(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Sunday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION New York 105, Boston 75 Chicago 117, Dallas 101 Utah 109, Denver 105 New Orleans 128, Sacramento 123 LA Clippers 129, Indiana 96 Cleveland at Washington (Postponed) Philadelphia at Oklahoma City (Postponed) NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE Pittsburgh 4, Washington 3 (SO) Florida 5, Chicago 2 Dallas at Tampa Bay (Postponed)
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE PLAYOFFS Kansas City 22, Cleveland 17 Tampa Bay 30, New Orleans 20
TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL Iowa 96, Northwestern 73 Houston 75 UCF 58 Virginia Tech 64, Wake Forest 60
Paul Archuleta/FilmMagicBy CARSON BLACKWELDER, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — Shawn Johnson is pregnant with her second child with husband Andrew East, the couple announced Friday.
“Here we go again,” the Olympic gold medalist captioned an Instagram post featuring a series of photos in which she shows off her baby bump with her family.
In the first snap, she shares a romantic kiss with East. The second is a sweet shot of their 1-year-old daughter, Drew Hazel, and the third is a family portrait of the three of them together.
The couple also shared a video to YouTube about their big news — including how Johnson told East she was pregnant, them both guessing it’s a boy, and that the baby’s due date is summer 2021.
Johnson also opened up about how conflicted she feels after having experienced a pregnancy loss back in 2017.
“I think every time I get a pregnancy test positive after the miscarriage, I try to numb myself and be like, ‘OK, here’s the situation: You’re pregnant, we don’t know how it’s going to end,'” she said. “I don’t celebrate it, which is kind of sad. I get very excited, but I also get very daunted by the situation.”
East — who said he wants to have “as many kids as possible” — then recalled how he tested positive for COVID-19 just days after finding out Johnson was pregnant.
“We were in this time of celebration and we wanted to tell her parents and our friends, but then I ended up having to self-isolate,” he said, calling it “not the ideal situation.”
Johnson ended the video with a message of support to other families on the journey to have children.
“If you are pregnant, trying to get pregnant, if you’re trying to adopt, if you’re in the process of expanding your family or recently suffering from a loss, we are praying for you. All those beautiful babies out there, all those rainbow babies, all those babies in heaven,” she said. “We love you guys.”
(SUNSET BEACH, Calif.) — The time that Maybelle Blair played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the inspiration for the 1992 film A League of Their Own, were some of the best years of her life.
So to celebrate her 94th birthday, on Jan. 16, Blair, of Sunset Beach, California, is raising money to help give young girls a shot in baseball, and to commemorate the women in baseball like herself on whose shoulders they stand.
“We want to be able to have a league of our own again, to have a home of our own,” Blair told Good Morning America. “This was my whole dream for years.”
“When the movie came out, my dreams started to come true,” said Blair, who was featured at the end of A League of Their Own when retired players return for a reunion. “And then here we are again.”
Blair set a goal for her 94th birthday to raise $9,400 for the International Women’s Baseball Center, a proposed museum and educational center for girls and women in baseball in Rockford, Illinois, home of the Rockford Peaches made famous in A League of Their Own.
“It means so much to me,” Blair said of the center, which its organizers hope will become as well-known for women’s baseball as Cooperstown, New York, is for men’s. “This is what it’s all about, to be able to create a baseball center where we can have our own baseball memorabilia, our own baseball hall of fame.”
Blair pitched for the Peaches’ competitors, the Peoria Redwings, in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a league created by chewing gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley in the 1940s to fill the void of baseball when many American men were sent off to fight in World War II.
Blair said she got her start in baseball as a 2-year-old. She said she was put on the batting plate to fend balls thrown by her older brother, who was being groomed as a star pitcher. Years later, as her brother fought in the war, Blair had a chance of a lifetime to be a professional baseball player.
“When I got to walking out to the ball diamond and I heard that clickety-click, clickety-click under my spikes, that was no sweeter music in my ears,” she said. “And then I saw that green grass and I said, ‘Oh my God Maybelle, you’re a professional ball player.'”
“It’s unbelievable I had that chance, and there I was,” she said. “That’s what it meant to me my whole life.”
After her baseball career ended, Blair went on to have a long career with Northrup Aircraft, where she made history there, too, as one of the company’s first female managers.
She never left baseball behind, though, staying active in helping get women into the sport and, in 2014, spearheading the effort to launch the International Women’s Baseball Center.
“We’d been talking about this for a long time, that there’s no home for girls and women in baseball, so we set out to create a place,” said Kat Williams, president of the center’s board of directors and a professor of women’s sports history at Marshall University. “It’s a big complex and a big idea, and Maybelle Blair is the driving force.”
Blair threw out the first pitch at a women’s baseball game in Rockford two years ago, at the age of 92, and said it is her life mission to see this project complete, saying, “I’ve got to get this building [done] so I can die happy.”
The center is an $8 million project that will be built in stages as they are able to fundraise money, according to Williams.
They have already broken ground on an outdoor museum but have a long way to go to see their dream fulfilled of making the center not just a cultural spot for women in baseball around the world, but also a place for tournaments and educational events, like training for female umpires, of which Blair notes there are currently none in Major League Baseball.
The MLB only has one female general manager, Kim Ng, of the Miami Marlins, who was just named to the role last November.
“We need to have our own museum and our own recognitions and then we can have our dreams come true,” Blair said of women in the sport. “This is our chance for the girls. Let’s get it done.”
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Thursday’s sports events: NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION Philadelphia 125, Miami 108 Toronto 111, Charlotte 108 Houston 109, San Antonio 105 Denver 114, Golden State 104 Indiana 111, Portland 87 NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE Washington 6, Buffalo 4 Boston 3, New Jersey 2 (SO) NY Islanders 4, NY Rangers 0 Carolina 3, Detroit 0 Nashville 3, Columbus 1 Winnipeg 4, Calgary 3 (OT) San Jose 4, Arizona 3 Edmonton 5, Vancouver 2 Vegas 5, Anaheim 2 Minnesota 4, Los Angeles 3 Dallas at Florida (Postponed) TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL Gonzaga 95, Pepperdine 70 Michigan St. at Iowa (Postponed) Houston at South Florida (Postponed) Arizona St. at Oregon (Postponed)
(NEW YORK) — As a member of the New York Mets in the 1980s, team legend Darryl Strawberry watched the franchise go through a change they are once again experiencing: new ownership.
Strawberry played for the Mets from 1983-90, during which the franchise’s ownership was shifting. Real estate developer Fred Wilpon bought a small stake in the Mets in 1980, eventually becoming an equal partner in owning the team. The Wilpon family went on to become the sole owner with Saul Katz, and Fred served as Mets team president for more than two decades.
In 2020, the Mets underwent a less protracted ownership change: hedge fund manager Steve Cohen purchased the team from the Wilpons and Katz, with Cohen immediately becoming the majority owner.
Strawberry, who played for the Mets the last time they won a championship in 1986, spoke to ABC News about his new book, “Turn Your Season Around,” and the state of the franchise prior to their acquisition of Lindor. He believes adding talent through free agency or trade is helpful, but that the best way new ownership can build a championship team is through effective player development:
“We had a great general manager [Frank Cashen] and he had people underneath him. They went through the process of player development… and I think that is so, so critical to be able to develop your younger core players so they can play at the major league level. I think over the years, the Mets have gotten away from that kind of development. I think that’s important to get back to and I think they will get back to it.”
The Mets made several front office changes this offseason, first bringing Sandy Alderson back to the franchise and hiring him as team president. The Mets then hired former Arizona Diamondbacks executive Jared Porter as general manager and former Red Sox executive Zack Scott as their new senior vice president and assistant general manager.
The Mets have developed young talent in recent years, such as outfielder Michael Conforto and pitcher Jacob deGrom. Strawberry hopes that trend will continue. He views new ownership and the front office overhaul as promising:
“I think new ownership is very excited… That can make a whole difference about ideas and about putting the people in the right places and understanding that if we’re going to get better, our minor league system has to get better.”
Strawberry recounted his experience coming up through the minor leagues. He believes with homegrown talent like himself, Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, and others, the team developed strong chemistry, learned how to win consistently, and came to believe that they could rely on one another. From there, they added pieces via free agency or trade, such as Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter. He believes the Mets in the 1980s needed years to develop chemistry and never got “used to losing,” something he thinks can happen if players do not have time together as a team.
Strawberry points to the Mets’ crosstown rivals as a model for effective player development:
“When you think about the Yankees and why the Yankees have been so good for so many years, it’s because their minor league system has been great. If you keep development in your mind and put your minor league system in a place, you’ll be great. You can bring in young players who could play and could come to the big leagues at a younger age and stick around for a long time. So, I think that’s what they [the Mets] need to really focus on.”
MLB.com ranked the Mets’ minor league system in the bottom half of MLB last summer, and they already traded away one of their top prospects, Andres Gimenez, in the deal for Lindor. The Yankees were ranked 19th, just one spot ahead of the Mets.
Strawberry did not contend that there is one set formula that would make the Mets World Series champs, but believes that drafting young talent and expanding their skills in the minor leagues is a good place to start building a championship club.
Strawberry also discussed the challenges so many people have faced amid the COVID-19 pandemic and how baseball provided a sense of relief for many last summer. He hopes with new ownership, Mets fans will feel renewed excited about their club. He also wants people to think about hope as they face more challenges in the coming year, and why his personal experience with faith and battle with addiction during his playing days reminds him there will be better days ahead.
“We’ve had a real poor half of the year in 2020 and are going into a new year. We’re going to have to get up for it… We have to be strong. We’re going to have to believe you can’t quit. You can’t give up… I could easily have quit in the second half and not gone on to have a strong season. You know what? You can easily quit in the second half of your life here after the pandemic and not get up and say, ‘I’m giving up, I’m quitting.’ And that’s happening to a lot of people. They don’t see hope. There’s hope. There’s light.”
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