Category: Sports News

Drafted by the Mets in the 24th round of the 2018 MLB Draft, catcher Hayden Senger has been waiting years for the message he finally received just before the team broke camp in Port St. Lucie this week.

For the first time, the 27-year-old can call himself a major leaguer.

Senger, who has played a combined 402 games in the Mets’ minor league system, has officially made the 2025 Opening Day roster. President of baseball operations David Stearns announced the move to reporters on Wednesday, and Senger later spoke to the assembled media, describing what that moment meant to him.

“It was a very nice conversation. I feel like I couldn’t really get words out,” Senger said. “I was really excited. All of those years that I put in, kind of overwhelmed me. So, yeah, pretty speechless.”

With Francisco Alvarezbeginning the season on the Injured List due to a broken bone in his left hand, Luis Torrens will take over as the starting catcher, opening a spot for Senger as the backup.

“There’s a lot of down times and lot of times when I felt like I was on top of the world,” Senger said. “It’s a roller coaster playing in the minor leagues for that long. To be here, it does make it all worth it.”

“I’ve got to give a shoutout to my wife [Ryann],” Senger added later. “She has worked for a lot of years to support me through this, and it kind of made it all worth it now that I get to say I’m a major league baseball player.”

Stearns said Senger making the team is a good story, but that's not the reason he made the ballclub. 

“He’s getting the job because we think he can help us win games,” Stearns said. “He’s an elite defensive catcher. Our pitchers love throwing to him; that really matters for us. And we’re excited to have him on the team and looking forward to watching him play.”

As Senger has battled his way up through the Mets’ minor league system (he first got a taste of Triple-A ball in 2022), he’s needed to take on an offseason job along the way, working in a grocery store to supplement his income.

“[Carlos Mendoza] said I know what you do in the offseason,” Senger said about when he got the call into the manager’s office, “and I don’t know if you ever got a promotion [there], but you got one here.”

Of course, there’s no telling how long this major league dream will last for Senger, but he’s not thinking that far ahead. For now, he’s soaking up every moment he can as he looks forward to his major league debut.

But what about keeping that other job?

“Still up in the air,” Senger said with a laugh. “I gotta tell my boss.”

Hall of Famer on Phillies Andrew Painter: ‘This guy's gonna be Gerrit Cole' originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia

The Phillies haven’t opened the 2025 season just yet, but one Hall of Famer believes their pitching will guide them deep into October.

Hall of Fame baseball writer Jayson Stark was a guest on 97.5 The Fanatic’s “The Best Show Ever,” and he was very bullish on the Phils, particularly the starting pitching, a group that features a pair of additions at the back end to an already strong top four: hard-throwing Jesus Luzardo, added via trade from Miami, and top prospect Andrew Painter, who expects to arrive sometime around the middle of the season.

“I think the upside is best rotation in baseball,” Stark said. “We’re assuming the big guns stay healthy. [Zack] Wheeler, [Aaron] Nola, they’re all about taking the ball. Let’s assume they do. Then you have Cristopher Sanchez. So much buzz about that guy all spring, and with reason. He finished the spring with a 29% strikeout rate. Now you have this ‘swing and miss’ version of Sanchez that we’ve never seen. It could be spectacular if this is what he is.”

“Jesus Luzardo is a swing and miss machine. It feels to me like he is highly motivated by a chance to pitch for a team that’s actually good! When you think about all the retreads that they ran through the number 5 starter hole last year, and now you compare that group to Jesus Luzardo, what a difference! It’s incredible to think about what a difference that make.”

Some lofty expectations indeed for Luzardo, who while exceedingly talented, has yet to truly arrive in the major leagues. But Stark saved some superlatives for a man who has yet to throw a single major league pitch.

“Ricky, this guy’s gonna be [Yankees ace] Gerrit Cole, honestly. I just wonder about how patient the Phillies can be about getting him to the big leagues if they have any injuries early in the rotation.”

Whoa.

Painter hasn’t pitched a single inning above AA-ball, and Stark compares him favorably with a 6-time All-Star, Cy Young winner and future Hall of Famer. Heady stuff. I’ll take it.

Coming off Tommy John surgery and rehab, Painter (who turns 22 next month) is on an innings restriction of about 100 innings for 2025. The front office would prefer that those innings are pitched down the stretch, or, if the situation calls for it, in the postseason. But we shall see.

“I know they feel like they’ve got the best rotation in the big leagues… I’m not sure they’re wrong, and a lot of it is about those two guys who were not there at any point last year.”

When the Dodgers’ Guggenheim ownership group first bought the team in 2012, one of their early hires was renowned sports architect Janet Marie Smith.

And in her first couple of months on the job, one of her biggest early tasks quickly became clear.

The clubhouse at the time, she recalled, still felt like a “1962 locker room” — from the shared batting cage and food room used by the home and road teams, to the dilapidated dressing room that still harkened back to the stadium’s opening a half-century earlier.

So, that first offseason before the 2013 campaign, the team did some immediate renovations, updating the space with more modern features and expanding its footprint to a more spacious two-level design.

But over the decade since, a more complete reimagining of the space had been on the club’s bucket list.

Read more:Mookie Betts is happy to be back in the Dodgers' lineup

This winter, those visions finally became reality.

When the Dodgers begin the domestic portion of their schedule on Thursday, hosting the Detroit Tigers for their home-opener at 4:10 p.m., they will do so in the comfort of a brand-new clubhouse space, having completed an extensive renovation to Dodger Stadium this offseason that centered on transforming the area players will call home for the next six months.

“We felt that what we’d done in 2013 seemed like a marked change,” Smith said this week. “But what we’ve done this year is what [team president] Stan Kasten has described as a ‘generational upgrade.’”

In the space of just four months this winter, construction crews gutted the bowels of Dodger Stadium, digging deep trenches down the left and right field foul lines to build new, expanded clubhouse areas within the confines of Major League Baseball’s third-oldest ballpark.

When fans arrive Thursday, the results of the work won’t be obvious to the naked eye. From the exterior, the ballpark won’t look much changed from the extensive 2020 renovations Smith oversaw at the stadium, when the outfield pavilions were updated and the center field plaza was added to become Dodger Stadium’s new “front door.”

But beneath their feet, the Dodgers will be enjoying all the trappings of their new home clubhouse.

They now have expanded weight, training and food rooms. Their once-cramped locker room has been turned into a more spacious, luxurious setting. And, to the excitement of much of the roster, a second batting cage has been installed as well, one fitted with all the trappings of modern training technology in what the team hopes will serve as yet another boon to its superstar-laden roster.

“That clubhouse was amazing,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said after getting his first look during the team’s Freeway Series exhibition game against the Angels on Sunday.

“Really crazy,” added starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow. “Everything was really nice.”

“It’s hard to put into words,” echoed third baseman Max Muncy, one of the longest-tenured players on the roster. “You get so used to something being there and you come in and you have no idea where you’re at. It’s really cool. It’s what you’d expect out of the Dodgers.”

Because Dodger Stadium is built into a hillside in Chavez Ravine, Smith said the only way for the team to create new space for its players and coaching staff was effectively by digging deeper into the ground.

“It would be impossible — and I don’t use that word casually — to go into the hillside to create the space for the clubhouse,” said Smith, whose decorated career includes leading past jobs to build Camden Yards in Baltimore, transform Turner Field in Atlanta from a Summer Olympics venue into an MLB stadium, and renovate Fenway Park in Boston for a second century of use.

“So,” she continued of this winter’s Dodger Stadium renovations, “we took all the seats out, created the space below the playing field, and then created essentially a concrete roof over that” for the pre-existing structure to be rebuilt on top of.

Read more:Dodgers will visit President Trump and the White House to celebrate World Series title

Planning for the project had taken shape over the last two years, with Smith soliciting input from president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and his front office, members of the coaching staff and playing roster, and virtually anyone else who counts the clubhouse as their workplace on a daily basis.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in the clubhouse who didn’t have some input on their area,” she said. “That’s been really helpful.”

And through those conversations, the reality Smith first confronted a decade ago was only further crystallized as blueprints came together.

“As we worked with our baseball operations team and Andrew Friedman and all of his lieutenants,” she said, “it became clear that what we really needed was not just an appendage to the clubhouse, but a holistic renovation.”

Now, the home clubhouse is a sprawling three-story structure residing beneath Dodger Stadium’s field level. It stretches from behind the third-base dugout all the way down to the left-field foul pole. And it’s so big, Freeman joked that before Sunday’s game, he didn’t even have time to check out all of its new features on his first day there.

“I heard there were [new] sleep rooms,” he said with a laugh. “I haven’t even seen those yet. So yeah, it’s gonna take a couple days to take it all in.”

One of the most notable changes was the expansion of the actual locker room, which transformed from one of the smallest home dressing rooms in all the majors to a more modern space with new stalls complete with mood lighting and digitized nameplates.

Vast improvements were also made to strength and conditioning rooms, something that Smith credited to owner Mark Walter’s goal of making Dodger Stadium “a place where the players feel is there for them 12 months a year,” and also noted as being high on Friedman's list of suggestions.

“One of the things that Andrew and his team asked for was that our weight room and training room be placed together,” she said, “because the activities between the two are very fluid.”

The team’s full-service kitchen got a facelift, too, having evolved as a place of renewed importance since Dodger Stadium’s last clubhouse renovations in 2013.

Same went with the batting cages — the place many hitters and coaches spend much of their time pregame, and made near-universal requests for the creation of a second hitting tunnel.

“I mean, we made it work with one cage,” Freeman said. “But having two cages, obviously you can get so much more. Guys can work at the same time … We’ll be able to change schedules.”

“More space, more resources,” Freeman added, “means hopefully better things.”

The real surprise from players was how quickly the renovations got done.

Freeman deadpanned that, compared to Dodger Stadium’s four-month timeline, it took a wine cellar he installed at his home “about eight months to do, so I’m kinda confused.” Glasnow added that, at points this offseason, he “honestly didn’t think it was gonna get done” in time for the start of the season.

“But when we walked in, everything was ready to go,” Glasnow remarked this week, his eyes still wide with amazement at the new space. “To all the workers, I don’t know how they did that so quick. It was so much stuff.”

Smith acknowledged the scale of this offseason’s renovations isn’t usually completed so quickly. She estimated that the timeline “probably should have been three times” as long as their four-month construction window. But, to expedite the process, crews from PCL construction, along with hundreds of other subcontractors and vendors who were involved in the job, worked on a seven-day-per-week schedule. Some contractors, Smith said, “have literally not had a day off since January.”

“When they took the job on, it was sort of a pact everyone made: You’re gonna be available,” Smith said. “And everyone stuck to that … I think people feel real pride in being able to be a part of something that has this kind of cultural relevance to the city.”

Read more:News Analysis: Shohei Ohtani is restarting his throwing program. But how much will he pitch in 2025?

Smith’s hope is that fans feel similarly, even if their gameday experience might not look much different when they arrive Thursday.

“I know it’s not a fan-facing space [that we renovated],” she said. “But I think our fans have such a connection to our players and their emotions and their psyche, that I hope they sort of feel that energy resonated.”

With the players, at least, it already is; giving the Dodgers’ defending World Series-winning roster one more thing to celebrate as they open the 2025 season.

“It feels like they created space out of nothing, which they kind of did,” Muncy said. “Everything just feels a whole lot bigger. It’s kind of amazing.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

The Mets were dealt a handful of injuries to starting pitchers during spring training, with Paul Blackburn the latest to land on the injured list at Opening Day, but president of baseball operations David Stearns said on Wednesday that the club isn’t overly concerned about any of the injuries to the starters.

Stearns said that he’s experienced some spring trainings where you come out unscathed on the injury front and others where you "take it on the chin a little bit." 

“We’re fortunate that we believe that these dings to our starting rotation are pretty temporary and really not concerned with any of them,” he said from the Mets’ dugout in Houston ahead of Thursday's game against the Astros.

The Mets’ top baseball man said that Blackburn has already responded "really well" to the injection he got to deal with inflammation in his right knee, and Sean Manaea is “throwing and in good shape and really going through his rehab process at a really good clip and we’re excited about that.”

The Mets got the good news on Manaea two weeks ago when a follow-up MRI on his right oblique came back clear, and he was cleared to resume throwing as he was "symptom-free."

"We gotta pretty much build him back up as a starter," manager Carlos Mendozasaid at the time. "The good thing is he's feeling good, there's nothing going on there -- that oblique. And now it's just 75, 90, 120 [feet] before he gets on the mound."

Frankie Montas, who had had a “repeat MRI” on his lat injury in the last few days that showed “really good healing,” Stearns said.

In terms of throwing progression, the right-hander is still a “week or two away,” but Stearns was upbeat about Montas’ progress: “Clearly good healing is better than not healing and so we’ll certainly take that update.”

Montas landed on the shelf right at the start of spring training, which he believes he sustained during his first bullpen session of camp.

But on the whole, Stearns indicated a level of positivity on the rotation's injury issues on the eve of the season's start.

“At this point, we’re pretty optimistic on all these guys,” Stearns continued before dropping a grain of salt, “Of course, until they’re back throwing well in major league competition, we won’t know for sure. But we seem to be trending in the right direction and we’re really looking forward to getting them back.

“In the meantime, we have guys that we think can step up and do the job.”

Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez is making progress toward a return from a broken bone in his left hand.

The 23-year-old, who underwent surgery just over two weeks ago, got his stitches out on Monday and is set to begin strength work, manager Carlos Mendozasaid on Wednesday, adding that Alvarez is expected to resume baseball activities shortly after he starts his strength work.

Speaking on March 12, Alvarez discussed his expected return date.

"Maybe six weeks," he said. "My goal is to make that as quick as possible."

Alvarez added: "They said after the third week, maybe I can start hitting. It's on me. If my body takes more time than normal, maybe take eight weeks. But it's very on me. If I feel comfortable, if I feel good, I can move quicker."

Alvarez's return from injury seems to be on track with his aim for the shorter end of the six-to-eight week timeline, which would mean the catcher being back at some point near the end of April.

The 23-year-old went through something similar last year.

He injured his thumb on April 19 against the Dodgers while taking an aggressive turn at first base and awkwardly landing on his hand. That injury required surgery to repair a torn ligament and kept him out of the lineup until June 11.

When Alvarez returned, he took a while to get going offensively. But he finished the regular season on a high note, posting a 1.000 OPS and smacking five home runs over his last 48 plate appearances from Sept. 11 to Sept. 30.

Alvarez said he didn't think the thumb injury last year hampered his hitting upon his return.

Regarding how this injury might impact him?

"Maybe yes, maybe no," Alvarez said on March 12. "It's a quick recovery, so I don't think I'm going to lose strength in my hand. I'm very strong."