San Diego, CA

What to watch for when Arizona baseball hosts San Diego for 3-game weekend series

Published

1 year ago

February 21, 2025

What to watch for when Arizona baseball hosts San Diego for 3-game weekend series

The college baseball season is only a week old and already Arizona has experienced a rollercoaster of results.

The Wildcats went to Arlington, Texas with their first preseason ranking in four years and promptly lose all three games, getting outscored 31-7 at the Shiners Children’s College Showdown at Globe Life Field. Then, two days later, they came home to run-rule New Mexico in an afternoon home opener at Hi Corbett Field for their first win of the season.

Playing that game at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday was a favor to New Mexico, which had spent the previous weekend playing a tournament in Phoenix and wanted to get back home. That means Friday will serve as the unofficial home opener as the UA opens a 3-game series with San Diego.

Arizona went 19-9 at Hi Corbett last season, a record that included two losses as NCAA Tournament regional hosts. The Wildcats are 15-4 all-time against the Toreros but dropped two of three to them in San Diego early last season.

Here’s what to watch for this weekend at Hi Corbett:

Rotation redux

Arizona is going with the same three starting pitchers as it did on opening weekend, sending out redshirt sophomore right-hander Collin McKinney on Friday night, sophomore righty Owen Kramkowski on Saturday afternoon and true freshman righty Smith Bailey for Sunday’s finale.

McKinney and Bailey looked great in their outings. McKinney, a transfer from Baylor, had the longest outing of the group by going 4.1 innings against Ole Miss and allowing a run on three hits with three walks and three strikeouts, while Bailey tossed four shutout innings against Louisville while striking out five and yielding three singles.

Kramkowski, on the other hand, had a first career start to forget. He failed to get out of the first inning against Clemson, allowing seven runs and eight hits while recording both of his outs via strikeout.

Bad luck contributed to the rough outing, as a potential inning-ending double play ball struck an umpire on its way through the infield, resulting in a dead ball single that put two on with one out. Kramkowski would then allow four straight hits before getting another out.

“You have to pitch through that,” UA coach Chip Hale said on Tuesday. “Kramkowski had a tough one, I’d like to see him back out there.”

Despite that performance, Kramkowski is still considered a pro prospect. D1Baseball ranks him as the No. 91 draft prospect in college for the 2026 MLB Draft.

Junior righty Casey Hintz was being considered for a starting spot, and threw the final 3.2 innings against Ole Miss, but Hale said his value may still be best suited for the bullpen. Another potential starter, Rutgers transfer Christian Coppola, could make his UA debut this weekend piggybacking off one of the other starters.

Hitting is contagious

Against New Mexico, Arizona had 11 hits including three in a row to open the bottom of the 4^th when it scored three times. There were two other occasions where the Wildcats had back-to-back hits.

In the three losses in Texas, that happened once.

Hitting was expected to be Arizona’s strength entering the season, based on the number of returning players and veterans on the roster, and Hale still feels that will be the case. He wasn’t upset with the overall approach his batters had at the plate in Texas, just the results.

“You always know, when you go play in those tournaments, like we will (next week) in Houston, there’s three really good teams that are that are coached really well, and they’re going to be at the same level,” Hale said. “Trust the process. Just do what you do, whether it’s pitching, hitting, defense, base running. Don’t try to do too much. Just be who you are.”

Against New Mexico Hale moved senior Garen Caulfield from the No. 2 spot to cleanup, and he responded with two hits and four RBI. That lengthens the overall lineup and also changes the approach for junior Mason White, who has batted third each game.

White had two hits on the opening weekend, both solo home runs, while against New Mexico he had two singles and a double. It was the ninth game of his career with 3-plus hits but only the fourth that didn’t include a homer.

“I thought his best at-bat … was the ground ball base hit that the shortstop backhanded and couldn’t come up with, those are the kind of at-bats he has to have, especially late in the count,” Hale said. “If he can do that, put the ball in play hard all the time, he’s going to have huge numbers.”

About San Diego

The Toreros went 41-15 last season, winning both the regular season and conference tournament titles for the West Coast Conference. They played in the Santa Barbara Regional, going 1-2, and then had five players taken in the 2024 MLB Draft including former UA pitcher Josh Randall, who struck out 10 Wildcats in five innings last February.

This season has been an even rougher start for San Diego than for Arizona, as USD went 0-4 at home albeit to Big 12 power TCU. Two of the games were 1-run losses including a 10-inning affair on Opening Day.

There are still a handful of returners from the 2024 team that gave Arizona problems a year ago. Outfielder/left-handed pitcher Austin Smith had three homers and seven RBI and also struck out four of five batters he faced, while infielder Jack Gurevitch had five hits.

San Diego pitchers struck out a combined 44 Wildcats in the series, 19 apiece and the first and third games, but like Arizona it has a revamped staff.

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San Diego, CA

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Published

7 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Todd Martens
| Los Angeles Times

San Diego — Before we see elephants at Elephant Valley in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we come face to face with destruction, only the wreckage is beautiful. A long, winding path takes guests around and under felled trees. Aged gray tree hunks form arches, for instance, over bridges that tower over clay-colored paths with hoof prints.

The design is meant to reorient us, to take us on a trail walked not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and hunted for its cataclysmic-like ability to reshape land, and sometimes communities.

“It starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care for the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are ecosystem engineers.”

Elephant Valley will open March 5 as the newest experience at the Escondido park, its aim to bring guests closer than ever to the zoo’s eight elephants, which range in age from 7 to 36, while more heavily focusing on conservation. The centerpiece of the 13-acre-plus parkland is a curved bridge overlooking a savanna, allowing elephants to walk under guests. But there are also nooks such as a cave that, while not previewed at a recent media event, will allow visitors to view elephants on their level.

In a shift from, say, the Safari Park’s popular tram tour, there are no fences and visible enclosures. Captive elephants remain a sometimes controversial topic, and the zoo’s herd is a mix of rescues and births, but the goal was to create a space where humans are at once removed and don’t impede on the relative free-roaming ability of the animals by keeping guests largely elevated. As an example of just how close people can get to the herd, there was a moment of levity at the event when one of the elephants began flinging what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces up onto the bridge.

“Our guests are going to be able to see the hairs on an elephant,” Burtis says. “They can see their eyes. They can see the eyelashes. They can see how muscular their trunks are. It’s really going to be a different experience.”

Elephant Valley, complete with a multistory lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, boasts a natural design that isn’t influenced by the elephant’s African home so much as it is in conversation with it. The goal isn’t to displace us, but to import communal artistry — Kenyan wood and beadwork can be found in the pathways, resting spaces and more — as a show of admiration rather than imitation.

“We’re not going to pretend that we’re taking people to Africa,” says Fri Forjindam, now a creative executive with Universal’s theme parks but previously a lead designer on Elephant Valley via her role as a chief development officer at Mycotoo, a Pasadena-based experiential design firm.

“That is a slippery slope of theming that can go wrong really fast,” she adds. “How do we recognize where we are right now, which is near San Diego? How do we populate this plane with plants that are indigenous to the region? The story of coexistence is important. We’re not extracting from Africa, we’re learning. We’re not extracting from elephants, we’re sharing information.”

But designing a space that is elephant-first yet also built for humans presented multiple challenges, especially when the collaborating teams were aiming to construct multiple narratives around the animals. Since meetings about Elephant Valley began around 2019, the staff worked to touch on themes related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to personalize the elephants.

“Where can we also highlight each of the elephants by name, so they aren’t just this huge herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You see that in the lodge.”

That lodge, the Mkutano House — a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili — should provide opportunities for guests to linger, although zoo representatives say reservations are recommended for those who wish to dine in the space (there will also be a walk-up, to-go window). Menus have yet to be released, but the ground floor of the structure, boasting hut-like roofing designed to blend into the environment, features close views of the elephant grazing pool as well as an indoor space with a centerpiece tree beneath constellation-like lighting to mimic sunrises and sunsets.

Throughout there are animal wood carvings and beadwork, the latter often hung from sculptures made of tree branches. The ceiling, outfitted with colorful, cloth tapestries designed to move with the wind, aims to create less friction between indoor and outdoor environments.

There are, of course, research and educational goals of the space as well. The Safari Park works, for instance, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying human-elephant conflict and finding no-kill resolutions. Nonprofits and conservation groups estimate that there are today around 415,000 elephants in Africa, and the African savanna elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Studies of the zoo’s young elephants is shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in the hopes of delivering care to elephant youth to prevent orphanage. Additionally, the Safari Park has done extensive examination into the endotheliotropic herpes virus. “The data that we collect from elephants here, you can’t simply get from elephants in the wild,” Burtis says.

One of the two entrances to Elephant Valley is outfitted with bee boxes; bees are known to be a natural elephant deterrent and can help in preventing the animals from disrupting crops or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the plane is outfitted with timed feeders in an attempt to encourage movement throughout the acreage and establish a level of real-life unpredictability in hunting for resources. Water areas have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make it easier for the elephants to navigate.

With Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the goal was to allow visitors to “observe safely in luxury — whatever that is — but not from a position of power, more as a cohabitor of the Earth, with as much natural elements as possible. It’s not to impose dominance. Ultimately, it needed to feel natural. It couldn’t feel like a man-made structure, which is an antiquated approach to any sort of safari experience where animals are the product, a prize. In this experience, this is the elephant’s home.”

And the resulting feel of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their house guests.

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San Diego, CA

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

Published

19 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

A man in the Mission Bay Park community of San Diego was fatally struck Sunday morning by a hit-and run vehicle, authorities said.

The victim was also struck by a second vehicle and that motorist stayed at the scene to cooperate with officers, the San Diego Police Department reported.

The initial crash occurred at about 2:20 a.m. Sunday in the area of West Mission Bay and Sea World drives.

The pedestrian was in the southbound lanes of the 2000 block of West Mission Bay Drive when he was struck by a silver vehicle also in the southbound lanes. That vehicle fled the scene, continuing southbound, police said.

A 28-year-old man driving his vehicle southbound ran over the downed pedestrian.

“That driver remained at the scene and is not DUI,” according to a police statement. “The pedestrian was pronounced deceased at the scene.”

Anyone with information regarding the initial crash was urged to call Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477.

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San Diego, CA

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

Published

1 day ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

San Diego County is known for having wet, cold weather in February. But it had numerous hot spells this year. And when the month ended on Saturday a high pressure system produced heat that broke or tied temperature records in nine communities from the desert to the sea, the National Weather Service said.

The most notable temperature occurred in Borrego Springs, which reached 99, five degrees higher than the previous record for Feb. 28, set in 1986. The 99 reading is also the highest temperature ever recorded in Borrego in February.

Escondido reached 95, tying a record set in 1901.

El Cajon reached 92, three degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Ramona topped out at 88, five degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Alpine hit 88, four degrees higher the record set in 1986.

Campo reached 87, four degrees higher than the record set in 1999.

Vista hit 86, four degrees higher than the record set in 2020.

Chula Vista reached 84, one degree higher than the record set in 2020.

Lake Cuyamaca rose to 76, four degrees higher than the record set in 1986.

Forecasters say the weather is not likely to broadly produce new highs on Sunday. Cooler air is moving to the coast, and on Monday, San Diego’s high will only reach 67, a degree above normal.

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