A league of their own

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🚨 Headlines

🏈 Cutdown day: NFL rosters have officially been cut down to 53 players each. Seahawks WR Marquez-Valdes Scantling and Packers WR Mecole Hardman are among the biggest names cut.

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⚾️ MLB schedule release: The 2026 MLB season will open on March 25, followed by a full slate of games on March 26, marking the earliest official Opening Day in history.

🏎️ Team Cadillac: Veteran drivers Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez will return to Formula 1 next year with Cadillac, which will debut as the 11th team on the grid.

🇺🇸 Captain America is back: Christian Pulisic was named to the USMNT roster for September friendlies against South Korea and Japan, returning to the squad after skipping this summer’s Gold Cup.

🎾 Coco survives: Coco Gauff overcame service struggles to beat Australia’s Ajla Tomljanović, 6-4, 6-7 (7-2), 7-5, in the first round of the U.S. Open.

⚾️ A league of their own

More than 600 women participated in open tryouts this week for the soon-to-launch Women’s Professional Baseball League.

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From Yahoo Sports’ Jake Mintz:

For more than 25 years, Justine Siegal, the trailblazer of modern women’s baseball, has been pushing her sport up the hill.

That journey has pulled her all around the globe, from Cleveland to Korea, from Massachusetts to Dubai. In 2011, Siegal became the first woman to throw batting practice to an MLB team when she threw to Cleveland hitters in spring training.

“It’s been such a lonely path … having done this for the last 26 years,” Siegal said. But Monday at Nationals Park was a different type of day.

Perched on a panel and surrounded by peers, business partners and fellow women’s baseball luminaries, Siegal could see the future she has spent her life imagining and manifesting. And, at long last, she felt a sense of peaceful belonging.

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“I feel like now I’m part of my family. I’m with my peers,” she said. “My grandchild is going to play in this league, and I’m just so grateful. The future is very, very bright.”

That future began to actualize over a whirlwind weekend in Washington, where more than 600 women from 10 countries arrived for open tryouts ahead of the WPBL’s inaugural season next summer.

Those hopefuls included heralded vets of the international circuit, such as Kelsie Whitmore and Japanese pitcher Ayami Sato, and Little League World Series legend Mo’ne Davis.

Others, including a few women in their 40s and 50s, attended the tryout as a shot-in-the-dark bucket-list item, a chance to see how they would fare or what they have left.

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For many, it was the first time they had ever shared a ballfield exclusively with other women. According to Baseball for All, roughly 100,000 girls play youth baseball each year in the U.S., but only about 1,000 continue into high school ball.

Participation gradually dwindles throughout Little League and then plummets once girls reach middle and high school. Many of the most talented players are incentivized to switch to softball, which offers ample travel ball and scholarship opportunities.

Baseball for All — founded by Siegal in 2010 — was designed to change that. And now, Siegal’s newest project, the WPBL, is meant to serve as the capstone: a league for all young girls and women to strive toward.

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“Parents will often tell me they had no idea how much their daughter was holding in when they were the only girl,” Siegal told Yahoo Sports. “One dad said he’d never seen his girl sing [on the field], you know, until the other girls were singing.”

Keep reading.

⚾️ MLB power rankings

The Brewers sit atop our MLB power rankings as we enter the final month of the regular season.

Dive in: One player on each team with something to prove down the stretch

🏀 WNBA power rankings

Just two weeks remain in the WNBA regular season, and beneath the Lynx — the league’s clear best team and No. 1 in our latest power rankings — chaos reigns in the final sprint to the playoffs.

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Where it stands: Minnesota (30-7) should lock up the No. 1 seed any day now, while the cellar-dwelling Sun, Sky and Wings have all been eliminated. But the other nine teams are all bunched up in an unusually crowded race for the final seven playoff spots.

• First are the four teams jockeying for the 2-5 seeds, as the Dream (24-13), Aces (25-14), Mercury (23-14) and Liberty (23-15) are separated by just 1.5 games.

• That group is three games clear of those fighting for the 6-8 seeds, with the Fever (20-18), Valkyries (19-18), Storm (20-19) and Sparks (17-19) separated by just two games. The Mystics (16-22) are still alive, but probably not for long.

How close is that? The gap between the 2-seed Dream and 9-seed Sparks is just 6.5 games. Last year, that gap was 16 games entering the postseason, and it hasn’t been closer than 12 in the last five years.

Biggest upcoming games: The Aces, who already clinched the playoffs, visit the Dream tonight in a game that could determine the 2-seed. The Fever, still without Caitlin Clark, visit the Sparks on Friday as they try holding off L.A.’s push for the final spot. The Liberty, looking to defend their title, visit the Mercury on Saturday in a critical battle for the 4-seed and home-court advantage.

📚 Good reads

🏈 Ross Dellenger: Money matters: How Dave Aranda, Baylor learned to adapt and embrace new era of college football

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Baylor resisted the intentional pay-for-play method in compensating athletes until a year ago. But their football team’s NIL budget has skyrocketed, making them one of the more extreme examples of a school whose roster value has gone from a little to a lot very quickly. Could this program-wide overhaul transform the Bears into to a Big 12 champ?

🎓 Ben Fowlkes: Welcome to Combat U, the university that put MMA on the syllabus

The idea was fairly simple. Students at Sacramento State could already take classes in physical pursuits ranging from dance to golf. Why not fight sports as well? And if students who excel at NCAA sports like football and basketball can earn college scholarships for their athletic achievements, why couldn’t it work the same for students who had dedicated their lives to the martial arts?

🎾 Dan Wolken: Why tennis needs Andre Agassi in the broadcast booth

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Agassi’s recent return to the fore after years away from the sport he once dominated is not just a welcome development but badly needed. In an era where TV executives seem to have little interest in presenting tennis beyond personality and conflict, Agassi has a natural Yoda-like ability to make the complex seem both relatable and simple.

📺 Watchlist: Wednesday, Aug. 27

🎾 U.S. Open, Second Round | 11am ET, ESPN/ESPN+

The second round begins today with plenty of big names taking the court, including No. 7 Novak Djokovic (11:30am), No. 4 Taylor Fritz (1pm), No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz (7pm) and No. 6 Ben Shelton (8:10pm) on the men’s side and 2021 champion Emma Raducanu (11am), No. 4 Jessica Pegula (1:10pm) and No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka (8:40pm) on the women’s.

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⚾️ Padres at Mariners | 4:10pm, MLB

Seattle’s Bryan Woo, 25, is a dark horse Cy Young candidate after opening the season with 25 consecutive outings of at least 6 innings pitched, and his 2.94 ERA ranks fifth in the AL.

⚽️ Leagues Cup, Semifinals | 8:30pm, Apple

Inter Miami host Orlando City (8:30pm) and LA Galaxy host Seattle (10:45pm) in the Final Four. The winners advance to the title game, while also clinching spots in next year’s CONCACAF Champions Cup.

Is Messi playing? Lionel Messi missed Miami’s quarterfinal with a minor hamstring injury, but he trained with the squad on Tuesday and hopes to play tonight.

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More to watch:

• 🏀 WNBA: Aces at Dream (7:30pm, NBA) … Vegas (11 straight wins) can overtake Atlanta for second place with a victory.

• 🏀 EuroBasket: Serbia vs. Estonia (2:15pm, DAZN) … The 42nd edition of the 24-team tournament tips off, with Nikola Jokić (Serbia) headlining the slate.

Today’s full slate.

🇪🇺 Europe trivia

EuroBasket 2025 tips off today, with 24 European nations set to compete for continental supremacy.

• Group A: Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Portugal, Serbia, Turkey

• Group B: Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Lithuania, Montenegro, Sweden

• Group C: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Spain

• Group D: Belgium, France, Iceland, Israel, Poland, Slovenia

Question: Which country above has the largest population? Which has the smallest?

Answer at the bottom.

📸 Photo finish

I know Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got engaged or whatever, but this might be the most perfectly-timed sports photograph ever taken and deserves our full attention. I may have just found my Halloween costume.

Trivia answer: Germany has the largest population (84 million); Iceland has the smallest (398,000)

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