MLB playoffs + World Series

WNBA playoffs + WNBA Finals

NBA season starts

NHL season starts

Three nights a week of NFL

Five nights a week of college football

Three editions of Sports! The Newsletter, the free and good newsletter about sports, every single week

For a primer on the Brewers’ whole vibe, check out our post from six weeks ago about a team dedicated to zigging when baseball has zagged. They’ve built an offense out of strategies like “not swinging the bat” and “hitting the ball to the opposite field.”

(Slight update, though: I wrote about how the Brewers had the best record in baseball despite being dead last in home runs; that ended up not panning out — they were 29th out of 30 teams in home runs at the end of the regular season.)

Forcing protracted at-bats is part of Milwaukee’s strategy. The Brewers faced and average of 3.97 pitches per at-bat this season, the most in the majors; Bauers averaged 4.17 pitches per at-bat, the 17th-most.

At 31 years old, Bauers is in the midst of an inexplicable breakout season. Bauers spent most of his career as a quad-A player, shuttling up-and-down from minor league teams … but at times, he barely seemed good enough to even play every day in the minors. In 2022, he hit .183 with eight home runs for the Triple-A affiliates of the Reds and Yankees. When the Brewers acquired Bauers in a swap of minor league players in 2023, he’d posted negative WAR in three of his four major league seasons. But this year, he set career highs in basically every category, including a team-leading 26 home runs.

Bauers told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he planned to retire after the 2024 season, and only stayed in baseball because his wife found out she was pregnant and would need health insurance.

The American healthcare system is broken! Inspiring!

(Also Jake Bauers is smarter than me because I did not really think this through when leaving steady employment to become an Independent Newsletter Guy.)

On the other side, the Dodgers are dealing with a tremendous slump from Shohei Ohtani, who is fighting through injuries. Ohtani is hitting .155 with no home runs, 36 strikeouts, and just 15 hits in his last 24 games. His last homer came on Aug. 18, almost two months ago. Ohtani hasn’t pitched since July due to a knee injury. He went on the injured list in September with that same knee injury and an additional biceps injury, but the time off seemingly didn’t help at all.

The situation has given the Dodgers a dilemma: Do you bench the greatest baseball player of all time (my opinion) if he’s not performing? Manager Dave Roberts dropped Ohtani to sixth in the batting order, but it seems like Ohtani’s staying in the starting lineup. Some are calling for Ohtani to be replaced with star youngster Josue De Paula (who is Brooklyn-born, just like the Dodgers).

Unless the Dodgers win the next four games — and if that happens, every Milwaukee fan reading this is allowed to throw one unopened can of beer at my head — we’re headed for history. The Brewers have never won the World Series; their lone trip came in 1982, when they were still in the American League. And the ALCS features the Tampa Bay Rays, who have never won the World Series, and the Cleveland Guardians, who haven’t won the World Series since 1948.

The World Championships feature all the individual disciplines and the individual all-around, but the team event has greater importance: Teams that reach the podium will automatically qualify for the 2028 Olympics. The countries that secure these spots will not be eligible for individual qualifying spots and won’t need to worry about their 2027 World Championships placement. 

The actual athletes on those teams for L.A. 2028 will remain up in the air for a while. One of the quirks of Olympic qualifying is that countries essentially compete for quota spots, and each National Olympic Committee has final discretion on who goes to the Games. Gymnasts are often competing for the opportunity for someone else from their country to go to the Olympics. 

The U.S. women’s team enters World Championships as a medal favorite, having won the last seven women’s team all-around world championships. This year’s team is young, internationally inexperienced, and unlikely to be the five gymnasts who Americans will be cheering for in Los Angeles. 

Skye Blakely is competing in her fourth World Championships and is the most experienced member of this U.S. team. After helping the U.S. win the team event at the 2022 and 2023 World Championships, she ruptured her Achilles ahead of the Paris 2024 Games. She’s joined by four teenagers: Charleigh Bullock, Reese Esponda, Claire Pease, and Hezly Rivera are all going to their first World Championships.

(Rivera was on the gold-medal winning American team from the Paris Olympics. She didn’t compete in the team event, but she still got a gold medal, kinda like how the backup QB at the Super Bowl still gets a Super Bowl ring. — Rodger)

While U.S. gymnasts are always in the mix for the individual all-around title, the competition is wide open in Rotterdam. If the Russians’ visas were not denied, they’d be considered among the favorites for the team event. Now, they may have to wait until 2027 to qualify for L.A. 2028.

Readers of this newsletter who tuned into the Asian Games in Nagoya will remember the tight competition between the Chinese and Japanese women’s teams, when Japan came within one point of upsetting China for gold. 

Unless Melnikova’s visa status changes, Asian Games all-around gold medalist Aiko Sugihara from Japan and Ke Qinqin from China must be considered the favorites. Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour, the 2024 Olympic champion in the uneven bars, is another name to watch. 

Brazil won the team all-around bronze medal at the Paris 2024 Olympics and will be led by Rebeca Andrade, the first Brazilian woman to ever win an individual Olympic medal in gymnastics. The team may have an outside shot at a medal, and Andrade is always a name to watch.

On the men’s side, Japan and China remain the favorites to win World Championships. Japan’s boasts the last two Olympic individual all-around champions in Daiki Hashimoto and Shinnosuke Oka, but they were bested in Nagoya by the Chinese team led by Zhang Boheng, who also captured the individual all-around gold. 

Russia has strong teams in both the men’s and women’s competitions. The men’s team has an outside shot at a medal with 2025 parallel bars bronze medalist Daniel Marinov and 2025 junior individual all-around world champion Arsenii Dukhno leading the squad. The women’s team just dominated the European Championships in Croatia, with Melnikova winning the continental all-around title and Anna Kalmykova taking silver. Both have been denied visas to the Netherlands. 

Russia is still largely in the hinterlands of international sport, thanks to its 2014 doping scandal and the ongoing war in Ukraine. But the IOC has eased restrictions on Russian athletes, allowing them to compete under their own flag at L.A. 2028 after more than a decade of competing under either the Olympic Flag or, later, the Athletes of Independent Nations flag. Russia and Belarus remain suspended by some international sport bodies. 

This World Championships will be the second straight in which gymnasts’ visas were denied. The Israeli team was denied entrance to the 2025 event in Indonesia over Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza.

Both bans have garnered outcry from the international sporting community. Allowing athletes to compete, even from countries not recognized by host nations, is considered one of the underpinnings of our international sport system. But recent actions by some countries — including the United States — suggest the system could be fraying.

First of all: I promise I am not trying to turn this newsletter into “Dramatic Last Second Sports Collapses,” although I understand why you might think that after back-to-back entries about Fremantle blowing the Australian Football League championship in the final minutes and Oliver Solberg crashing at the finish line of the World Rally Championship. It just so happens that sports have featured a lot of dramatic last-second collapses lately.

Knibb is one of America’s best cyclists — she just kinda threw on top being really good at running and swimming. She won the national individual time trial championship in 2024 and 2026, and competed in the event in the Paris Olympics while also competing in the Olympic triathlon events.

She’s been dominant at just about every sub-Ironman triathlon distance. She’s a four-time Ironman 70.3 World Championship winner — a half-distance course, which means only 1.5 miles of swimming, 55 miles of biking, and a half-marathon — and she’s won silver medals at the last two Olympics in the mixed relay, in which athletes are only on the course for about 20 minutes each.

In every triathlon she enters, it’s sort of a given that Knibb will be leading after the cycling leg, which she regularly completes minutes ahead of her competition.

In 2025, she tried to hold that lead. It didn’t work. She collapsed after eight hours and 13 minutes, watching helplessly as Løvseth passed her with just two miles remaining in a 140-mile race.

Løvseth has been described as “the world’s fittest woman.” (A normal thing for an American person to say, a creepy thing for a British person to say.) I have to imagine the Norwegian Pain Tolerance that allows them to dominate the Winter Olympics is a boon in triathlon: in 2025, Norwegian men swept the podium in Kona.

This year, Knibb once again had a big lead after the bike section … and history seemed to be repeating itself. Løvseth took the lead with five miles to go, while Knibb was seen vomiting. (Her manager apparently wrote “vomiting is normal” on a whiteboard to encourage her to keep going. These people are built so, so, so different.)

Then, the story flipped. Suddenly, it was Løvseth’s body that could go no farther. With less than a mile to go, as she headed down the final stretch, Løvseth’s running form started to falter. She slowed down almost to a walk (amateurs started passing her) then began wobbling, eventually tumbling to the ground. This time, it was Løvseth on the ground as Knibb passed by:

Løvseth showed remarkable determination: She got up off the asphalt and walked to the finish line, taking eighth place.

Knibb credited her 2025 failure for her winning strategy in 2026. Here’s what she said after the race, via Louis Bien — the editor of Sports! — in a story for Trek: