The Athletics parted ways with one of their talented youngsters on Wednesday.
The Green and Gold traded speedy outfielder Esteury Ruiz to the Los Angeles Dodgers for right-handed starting pitcher Carlos Duran, ESPN’s Alden González first reported before the team made the move official shortly after.
The A’s have acquired RHP Carlos Duran from the Dodgers in exchange for OF Esteury Ruiz.
Ruiz, 26, has been back and forth between Triple-A Las Vegas and the major leagues over the past season-plus after stealing an American League-most 67 stolen bases during the 2023 MLB season, which also broke Rickey Henderson’s Athletics rookie record.
In 178 games at the major-league level, Ruiz is batting .243/.297/.343 with seven home runs, 57 RBI and 73 stolen bases in 598 plate appearances.
Duran, whom the Athletics acquired for Ruiz, is a 23-year-old starting pitcher who signed with Los Angeles as a 16-year-old international prospect in 2018.
In 19 starts last season, Duran posted a 3.71 ERA in 53 1/3 innings pitched with 73 strikeouts and 32 walks for the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate.
Major League Baseball updated its rulebook in 2023 to increase the pace of action on the field. But the changes put concessionaires on the clock, too.
Rishav Dash, senior director of analytics for Delaware North’s sports business, remembers the lead-up to that year’s Opening Day—months spent modeling the potential ramifications and discussing them with the company’s 10 MLB clients.
MLB games were 24 minutes shorter on average in 2023 than they were in 2022, and games were another four minutes faster last season, a roughly 15% deduction in all. But the condensed time ultimately “had only a marginal effect on consumer behavior,” a white paper published by Aramark Sports + Entertainment found.
Ballparks were prepared for the new status quo, it turned out, because they’d already undergone a revolution. Teams optimized operations for the same reason MLB added a pitch clock: Fans could no longer stand to wait. This year, baseball’s Ballpark app is testing new concession-buying functions—including using digital wallets—in search of even speedier delivery.
The hot dog cannon is no longer just a jumbo-sized novelty gag. It represents the apotheosis of MLB teams’ quest to serve food, fast.
Some clubs responded to shrinking game times by extending beer sales through the eighth inning. But most found game-goers buying about as often as they did before, most commonly just before the first pitch and often sometime again about a third of the way through a game.
If anything, the larger impact was likely the 10% jump in attendance baseball saw in 2023, in part thanks to the rule changes. An endless tally of concession analytics has also altered the game.
Aramark VP of Data Science Scott McDade said the company tracks the ratio of sales locations to fans, especially in the upper decks, to ensure quick food access. One hundred fans-per-register represents a rough baseline target. At Delaware North, purchase tracking data allows Dash’s team to narrow in on specific sections that aren’t selling to expectations. Changes range from menu updates to additional automation.
These days, there’s more than one way to get your peanuts and Cracker Jack. The Texas Rangers cited the pitch clock when rolling out mobile ordering to all visitors in 2023. Fenway Park brought in self-order kiosks to celebrate its 111th birthday. The Pittsburgh Pirates called up computer vision technology from Mashgin to facilitate speedier self-checkouts using cameras that capture what each fan is buying. Across 16 venues, Mashgin estimated it saved baseball fans 14 million minutes of line time in 2023—the equivalent of more than 86,000 extra baseball games viewed. Then, of course, there are still the roving vendors hawking options. Now they wield Square point-of-sale devices, naturally.
Some new concepts digitize the checkout altogether. MLB SVP for ballpark experience and ticketing product Karri Zaremba said the league is testing “a number of new purchase experiences” this season, starting in Cleveland and Philadelphia. There, fans can now order food and pay through the MLB Ballpark app.
The tests build on advancements in the stadium entry process. A hands-free, facial recognition-based experience lets fans better appreciate their moments walking up to historic venues, Zaremba said. It also proved to be 2.5 times as fast as digital ticketing methods. The league is still working with teams to figure out how they might use extra space once reserved for winding lines.
With fans walking in at a faster clip, it is on stadiums to be ready to serve them. More than 40% of in-stadium purchasers made their buys before first pitch, according to Aramark’s study. McDade said some teams have updated their giveaway promotions to encourage earlier arrivals and smooth out that pregame rush.
In Atlanta, the Braves opened a food court just around the corner from their most frequented entrance gate, increasing serving speed as fans enter.
The eight-stall hall also represents an evolution in ballpark design philosophy. Truist Park opened in 2017. But rather than wait 20 years for massive overhauls, the Braves have created a master planning committee that oversees updates on an ongoing basis. Back in 2019, the team tracked food acquisition time throughout the stadium. The venue opened with 100% traditional food counters but has added mobile ordering, self-checkout and Amazon’s Just Walk Out stores to its footprint since. Occupancy tracking sensors improved the flow through the team’s retail store as well.
Atlanta was rated No. 1 in overall guest experience and concessions in an MLB-wide survey last year.
Still, there are human cashiers ready to serve those who prefer the ol’ way—and many do.
“Our fans really equate a baseball game with the food and beverage experience,” Braves SVP for operations Hannah Basinger said. “And doing so in such an automated fashion—I don’t think it’s for everyone.”
The goal then, is not too dissimilar from what the architects of baseball’s modern rules had in mind: The same beloved ball game, just a little bit snappier.
Familiar faces such as Kemar Roach will feature, as will the two Camerons in Bristol – Bancroft and Green
Those of us lucky enough to watch county cricket in the 1980s, with a packet of Salt’n’Shake in one hand and an autograph book in the other, could tick off Viv Richards at Somerset, Malcolm Marshall at Hampshire, Michael Holding at Derbyshire (imagine!) and Courtney Walsh at Gloucestershire in only a couple of games. And that was just for starters.
The growth of franchise cricket means that players at the peak of their powers will rarely now sign on the dotted line to spend their entire summer in northern climes perfecting their red-ball skills. But the appeal remains, like a sudden blast of Madonna’s Into the Groove from a passing car as you wait for the lights to change. The 2025 County Championship overseas roster is an intriguing one. Choose your games carefully and you have a chance to watch some of the world’s best do battle against each other and the indignities of the British weather.
The Utah Jazz were punished after sitting Lauri Markkanen. <br>Photograph: Rob Gray/AP
The Toronto Raptors aren’t new to losing. But they are new to whatever this is.
After taking over as the Raptors’ president of basketball operations in 2013, Masai Ujiri refused to embrace the blatant, in-your-face tanking that Sam Hinkie and the “process” Philadelphia 76ers were busy popularizing during that same era, instead opting to build from the middle. “I’m not sure the karma is great when you do stuff like that,” Ujiri said about tanking. “We’re not doing that here,” he later added.
The Raptors made history in 2019 by becoming the first team to win an NBA Championship without a single lottery pick. But after Toronto missed the playoffs in three of the last four seasons and were rewarded with just one top 10 draft pick, Ujiri finally decided to follow in a long line of teams who are taking advantage of the NBA’s incentive structure that means bad teams have better odds of landing a top pick in the draft.
Now, the Raptors find themselves in the middle of an embarrassing and unwatchable multi-team tank-off that has come to define the 2024-25 NBA season.
“As a purist of the league, a purist of basketball, we play every game to win,” 15-year veteran and vice-president of the National Basketball Players Association, Garrett Temple, tells the Guardian. “[But] the way the rules are set up, it’s advantageous to be the worst team in the league record-wise. I don’t think it’s a great look for the NBA.”
And the Raptors have given bad looks this season. After leading playoff-bound Orlando Magic by double digits in the fourth quarter on 4 March, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic pulled the plug by sitting starters Immanuel Quickley, Scottie Barnes, Jakob Poeltl and RJ Barrett, leaving about $100m in salaries on the bench and less than $10m in rookies and two-way players on the floor. “All I could do was laugh,” Barrett said.
While Rajakovic explained that “for us, it’s very, very important now to take a look at different players and young guys and to develop those guys, to give them important minutes,” the reality was that the Raptors were as close to the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings as they were to a playoff spot. Even though about a third of the regular season was still to be played at that point, the team had already decided to prioritize managing its lottery odds over making a push for the playoffs.
And they are not the only ones.
“Right now there are nine teams tanking,” one league executive told ESPN. “And next year’s draft is going to have maybe more franchise players than this year’s draft. A year from now, you may still have nine teams tanking.”
That’s almost one-third of the league that exists somewhere on a spectrum from being comfortable with mediocrity to coming up with increasingly creative ways to lose games. Teams are sitting their best players due to “rest” and quiet-quitting by pulling starters late in games, causing upwards of 20 star players to be in street clothes on any given night in March and April, making the quality of late-season basketball worse than ever.
“Teams can put whatever they want on their injury report, and the league has not policed injury reports,” NBA writer Brian Windhorst said on the Hoop Collective podcast. “So you have situations where guys are truly injured, but listed as out. And other situations where stars are not really injured, but they’re listed as out. And so the credibility is all over the place, and the league has let that go down the block and around the corner … it’s just a mess.”
While it makes sense for teams to take advantage of the NBA’s incentive structure so long as they can get away with it, the popularization of tanking has created a lose-lose situation for the league, the fans who pay large sums to attend games or watch on TV, the players who are missing out on crucial developmental reps and, most importantly, the NBA’s TV partners, who recently signed an 11-year agreement worth $76bn.
People have been trying to come up with creative solutions to solve the NBA’s tanking problem for more than a decade, ranging from flattening the draft lottery odds so that every non-playoff team has an equal chance of getting the No 1 overall pick, to creating a “play-out” tournament where the worst teams compete for better draft odds at the end of the season, to replacing the draft with rookie free agency.
But each so-called solution comes with unintended consequences, such as teams on the playoff bubble tanking to get in the lottery if the odds are flat or if there is a play-out tournament, and the best rookies hurting parity by signing in big markets in free agency.
We know that the NBA doesn’t approve of tanking because it has a long history of railing against it. The league pressured the 76ers to get rid of Hinkie in 2016, and fined Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban $600,000 for admitting to tanking in 2018.
The question, then, is how does the NBA keep a similar incentive structure but discourage the blatant, unethical tanking that has become popular in recent years? The obvious answer is to start by seriously penalizing anything that goes against the integrity of the game.
After all, we usually have a pretty good idea about who the worst teams are by the 50-game mark, with the league sorting itself into tiers of contenders, playoff teams and bottom-dwellers. But at a certain point, some teams rest veterans or quiet-quit to increase their lottery odds. The rest of the bottom-dwellers have no choice but to follow suit, and bam! Unmitigated, unethical tanking ensues.
“When I first came in the league, I don’t remember this happening as much,” Temple, who has been around the NBA since 2009, says. “People are trying to take advantage of situations and have their team be the best team they can be. At the end of the day, no team is doing this in order to have a bad team. They’re trying to make their team better.”
But what if there was a way to pressure teams to play out the entire season the way they play the first 50 games? That way, the lottery order would sort itself out naturally, and the worst teams would get the best odds without the need to ever lose on purpose.
It may sound extreme, but that’s exactly what happens in the NHL, where a culture of competitiveness and power at the hands of head coaches keeps teams from resting players in order to lose on purpose. Instead, the NHL employs a different, more ethical form of tanking where the worst teams choose to offload veteran players at the trade deadline and naturally lose out as a result.
The NBA can’t expect the culture to change naturally given that teams have learned how to exploit the system, but the league can make it a significantly harder system to game. This would require the NBA to get serious about discouraging tanking, penalizing teams who are found guilty of resting healthy players with significant fines or the removal of future draft picks in order to get the best players to play all season.
In March, the NBA fined the Utah Jazz $100,000 for violating the league’s player participation policy for sitting star Lauri Markkanen for nine straight games when he appeared to be free of significant injury. But the standard $100,000 fine that the league levied against the Jazz this year, the 76ers last year, and Mavericks the year before is a drop in the bucket for team owners like Ryan Smith, who has an estimated net worth of $2.6bn. And when Markkanen did return the following game, he played just 19 minutes and sat the entire second half, showing how seriously the organization took the penalty.
“These next few weeks,” one NBA executive told ESPN. “Could be the worst tanking stretch we’ve ever seen.”
What the NBA needs is a new set of rules specifically designed to discourage tanking – a “Shame Doctrine” that clearly lays out a set of increasingly significant penalties that will be levied against teams for tanking, with each infraction setting them back millions of dollars and future draft picks.
Of course, it can be complicated to police injuries when almost every player is banged up by the end of the season. But the league already has its own doctors to determine whether a player is healthy enough to play, and enforcing it would be similar to what the NFL does in order to satisfy football’s integrity (and the NFL’s betting partners).
Plus, common sense should apply here. If a team pulls its starters in the fourth quarter as the Raptors did, they should be penalized. If the Jazz refuse to spread out Markkanen’s minutes so that he only plays in the first half, so should they.
The solution isn’t to come up with a different incentive structure besides the lottery because they all have flaws. Instead, it’s time for the NBA to be proactive and get serious about penalizing tanking violations. Otherwise, teams will continue to find creative ways to game the system, and the product will continue to suffer.
Briton says ‘heart worked a little too hard’ in Bogotá
Watson defeated in opening round of Charleston Open
Britain’s Francesca Jones has been forced to withdraw from the Colsanitas Cup in Bogotá after collapsing on court. The 24-year-old appeared to stagger after failing to return a serve from Argentina’s Julia Riera in the third set of their round-of-32 match and was unable to return to play. She fell to the ground and was removed from the court in a wheelchair but later said her heart had “worked a little too hard”.
“Due to a physical issue, Francesca Jones has withdrawn from her match against Julia Riera at 6-2, 5-7, 5-3 in favour of the Argentinian,” the tournament posted on X. “We wish the British tennis player a speedy recovery.”
Steph Curry leaned to his left, slowly walking out of frame from the bottom left corner as he watched the ball perfectly splash through the net.
The 3-pointer gave him a dozen on the night, also awarding him with 50 points to put the Warriors ahead by one point as only three minutes remained on the clock in an eventual 134-125 win against the Memphis Grizzlies on Tuesday night at FedExForum, pushing Golden State to the No. 5 playoff seed in the Western Conference.
Curry scored 52 points on 16-of-31 shooting and made 12 of his 20 3-point attempts, adding 10 rebounds, eight assists and five steals as an exclamation to his latest heroics. The 37-year-old was the star of the show, the leading man for all of us to still marvel at in his 16th season. His 12th and final triple of the night also highlighted why the Warriors believe they have the right 35-year-old co-stars around him.
Draymond Green caught Brandin Podziemski’s pass from the left wing and didn’t have to think twice. Playing his 13th season as Curry’s running mate, Green knew exactly where he’d be and when. As Green hauled in Podziemski’s pass, he already was in his own passing motion for Curry, who was sprinting through the paint to reach the left corner for three points.
It was who was next to him, and his subtle nuance of basketball smarts, that deserves recognition and appreciation. Jimmy Butler, running along the baseline, looked to be right in step with Curry. Maybe even in his way. But Butler gets it. He sees things. He knows what the right play is, nearly every time.
And in this instance, the right play was making room for Curry – clearing space by screening Ja Morant and getting in the way of Santi Aldama. Curry only needs a crack to let it fly. He had a whole lane, thanks to Butler.
Those are the kinds of plays that don’t show up in the box score, yet ultimately lead to winning.
“Jimmy saved our season,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said to reporters in Memphis after the win. “The trade saved our season. Everybody knows that, but you watch what he did tonight – 12 for 12 from the line. Steph goes off the floor, we’re running everything through him. Just a big-time defender, big-time two-way player. … As Steph talked about, he wanted to play meaningful basketball again, and he’s getting to do that.
“We’re all getting to do that, and it’s a lot of fun.”
The spotlight and all the headlines belonged to Curry. Rightfully so. Butler also was fantastic, scoring 27 points on 7-of-11 shooting, and had six rebounds, four assists and three steals. He made all 12 of his free throws and now has made 10 or more free throws six times in the 23 games he has played for the Warriors. His basketball IQ down the stretch was off the charts.
First, he found a way to get NBA All-Star and 2022-23 Defensive Player of the Year Jaren Jackson Jr. off the floor with two minutes to go in the game and the Warriors only up by one point. Knowing Jackson had five fouls, Butler baited him into a sixth mid-shot and then made both free throws to give the Warriors a three-point lead.
Then, not even a minute later, Butler’s swipe-down steal on Ja Morant led to Moses Moody’s game-sealing 3-pointer. Let the party in Grind City commence.
“Playoff Jimmy, ya know,” Kerr said. “It’s a real thing. He’s a big-time, big-game performer at both ends. So much of that comes down to IQ, your basketball IQ. Obviously he’s got a lot of gifts. Incredibly strong and really fluid athlete, but to me, it’s his brain that puts him over the top.
“The pump fake on Jaren was kind of the play of the game, to me.”
The dagger drained by Moody was off Green’s 12th assist of the game. Though he always does a little bit of everything, Green recorded his first triple-double of the season, totaling 13 points, 10 rebounds and 12 assists. He assisted five of Curry’s 12 threes, and his 12 assists accounted for 31 points.
The Warriors now are 31-2 all-time when Green has a triple-double.
Winning time is when dogs like Butler and Green are let off their leash. In the fourth quarter, Butler scored 10 points, made all six of his free throws and was a plus-10 in 10 minutes. Green was a plus-12 in just under 10 minutes, grabbing six rebounds and dishing four assists.
Any kind of curtain call was made for Curry. His co-stars, Butler and Green, could take a bow right alongside him.
The storylines are endless around Steph Curry’s 52-point explosion in the Warriors’ gritty 134-125 win over the Memphis Grizzlies on Tuesday night at FedEx Forum.
Curry finished the game with 52 points on 16-of-31 (51.6 percent) shooting from the field and a whopping 12 of 20 (60 percent) from 3-point range. He added 10 rebounds to pick up his ninth double-double of the 2024-25 season, with eight assists, five steals and one block. He was a plus-17 in plus/minus rating through 36 minutes.
Not only did he help will his team to a needed victory that jumped them into the Western Conference’s No. 5 playoff seed, but he made impressive NBA history all while in Year 16 at age 37.
Here are 10 mind-boggling stats from Curry’s unforgettable performance:
Steph Curry is the oldest player in NBA history to have a quarter with 15 PTS, 5 REB, & 5 3PM. pic.twitter.com/KIDE0nfntA
Since that date, Curry is averaging 25.5 points on 42.3-percent shooting from the field and 40.8 percent from beyond the arc, with 5.0 rebounds, 5.5 assists and 2.0 steals in 32.2 minutes through six games. The Warriors are 5-1 in such contests.
A lot of NBA talk has been about who will be the next face of the league. It might be best to sit back and appreciate what we are witnessing now, because Tuesday’s performance served as just another reminder that the Chef is still cooking.
Cincinnati scores 70.9 points and has outscored opponents by 5.3 points per game. UCF averages 8.7 made 3-pointers per game, 2.3 more made shots than the 6.4 per game Cincinnati gives up. Cincinnati has shot at a 44.9% rate from the field this season, 0.2 percentage points less than the 45.1% shooting opponents of UCF have averaged.
Boise State makes 46.1% of its shots from the field this season, which is 2.3 percentage points higher than Butler has allowed to its opponents (43.8%). Butler scores 8.3 more points per game (74.2) than Boise State allows to opponents (65.9). TOP PERFORMERS: Tyson Degenhart is averaging 18 points and six rebounds for the Broncos.
USC averages 77.2 points and has outscored opponents by 2.2 points per game. Villanova ranks eighth in the Big East with 22.7 defensive rebounds per game led by Wooga Poplar averaging 6.0. USC averages 77.2 points, 9.8 more per game than the 67.4 Villanova allows.
