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LOS ANGELES — The All-Star Game showcased what baseball has become — home runs, strikeouts and offense-killing shifts. The National League didn’t have a hit between the first and eighth innings of Tuesday night’s 3-2 loss, its ninth in a row. In a sport where R&D has become as important as BP, four of the five runs scored on long balls. There were 22 strikeouts, including the final three batters on 10 pitches by Cleveland’s Emmanuel Clase in a game that lasted 3 hours, 11 minutes despite just 13 hits, five walks, two hit batters and one runner reaching on a ...

PIAA looking at shakeup

By Michael Boytim mboytim@altoonamirror.com The PIAA held its summer meeting last week and plenty of news came out of it, but most of it is all unofficial for now, because a motion takes three readings and approvals to be accepted and each of the major topics are through just one accepted reading. While it’s best to wait until the proposed basketball qualifiers and upcoming state bracket reveal are official until after the third reading due to the possibility of things changing over the next couple meetings, it’s worth exploring three other topics that could result in seismic ...

Expansion leaves a green footprint

Of the Big Ten’s five expansions over the last 70 years — Michigan State in 1950, Penn State in 1990, Nebraska in 2011, Maryland and Rutgers in 2014 — Thursday’s blockbuster announcement that Southern Cal and UCLA would join the league starting in 2024 is the biggest. It converts the league from a midwestern base with eastern cherry picking to a coast-to-coast footprint that snagged the Los Angeles market and the west’s best two brands while, intentional or not, torpedoed the Pac-12. An obvious counter to the SEC’s poaching of Texas and Oklahoma, the Big Ten has further ...

Hoenstine family savors special day

UNIVERSITY PARK — Central baseball had some history when A.J. Hoenstine took over as head coach 15 years ago, but most of that was centered around a run to the PIAA Class 3A championship game in 1984 that the Scarlet Dragons lost to Chambersburg, 3-1. Since Hoenstine has taken over, ...

No winners in golf’s Civil War

Golf is in the early days of a bitter showdown between the established PGA Tour and an upstart series backed by the repressive Saudi regime, which hopes that throwing around billions will help people forget about its appalling human rights record. If history is any indication, there are unlikely to be any real winners in this battle of the links. IndyCar is still struggling to overcome an ugly rebellion from the 1990s. The NBA’s growth was undoubtedly stifled by its nearly decades-long challenge from the American Basketball Association. The NHL endured plenty of harsh blows while ...

Is Franklin’s stance falling on deaf ears?

UNIVERSITY PARK — Without mentioning names — hint, hint — there have been some former Penn State football coaches known to snap at the media every now and then. James Franklin, for the most part, hasn’t been one of them. In fact, at least in the press conferences I’ve attended over Franklin’s soon-to-be nine-year tenure, I’ve only heard him raise his voice twice — when Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz accused Penn State of faking injuries last year and Wednesday when Franklin was glued on the topic of NIL. From the beginning, Franklin has wanted Penn State to be “bold and ...