One of the most anticipated fights of the year takes place on Saturday as Max Holloway takes on Dustin Poirier at UFC 318 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Hawaii’s Holloway defends his symbolic BMF title in the headlining bout at the Smoothie King Center, while home favourite Poirier will bring the curtain down on his magnificent career.
Former interim lightweight champion Poirier, 36, has won 21 of his 31 UFC bouts and is regarded by many as the best fighter to never win an undisputed title.
His fight with Holloway marks the third time the pair have met, with Poirier winning the previous two encounters.
“It feels surreal but it’s the right time. I don’t want the sport to chew me up, I want to walk away, I don’t want it to retire me,” said Poirier.
“We’ve fought at different times as different men and each fight has been so different. It’s exciting. Max is a legend, [a] hall of famer, and a good person so fighting him for the last one seems poetic.”
Holloway is starting the next chapter of his distinguished career by moving up to lightweight permanently after defeat by Ilia Topuria for the featherweight title in October.
“It sucks it has to be Dustin but this is his last dance and I’m here to play spoiler,” said Holloway.
SAN FRANCISCO — The Dodgers finally looked like the Dodgers again on Friday night.
Too bad it didn’t happen until they were already down six runs.
For the first time in a week, the highest-scoring offense in baseball finally rediscovered its high-flying form, handing San Francisco Giants ace Logan Webb his worst start all season while sending shivers up the spine of the orange-clad contingent at Oracle Park.
But by the time it happened, the club had already dug a hole too deep for even its star-studded lineup to climb out of, unable to completely erase an early six-run deficit in a 8-7 loss to their division rivals — sending the Dodgers to a seven-game losing streak that marks their longest skid since September 2017.
“I like the fight. I thought one through nine, there were good at-bats in there, scored some runs, had a chance to win again,” manager Dave Roberts said. “And unfortunately, on the pitching side, we just couldn’t prevent enough.”
Friday, of course, never figured to favor the Dodgers given the difference in caliber of the starting pitching matchup.
On one side stood Webb, the crafty and relentless All-Star right-hander who has largely dominated the Dodgers in his seven-year career.
On the other was Dustin May, the once-promising Dodgers right-hander who has yet to realize his tantalizing potential in what has been his first fully healthy big-league season so far.
Still, for a little while on a cold night along the San Francisco Bay, little separated the two sinker-ball specialists, the Dodgers and Giants locked in the kind of close contest that has been the hallmark of this rivalry in recent years.
In the top of the third, Shohei Ohtani even put the Dodgers in front, splashing his NL-leading 32nd home run of the season into McCovey Cove beyond right field for only the eighth splash-down home run by a Dodger player in Oracle Park history.
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani tosses his bat after hitting a two-run home run in the third inning against the Giants on Friday.
(David Barreda / Los Angeles Times)
But eventually, May came unglued, giving up seven runs in less than five innings as the Giants surged to an 8-2 lead. And though the Dodgers (56-39) eventually got to within one, tagging Webb with a season-high six runs, they came up empty in their final couple trips to the plate, wasting plenty of positive subplots in another losing story.
“Today we were able to string some hits together, put some innings together,” shortstop Mookie Betts said. “But we just come up short.”
After starting his night with increased fastball velocity and ruthless assault of the strike zone, May lost his command in the fourth inning.
Dodgers pitcher Dustin May delivers against the Giants on Friday.
(David Barreda / Los Angeles Times)
Rafael Devers walked on four pitches to start the inning. Matt Chapman received another free pass despite a mid-at-bat mound visit from catcher Will Smith. And with one out, Jung Hoo Lee laced a two-run triple over the outstretched glove of Teoscar Hernández, who returned to the lineup after missing the last four games with a foot contusion but still seemed hobbled while trying to track the ball down in the right-field gap.
“Just got a little bit out of sync, couldn’t time things back up,” May said of his delivery, which has teetered between flashes of dominance and stretches of frustration during his return from a second career elbow surgery.
“During my warm-up throws in the fourth, it felt a little off. Trying to get my foot down a little earlier didn’t really help. That’s been a cue. But yeah, it just went bad.”
Things got worse in the fifth, when the Giants (52-43) plated five more while sending 10 batters to the plate.
Dominic Smith led the inning off with a homer. May then gave up a single and two walks to load the bases. The Dodgers missed their chance to escape the inning, when Hyeseong Kim failed to turn a difficult but potential inning-ending double play quickly enough at second base.
May was replaced by Anthony Banda, who was greeted with another two-run triple by Willy Adames (who had already homered to open the scoring in the second inning) and a run-scoring infield single from Lee, who outraced Banda to first base to punctuate a painfully long inning.
“To win a big-league ballgame is tough, but you’ve still got to pitch well, you’ve got to catch it and you’ve got to take good at-bats,” Roberts said. “If all three of those things don’t line up in one night, it’s hard to get a win.”
Mookie Betts grimaces in pain after being hit by a pitch in the sixth inning against the Giants on Friday night.
(David Barreda / Los Angeles Times)
It was at that point, coming off a six-game stretch in which they’d scored 10 total runs, that the Dodgers’ bats finally came to life.
In the top of the sixth, Hernández launched a two-run double that Lee couldn’t quite corral on the run at the warning track, before Michael Conforto followed with a two-run homer that chased Webb and cut the deficit to two.
In the seventh, the Dodgers struck again, when Betts slid into third after hitting another ball just beyond Lee’s reach in center and later scored on Smith’s RBI single.
“It’s definitely more encouraging,” said Betts, who has been among the coldest hitters in the Dodgers lineup lately. “I can’t speak for everyone. But I haven’t done anything this whole time … Just to get us going, get some hits there, that’s the positive that you can take out of it.”
That, however, was as close as the Dodgers got. Smith was left stranded to end the seventh. Kim’s two-out double in the eighth was squandered. And, in the most frustrating of endings, a two-on, one-out opportunity in the ninth went by the wayside when Smith rolled into a double play.
The division lead is down to four.
And as the Dodgers continue to stumble toward the All-Star break, moral victories remain the only wins in sight.
“I know it sucks, but you have to try to take some positive out of it,” Betts said. “At least we battled back.”
Dave Roberts had some goals in mind for starting pitcher Dustin May on Thursday. And they had little to do with the final result.
“The first thing is his ability to go deeper in games,” the Dodger manager said. “The sweeper has got to be a more effective pitch. His sinker has got to be more effective.
“I know he’s working through some delivery things with the pitching coaches. I’m kind waiting to see what to expect tonight.”
May would give Roberts far more than he asked for, setting down the first 16 batters in order and pitching into the eighth inning for the first time in his career in a 6-2 win over the Chicago White Sox.
The win was the Dodgers’ fourth in a row and ninth in their last 10 games.
The start was May’s 16th of the season and the seven innings he threw gave him 89.2 for the year, both career highs. Consistency, however, has been an issue. He won just once in June, when his 5.67 ERA was highest among Dodger starters.
His first start in July was a different story, with May (5-5) giving up just two hits and striking out nine — one shy of his career high — in seven shutout innings before tiring in the eighth.
The Dodgers needed just three batters to give the right-hander the lead with Shohei Ohtani drawing a lead-off walk, then scoring on Freddie Freeman’s one-out double into the right-field corner.
Freeman padded that lead in the third, going the other way and looping a two-run double into the left-field corner. It was Freeman’s first three-RBI game in nearly two months. When Michael Conforto followed two batters later with a two-run homer, it was 5-0 Dodgers.
And the lead could have been larger: Freeman lost a homer of his own in his next at-bat when Chicago right fielder Michael Tauchman reached a couple of rows into the right-field bleachers near the foul pole to bring his fifth-inning drive back.
Mookie Betts closed the Dodgers’ scoring with a one-out solo homer in the seventh, just his second since May 19.
May, meanwhile, was cruising, talking a perfect game into the sixth before Brooks Baldwin singled sharply to right. He took a shutout into the eighth before Baldwin ended that, too, with a two-run homer.
May got help from a couple of sterling defensive plays, with Conforto taking a hit away from Miguel Vargas with a sliding catch in left to the start the fifth and Freeman diving to his right to stab Josh Rojas’ low line drive to start the sixth.
Relievers Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates followed May to the mound, throwing a hitless inning apiece to close out the win.
