S. Senate. In Vermont last Thanksgiving, three Palestinian American college students, Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Hisham Awartani were shot and one, Awartani is permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Nationwide, the increase in hate crimes and incidents have risen to astronomical levels since Oct. 7, 2023.

Threats made to anyone who criticizes Israel creates fear. This perpetuates the dissemination of false information via propaganda. Silencing is already normalized when it comes to Arab, Palestinian and Muslim Americans.

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The silence from entities who tally incidents such as the ACLU, FBI and General Attorney’s office have responsibilities to monitor, gather information and begin investigations. Our District Attorney’s office in San Diego and California’s Attorney General in Sacramento are refusing to notice what is threatening our constitutional rights to engage in public debate. After this long period of silence. Our community concludes that they do not care. Prove us wrong.

Our community feels unsafe while it grieves these losses in our home countries. If bullying is not addressed proactively by our civic leaders, it will metastasize and lead to more violence against Arabs, Muslims and all Americans critical of Israel. We expect to practice our constitutional rights without danger and sabotage. We demand that empathy and discussion, ingredients for healing and responsibly constructed resolutions be sought by elected and civic leaders.

Bittar is an artist, writer and community organizer who lives in North Park.



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Bishop’s runs winning streak over Francis Parker to seven

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Bishop’s runs winning streak over Francis Parker to seven


For the last six years, the yearly matchup between Bishop’s and Francis Parker has been rather one-sided, with the Knights winning each of the last six games.

On Friday night, the lopsided rivalry continued.

Bishop’s extended its win streak to seven with a dominant 48-0 victory over the Lancers.

“It’s always good to get a win, and it’s always good to have guys playing efficiently and effectively,” said Bishop’s coach Shane Walton. “And more than that, it’s good to get these young guys in there and get some opportunities late.”

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A day after the announcement of his verbal commitment to the University of Iowa, Knights QB Cash Herrera put together arguably his most efficient performance of the season, passing for two touchdowns and rushing for one, all coming in the first half.

Herrera got his favorite weapons, Ian Browne and Ruben Gutierrez III, involved early. He connected with Browne on a 12-yard TD pass and then hit Gutierrez for a 32-yard TD on a perfectly timed screen, a staple of the Knights’ offense.

Bishop’s (3-2) ended the first half up 34-0.

“Cash is special, and Ruben Gutierrez has been a special player for us,” noted Walton. “Those two guys have kind of gotten things going for us. We’ve been dealing with a lot of injuries, so the offense hasn’t been as efficient as I would like it to be, but we’re starting to gel at the right time.”

The Knights used a RPO-based attack to generate numerous explosive plays against Francis Parker (3-3).

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Browne had 100 receiving yards in the first half to go with his TD. Gutierrez added a rushing TD to go with his screen score. Both playmakers were pulled early in the third quarter along with Herrera.

The Knights’ defense was just as impressive as their offense, led by defensive linemen Declan O’Donovan, Henry Armstrong and Cooper Armstrong. The trio produced five sacks and eight tackles-for-loss in the win.

The constant pressure helped create turnover opportunities in the secondary. Son-Son Santiaguel and Jonah Garcia each came away with interceptions. Garcia also forced and recovered a fumble.

“Defense is about everyone being a piece to the puzzle, and we talk about everyone reaching their cap,” noted Walton. “We talk all the time that in every game, you get about 10 to 12 possessions a game. If you can take the ball away three times, that means they get seven to nine, and we get 13 to 15. Anytime you win the turnover battle, you’re typically going to come away with the win.”

Scoring Summary

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Bishops 48, Francis Parker 0Bishops          14  20  7   7 – 48Francis Parker 0   0   0   0 – 0B – I. Browne 12 pass from C. Herrera (E. Granet kick)B – R. Gutierrez 32 pass from C. Herrera (E. Granet kick)B – Herrera 4 run (E. Granet kick)B – R. Gutierrez 3 run (E. Granet kick)B – D. O’Donovan 2 run (PAT failed)B – S. Santiaguel 2 run (D. Ashraf kick)B – J. Popplewell 8 run (D. Ashraf kick)

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