Carlisle United owner Tom Piatak 'deeply sorry' for relegation
Mr Piatak, a businessman from Florida whose family have been in charge of Carlisle since November 2023, said the season "started with ambition and hope".However the club were in the bottom two for all bar three days since early October.
'A painful day'
"We fell short of the standards you rightly expect," the owner continued, describing Saturday's match as a "painful day"."Yet in the face of that, your loyalty has been extraordinary. "From 11,000 at Brunton Park on Good Friday to almost 1,000 of you in Cheltenham today, you've never stopped showing up."That unwavering support is the soul of this football club."
Carlisle United boss Mark Hughes told BBC Radio Cumbria: "It's not a great moment for anyone connected with the club."It's difficult for everyone, not least the fans who came in great numbers again today."We gave it a shot and the players gave me everything, but for everyone connected it is really hard to take."Mr Piatak added: "We will be transparent. We will be accountable. And we will not hide from the work ahead."
Meanwhile Barrow Association Football Club said it was "always nice to freshen up" its bio on X.The club changed its description to "the only Football League Club in Cumbria".
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The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
Mets' Pete Alonso stranded on deck in 2025 All-Star Game tiebreaker
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The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
MLB All-Star winners and losers: Tiebreaker is cool, MLB draft is lame
A little heavy, eh? Well, that's sort of how it felt when this 95th All-Star Game went to extra innings and was decided for the first time by a swing-off, which replaced the mega-roster to ensure there'd be plenty of pitchers for extra innings, which replaced How The Game Once Was, at least until it ended in a tie before a befuddled Bud Selig in 2002. Yet the game always seems to win, thanks in large part to the stars in the arena that seem to produce spectacular feats, regardless of format. On this night, it was Kyle Schwarber's three homers in three swings that stood up for a National League "victory" after American Leaguer Jonathan Aranda's bullet line drive hit brick and not seats. When Aranda followed with a harmless pop fly that sent the NL into a bobbing mass of celebration down the first base line, they were 7-6 victors (4-3 on penalty swings). Somehow, it all worked out. 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And in an All-Star Game, it honestly comes down to leftover pitchers trying to get out batters who hadn't yet hopped a private jet to their final All-Star break destinations. Nah, we weren't exactly "robbed" of drama not seeing Shane Smith and Hunter Goodman clash in the bottom of the 11th, just one scenario had managers not had the freedom to burn all their pitchers before game's end. And while roughly half the 41,702 in attendance had departed, those that remained were plenty engaged by the oohs and ahhs of the swing-off. Kyle Schwarber The baddest dude on the first-place Philadelphia Phillies is seemingly universally respected in the game, and his ability to take three batting practice pitches and put them all in the seats - with a result literally on the line - goes to his superior skill and ability to focus. That man is a free agent at the end of the year, and his late-night power show, even coming in a fake game, nicely illustrated why he'll be paid superstar money, and not DH money. Players who like playing baseball If the swing-off exposed anything to the casual fan, it's that the All-Star starters - typically the game's biggest superstars - have long beaten a hasty path to the airport by game's end. Hey, they got places to be and money to burn and it is their break time. That's why teams lock in their three swing-off participants ahead of time, knowing who will be around in a 10th inning - and no, it almost surely won't be Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. But anytime he's on the roster, Mets slugger Pete Alonso counts himself in. The two-time Home Run Derby champion is both an avid competitor and a ball enthusiast. And there's something of a difference between dudes who both love baseball and are very good at it, and those for whom the latter is the only qualifier. That's not to say the players that begged off this All-Star Game - ultimately more than 80 were named to the rosters - don't love it. Rest is important and unpublicized injuries are very real. But it never hurts to have stars who want to be here. "It's an honor for me," says Alonso. "Certain guys, if they're banged up, it's situational. But I'm healthy and I'm appreciative and it's a great event. For me, it's a no-brainer to come." Sometimes, a player will have his star-is-born year and back it up at an All-Star Game expected to serve as his platform - think Judge in 2017. Raleigh roared into the break with an AL record 38 first-half homers, the curiosity of being a switch-hitting catcher outslugging Judge and the best nickname in the game - and backed all of it up. His Home Run Derby championship was both a compelling tale and a remarkable feat, and gives the game a legitimate star in a Pacific Northwest outpost that too often gets ignored. Dino Ebel He might be the greatest batting-practice pitcher of all time, or at least the most decorated. Ebel has been the soft tosser for two Home Run Derby champions - Vladimir Guerrero Sr. in 2007 and Teoscar Hernandez in 2024 - and as the clock neared midnight Tuesday he climbed halfway up the Truist Park mound and tossed cookies to Stowers and Schwarber. Four of the six pitches ended up in the seats. "Put a 'W' next to Dino's name in the paper," says Dodgers and NL manager Dave Roberts, whom Ebel serves as third base coach. "Well, there's no more papers anymore, but Dino should get the win. Absolutely." That's only the half of it. Sunday night, Ebel's son Brady was drafted 32nd overall by Milwaukee, and he has another lad, Trey, who is a well-regarded prospect for the 2026 draft. Let's just say mid-July has been very good to the Ebel clan. Losers It remains Manfred's pet project, and the optics are good holding it in conjunction with All-Star Week. 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Manfred is perhaps the only baseball official who wants to drag the process into mid-July, putting scouting departments, front offices, college coaches and, of course, the players in flux deep into the summer when the whole thing could be done in early June. Pat McAfee, or whoever decided to loop him into the festivities That was weird. What's usually a pretty rote process - the pregame All-Star press conference where starting pitchers and lineups are announced got a startling charge when McAfee, ESPN's sleeveless ambassador to the Coveted Young Demographic, was on stage to moderate the session. It's tough to fake baseball, and while McAfee did all right, the entire presser was simply bizarre. It helped that Paul Skenes' presence enabled McAfee to lean into his Yinzer shtick, yet couldn't save him from mispronouncing Ketel Marte. And an inquiry from a reporter on baseball's unexplained decision to move the game back to Atlanta after onerous voting laws were passed - and Roberts' general abdication of stances on social issues important to Dodgers fans - resulted in McAfee trying to parry the whole exchange. He was also tapped to intro the participants in that night's Home Run Derby, which is among ESPN's most important broadcasts all year. The whole thing smacked of the erstwhile Worldwide Leader signing all its inventory over to McAfee, and MLB eagerly (desperately?) hoping to cash in some of that cultural currency. The Phillies Hey, they're on the clock for the next All-Star Week and the pressure is mounting. The game comes less than two weeks after the country's Semiquincentennial, and there may not be enough red, white and blue to out-America all the Midsummer Classics that came before it. Also, Kyle Schwarber is a free agent. As this 95th game showed, some things you just can't let get away.
The Guardian
12 hours ago
- The Guardian
All-Star Game ends in historic home run swing-off as Schwarber clinches NL victory
Kyle Schwarber has played in Game 7 of the World Series, and homered for the United States in the World Baseball Classic. But he had never walked up to the plate in an All-Star Game swing-off. No one had. 'That's kind of like the baseball version of a shootout,' he said after homering on all three of his swings, going down to his left knee on the final one, to overcome a two-homer deficit. That held up when Jonathan Aranda fell short on the American League's final three swings, giving the National League a 4-3 swing-off win after a 6-6 tie on Tuesday night in which the team had wasted a six-run, seventh-inning lead. Concerned about running out of pitchers in an era where no All-Star throws more than one inning, Major League Baseball and the players' association made the change in 2022. In baseball's equivalent of soccer's penalty-shootout, the game was decided by having three batters from each league take three swings each off coaches. 'It will be interesting to see where [the swing-off rule] goes,' said AL manager Aaron Boone of the New York Yankees. 'There's probably a world where you could see that in the future, where maybe it's in some regular season mix. I wouldn't be surprised if people start talking about it like that.' Boone picked Brent Rooker, Randy Arozarena and Aranda on Monday, and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts picked Eugenio Suárez, Schwarber and Pete Alonso for the NL. Because Suárez was hit on the left hand by a fastball in the eighth inning, the NL turned to the team's alternate, Kyle Stowers. Players from both teams stood outside their dugouts, some already in street clothes, jumping and shouting after each long ball from their side. Yankees coach Travis Chapman threw to the AL batters and Dodgers coach Dino Ebel to the NL hitters. Rooker put the AL ahead by homering on his last two swings, and Stowers hit one. Randy Arozarena boosted the AL lead to 3-1. Ebel had thrown BP to Schwarber two years ago at the WBC. 'He asked me right before, he was like, where do you want it?' Schwarber recalled 'I'm like, just middle. And he's like, 'I gotcha.'' He took two pitches and deposited the third just over the center-field fence. Schwarber took another, then hit a 461ft drive over the right-center bullpen. After letting two more go by, he dropped to a knee while pulling the third, craned his neck and held his bat it the air as the ball landed in the fourth row of the Chop House seats. 'I didn't hit it, obviously, my best, but I was thinking I got enough of it,' Schwarber said. 'And I was just kind of down there, hoping, saying: go, go, go. And it went. And it was awesome.' Aranda followed with a fly well short of the center-field warning track, drove a pitch about a foot shy of the top of the right-field wall and hit an opposite-field pop that dropped in medium left. Alonso, a two-time Home Run Derby champion, didn't have to bat and patted Schwarber on the head as fireworks went off at Truist Field. 'I felt like a closer like a closer going into a game,' Alonso said, 'and then it's like, wait, the guy in the field got a double play to end the inning. You're not going in.' MLB, after consulting with the Elias Sports Bureau, said in 2022 that All-Star Games ending in a swing-off would be listed as tied, with a notation of the game being decided in a swing-off. MLB's official postgame notes listed Tuesday's outcome as a 7-6 NL victory. Earlier in the game, Ketel Marte's two-run double in the first had put the NL ahead, and Alonso's three-run homer off Kris Bubic and Corbin Carroll's solo shot against Casey Mize opened a 6-0 lead in the sixth. The AL comeback began when Rooker hit a three-run pinch homer against Randy Rodríguez in a four-run seventh that included Bobby Witt Jr's RBI groundout. Robert Suarez allowed consecutive doubles to Byron Buxton and Witt with one out in ninth, and Steven Kwan's infield hit on a three-hopper to third off Edwin Díaz drove in the tying run. Schwarber earned the MVP award, going 0 for 2 with a walk as the NL won for the second time in their last 12 tries. He became the first non-pitcher MVP without a hit.
