OKLAHOMA CITY — Mia Scott hit a grand slam, Teagan Kavan claimed another win and Texas defeated Texas Tech 10-4 in Game 3 of the Women’s College World Series championship series on Friday night to win its first national title.
Kavan, a sophomore, allowed no earned runs in all 31⅔ innings she pitched at the World Series. She went 4-0 with a save in the World Series for the Longhorns and was named Most Outstanding Player.
Leighann Goode hit a three-run homer, Kayden Henry had three hits and Scott, Reese Atwood and Katie Stewart each had two hits for Texas (56-12).
Texas Tech star pitcher NiJaree Canady, who had thrown every pitch for the Red Raiders through their first five World Series games, was pulled after one inning in Game 3. The two-time National Fastpitch Coaches Association Pitcher of the Year gave up five runs on five hits and only threw 25 pitches. The loss came after she signed an NIL deal worth more than $1 million for the second straight year.
Not even support from former Texas Tech football star Patrick Mahomes and his wife, Brittany, who were in attendance, could put the Red Raiders (54-14) over the top.
Texas had lost to Oklahoma in the championship series two of the previous three years. Oklahoma was one of the teams Texas beat on its way to the championship.
Canady’s night started like many of her others, as she struck out the first batter she faced. After that, she didn’t resemble the pitcher entered the game leading the nation in wins and ERA. Goode’s homer in the first put the Longhorns up 5-0. Scott’s blast came in the fourth inning and gave Texas a 10-0 lead.
Hailey Toney was a bright spot for the Red Raiders. She singled to knock in two runs in the fifth, then singled to knock in another run in the seventh.
But, in the opening contest of a World Series rematch at Chavez Ravine on Friday night, the Dodgers mounted another stunning late-game rally against the New York Yankees.
And this time, they didn’t even need an assist from the Yankees’ porous defense.
Seven months to the day since the Dodgers’ historic comeback at Yankee Stadium in last year’s World Series finale — when three Yankees errors keyed an infamous five-run fifth that propelled the Dodgers to the franchise’s eighth championship — the team produced an inning of similarly unexpected magic, scoring four times in the bottom of the sixth to turn a three-run deficit into an eventual 8-5 win at a sold-out Dodger Stadium.
“The situation is a little different,” designated hitter Shohei Ohtani said in Japanese, “but I think coming back to win is always good.”
It was Ohtani who got Friday’s sixth inning started, leading it off with his second home run of the night and MLB-leading 22nd of the season.
Freddie Freeman took over from there, hitting an RBI double off the wall to reprise his role of Yankees killer after winning MVP honors in last year’s Fall Classic.
Then, what had once been a 5-2 New York lead officially evaporated when Andy Pages lined a tying single against a drawn-in infield. The Dodgers finally went in front on a bases-loaded walk from Michael Conforto.
For a team that has been grinding for much of the last month, the sequence led to a scene of stadium-wide elation.
“Just getting guys on, keeping the line moving, getting huge hits,” Freeman said, “that was awesome.”
“Every win is important, [but] this one is a big one,” added outfielder Teoscar Hernández. “We were down early, [but] we didn’t panic.”
Highlights from the Dodgers’ 8-5 win over the Yankees on Friday night.
For the Dodgers (35-22), nothing will compare to the ecstasy of last year’s fifth inning in Game 5; when a dropped ball from Aaron Judge, an errant throw from Anthony Volpe and calamitous miscommunication between Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rizzo keyed the largest comeback in a title-clinching game in World Series history.
Asked about the similarities to Friday’s game, Freeman said he “actually never thought about it.”
But, given the team’s sub-.500 play over the last three weeks, and a rash of injuries that got worse Friday when Mookie Betts was scratched with a fractured toe and Evan Phillips was ruled out for the rest of the season because he’ll need Tommy John surgery, Friday injected this trying stretch of the regular season with a sorely needed jolt of life.
“For us to get behind the 8-ball a little bit … and find a way to scratch back into the game was huge,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Huge game for us to win.”
Dodgers outfielder Andy Pages reacts after he hits an RBI single against the Yankees in the sixth inning Friday.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
For much of Friday, the Dodgers seemed headed to the kind of loss that had become commonplace over their 10-11 slide entering the night.
Their starting pitcher struggled, with Tony Gonsolin giving up four home runs in the first three innings — including a mammoth blast from Judge two batters into the game — to hand the Yankees a 5-2 lead.
Their lineup, meanwhile, was sputtering against a premium pitcher, inducing little stress against major league ERA leader Max Fried after an Ohtani homer to start the night.
“After giving up a run on [Judge’s] homer, I think it’s important for the flow of the game to get one back right away,” said Ohtani, whose first blast was his sixth leadoff homer of the season. It marked the first time in MLB history that the reigning MVPs of both the American and National League hit first-inning home runs in the same game.
“We were in a bad position after that too,” Ohtani noted, “but everyone didn’t give up.”
Indeed, as they did so many times during last year’s World Series, the Dodgers flipped the script on the Yankees (35-21) with an inning they never saw coming.
Dodgers baserunner Freddie Freeman, right, beats the tag of New York Yankees catcher Austin Wells to score in the seventh inning Friday.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Ohtani’s blast to lead off the sixth was a sky-high fly ball to right, carrying just deep enough to land in the pavilion for his 15th home run of May (tying Pedro Guerrero in June 1985 and Duke Snider in August 1953 for the most in a single month in Dodgers history).
“Testament to Shohei,” Freeman said, “who is hitting home runs all over the place.”
The rest of the inning played out more methodically.
Hernández and Will Smith lined back-to-back singles. Freeman chased Fried from the game with an RBI double to left that got over Cody Bellinger’s head. Then, after the Yankees turned to right-hander Jonathan Loáisiga to face Pages, he hammered a ground-ball single through a drawn-in infield to bring home the tying run.
“When you can feel a little momentum, guys getting hits, you just try and keep that line moving,” Freeman said.
Another pitching change, with left-hander Tim Hill entering to face Conforto with the bases loaded and one out, didn’t help either.
“There were a lot of really good grindy at-bats in there, hitting some good pitches, spoiling some pitches,” Conforto said.
Against a ground-ball pitcher in Hill, Conforto took a different approach, working a full count while waiting for something up and over the plate.
On the payoff pitch, however, Conforto “kind of got the feeling he was losing the zone a little bit.”
Thus, when Hill pulled a sinker on his payoff offering, Conforto took for a run-scoring ball four.
“Just a rough inning,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.
The Dodgers took more good at-bats in the seventh, when another double from Freeman set up Pages for a two-out, two-run single — with Freeman racing home on his battered right ankle to score on a bang-bang slide.
And after Gonsolin settled down to work through six innings without further damage, the Dodgers’ bullpen made the lead stand, getting key outs from Jack Dreyer and Ben Casparius in the seventh, then struggling late-game options Tanner Scott in the eighth and Alex Vesia for a ninth-inning save.
“It’s still early, it’s still May,” Gonsolin said. “But it’s cool to play that kind of caliber team and come out on top.”
“We try to win each and every game, of course,” Ohtani added. “But I think [tonight was] a special atmosphere. I think it was huge to have taken the [first game] of the series.”
Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts will not start in any of this weekend’s games against the New York Yankees after sustaining a fractured toe this week, but the team is hopeful he will be able to avoid a stint on the injured list.
Betts told the Times on Friday night that he fractured his toe at home this week, after the Dodgers returned from a road trip on Wednesday night.
“I was just going to the bathroom in the dark and hit my toe on a wall,” he said.
The Dodgers were originally still planning to have Betts in the lineup Friday for their series opener against the New York Yankees, but he was ultimately scratched after his toe continued to give him problems before the game.
Despite the diagnosis, Roberts and Betts said they were confident the former MVP wouldn’t be out more than a few days.
“I know it’s at the tip of his toe, so it’s going to be one of those situations [that is] per his [pain] tolerance,” Roberts said. “I don’t expect an IL. We’ll probably have him down for the series and hopefully he’ll be available to hit in a big spot. And then we’ll kind of see. But I think for me right now it’s just day to day.”
“It’s just pain,” Betts added. “Get the swelling out, it’ll be all right.”
Betts had started in each of the Dodgers’ past 20 games, and appeared in each of their last 51 overall, having not missed any time since recovering from a two-week stomach virus at the start of the season.
While his defense had been much-improved during his second season as the club’s everyday shortstop, the 32-year-old was struggling at the plate, batting just .254 on the season with eight home runs, 31 RBIs and a .742 OPS.
In Betts’ absence on Friday, veteran Miguel Rojas took over at shortstop. Tommy Edman and Hyeseong Kim are also options to fill in for Betts at shortstop over the rest of the weekend.
“I’m gonna be all right,” Betts said. “It is what it is.”
For the second time in less than a year, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan played the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night, bringing together two legends of American song on one stage. The concert — actually Nelson’s third recent visit to the Bowl after his 90th-birthday bash in 2023 — was part of the annual traveling Outlaw Music Festival, which will keep Nelson, now 92, and Dylan, who’ll turn 84 next week, on the road through mid-September. Here are nine highlights from the show:
1. Last year’s Outlaw tour stopped at the Bowl in late July, which at that time meant Nelson didn’t have to ward off the chilly May gray that inevitably settles after dark over the Cahuenga Pass. Here, a day after reportedly suffering from a cold in Chula Vista, Nelson kept warm in a stylish black puffer jacket to go with his signature red bandanna.
2. John Stamos played percussion in Nelson’s six-man band Friday — a somewhat lower-key role than the prominent guitar-and-vocals spot he often holds down these days in Mike Love’s touring Beach Boys. Yet the TV star looked pleased as punch to be back there, shaking a shaker as Nelson opened his set, as always, with “Whiskey River.” Also on hand, filling in for Nelson’s son Lukas was singer-guitarist Waylon Payne, who sang lead in a moving version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” — the folk-soul masterpiece made a hit in 1970 by Payne’s mother, the late Sammi Smith.
3. My favorite of Nelson’s styles to hear him do at this point in his career, with a voice and a soloing hand as free as they’ve ever been, is the spectral country-jazz mode of “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” and “Always on My Mind,” which gave him a pair of No. 1 country hits between March 1981 and May 1982. On Friday, he nailed high notes you might not have expected him to in the former and used the latter to show off the rhythmic daring of his line readings. Both were achingly beautiful.
4. Nelson didn’t perform anything from his latest album, “Oh What a Beautiful World,” which came out last month and collects his interpretations of a dozen Rodney Crowell tunes. (By some counts, it’s Nelson’s 77th solo studio LP — and the 15th he’s dropped since 2015.) He did, however, do a cut from his second-most-recent effort: a stately rendition of Tom Waits’ “Last Leaf,” in which he rhymes “They say I got staying power” with “I’ve been here since Eisenhower.” In fact, Nelson’s been here since FDR.
5. The big event in Dylanology between last year’s Outlaw tour and this year’s was, of course, James Mangold’s Oscar-nominated biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” which inspired a widespread resurgence of interest in Dylan’s music — particularly the early stuff Timothée Chalamet performs in the movie. Perhaps that’s why Dylan is singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” on the road again for the first time in six years, including at the Bowl, where he gave the song a jaunty rockabilly vibe. (Anyone wondering why Chalamet wasn’t at Friday’s gig clearly hasn’t seen the TikToks of him wilding out after his beloved Knicks defeated the Celtics at New York’s Madison Square Garden.)
6. A rare-ish bit of stage banter from His Bobness, directed toward an audience member near the front row: “What are you eating down there? What is it?”
7. The whole point of going to see Dylan play is to be delighted — or to be outraged, or baffled — by his determination to reinvent songs so deeply etched into the history of rock music. Yet I was still thrilled by how radically he made over some of his classics here: “Desolation Row” was bright and frisky, while a sultry “All Along the Watchtower” sounded like Dire Straits doing ’80s R&B.
8. In addition to Nelson and Dylan, Outlaw’s West Coast leg also features two younger roots-music acts in Billy Strings and Sierra Hull. (Later in the summer, the tour will pick up the likes of Nathaniel Rateliff, Sheryl Crow, Waxahatchee and Wilco, depending on the city.) Strings, who’s been bringing bluegrass to arenas lately — and whose tattooed arms meshed seamlessly with the sleeves of his tie-dyed T-shirt — sang “California Sober,” which he recorded in 2023 as a duet with Nelson, and offered a haunting take on “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess.”
9. A former child prodigy on the mandolin, Hull opened the evening flexing her Berklee-trained chops in a series of lickety-split bluegrass numbers that got early arrivers whistling with approval. But she also showed off a winsome pop sensibility in originals like “Muddy Water” and “Spitfire” — about “my spitfire granny back in Tennessee,” she said — and in a yearning cover of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears.
