How a Chicago educator uses food to teach science

• October 8, 2026

At least once a month, Rita Leary incorporates food into a science lesson at Ashburn Community Elementary School in Chicago. On a recent Thursday, it was all about honey. Sticky, sweet, viscous, varied in hues of light to dark amber.

“Do you guys think it will taste like it smells?” Leary asked her mixed class of sixth, seventh and eighth graders.

The goal was to conduct a sensory exploration of honey samples native to Illinois, while hitting a core standard of food education: Food connects us and the food and the environment are interconnected.

Leary’s gooey lesson was sparked by Pilot Light, an organization founded in 2010 that developed a food-based curriculum for educators to integrate lessons about food, nutrition and the food system into everyday subjects like math, science and reading. The program’s emphasis is on using food as a learning tool and giving students ownership of learning and agency in their lifestyles, Leary said.

“It’s not like, ‘Oh here’s a carrot and here’s why carrots are good for you,’ but instead we use food to learn more about science,” said Leary, who has been an educator for 36 years. “Other things like robotics, only some kids like. Coding, some kids like it — art, just some. But food? Everybody likes food. And the students are so engaged, calm and so polite with each other.”

In September, Pilot Light launched an extensive update to its Food Education Center, a digital hub of free pre-K-12 lesson plans and resources for educators, parents and students that can be integrated across multiple subjects. The nonprofit, which started in a single Chicago classroom with notable local chefs, now partners with administrators, schools and teachers in 26 states. It’s also launching its first official chapter in New York City this fall.

Leary, a former Pilot Light Fellow, has been using a mix of self-made lessons and digital curriculum from the organization for more than five years. She wants more educators across Chicago Public Schools to find the benefit in incorporating food into classroom learning.

That Thursday, Leary’s students sat at their communal lab tables in groups of four, watching closely as their science teacher promised a tasting of pumpkin honey, apple blossom honey, blueberry honey and clover honey. Each flavor corresponds to the plant the bees pollinated, she reminded them.

But first — a few tests, for science.

Leary turned off the lights and asked her students to use mini flashlights to categorize the honey by shades. Then, to test each honey’s viscosity, the students flipped the vials over to see how fast or slow the honey moved down.

“Viscosity is thickness, how slow something flows — seventh graders, we’ll be talking about it a lot when we get to lava and volcanoes, because some lava is quite viscous,” Leary said, telling them to flip.

Leary explained, to many oohs and aahs, that when forager bees collect nectar from flowers, it’s almost 80% water. The worker bees fan their wings to make a phase change that turns it into that gooey honey texture.

Next, she asked them to smell each sample, using a gentle waft.

“Oh my god, the pumpkin one smells like NyQuil, the honey NyQuil!” screeched Lia Henry, a seventh grader.

When it was finally time to taste each one, Henry confirmed that the dark-hued pumpkin honey tasted like NyQuil, too.

Henry said she only ever has honey with tea, while her classmate, Tyjon Poole, also in seventh grade, said he’ll only have honey when his grandma gives him a spoonful for a cold or cough.

It was a “pretty cool” day in science class, Poole said, plus he never knew different kinds of honey could taste so unusual.

“If you really look and think about your tongue, it’s a map, right? All of those taste buds aren’t the same. They are chemical receptors, and they receive different kinds of chemicals,” Leary said, instructing the class to spread the honey on different corners of the tongue to experience the nuance in flavor.

Though the honey project was her own, Leary said if it wasn’t for Pilot Light, she may have never thought to incorporate food in her science lesson plan, because the public education system doesn’t necessarily require food education.

“And it’s not always eating — the next one for the sixth graders, because they’re looking at plant and animal cells, we’re going to see what cooking does to the cell wall,” Leary said. “A few years ago, when I was teaching social studies, we had a chef visit us through Pilot Light, and he gave a presentation on spices that traveled to Spain through North Africa, and that fit right in with our medieval history unit.”

Pilot Light’s ultimate goal is to make food education a part of every child’s learning, said Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn, the organization’s executive director.

“What are all the ways in which we connect with food? What do we need to know about food? What is it we can do once we have all this knowledge? We can make different decisions. We can advocate,” DeSorbo-Quinn said. “There’s a lot of different ways in which food connects to our lives. You can teach anything through food.”

Getting the Food Education Center to where it is now was a heavy undertaking, driven by teachers who were part of focus groups that helped shape the more than 200 available lesson plans grounded in Pilot Light’s Food Education Standards, which are designed by a multidisciplinary team of chefs, farmers, medical experts and psychologists.

These resources cover a broad array of topics, including agriculture, astronomy, historical events such as the Great Migration, ecosystems, geometry, global challenges like the refugee crisis, sustainability and food insecurity.

At Ashburn Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, Leary also tries to educate students on alternative food options to processed items, which is particularly vital in an area that has long suffered from a shortage of local grocery stores. A Pete’s Fresh Market opened four years ago in Evergreen Park, but before that, the neighborhood did not have a grocery store for about 10 years.

“So many of my students are processed food eaters — I like chips too — but they’re not really aware of what food can be, so I try to give them some clear options, and they’re ambitious and they like to try things,” Leary said. “Recently, we made a cream cheese and brown sugar mixture to dip apples in, and the next night I got a picture from one of the moms saying, ‘Look what Ricardo made for us!’”

Leary said the most powerful of Pilot Light’s seven food education standards is that it can be used to advocate for change.

“That’s where the connection comes from… when you taste things and you’re sharing,” she said, pointing to a group of students huddled over a plate of Triscuit crackers, fruit and honey at the end of class. “These (students) never do anything together, and here they are. This is also good for the community and culture of our school.”

Pilot Light now reaches thousands of educators and classrooms, but it didn’t start that way.

“We were responding to, literally, a call to arms by Michelle Obama of, ‘Hey chefs, get involved in schools — kids need you,’” explained Jason Hammel, chef and owner of acclaimed Lula Cafe in Logan Square and one of the organization’s founding members. “We did not think about it as a program or a nonprofit at all. We thought about it as a way of getting connected to the school system and to children.”

During the Obama administration, First Lady Michelle Obama’s signature “Let’s Move!” campaign urged chefs to partner with K-12 schools to weave nutrition and food into everyday life. Some chefs also helped students build school gardens.

“More and more, especially since COVID, chefs and restaurants are looked upon as resources for a variety of social needs — whether it’s actual hunger or community support,” Hammel said. “So it was natural for us to pitch in. But what was interesting about this was that we were doing our own program. We weren’t donating to someone else’s program. We did this ourselves.”

Even before the plan materialized, Matthias Merges, chef and proprietor of craft-driven hospitality group Folkart, was already working in select classrooms at his daughter’s school, Disney II Magnet Elementary, sharing insights about salmon farming, fish migration, how something goes from the ocean to someone’s plate and more. After he and other chefs went to Washington, D.C., for the launch of Michelle Obama’s “Chefs Move to Schools” program, they started to put a plan on paper.

The founding chefs — Hammel; Merges; Justin Large, former One Off Hospitality culinary director; and Paul Kahan, executive chef and partner of The Publican — would take turns going to classrooms on select days, first only at Disney Magnet but soon at multiple schools across CPS, using food to teach a lesson on any given topic.

“We’d email our list of teachers and ask, ‘What do you happen to be teaching that day?’” Hammel explained. “When the emails came back, like one classroom was doing fractions. OK, that’s easy. We’ll make a pie and cut it up or make a recipe. But then we got the Boston Tea Party, or plate tectonics, or how magnets work… the different chefs had to figure out a way to use food to teach (it).”

For that Boston Tea Party lesson 16 years ago, Hammel said the chef used herbal tea sachets and groups of students to market and brand their product to help teach consumerism and how “no taxation without representation” became a rallying cry for American democracy.

“As it started to take off, we were wrestling with (the fact that) there’s only a certain number of chefs, and there’s more than 400 schools in Chicago itself, there’s no way that we’re going to be able to do that,” Merges said. “That’s how it transformed into a system where the teacher was now the key. They could bring it back to their own classes and their own schools, and they became advocates for piloting and teaching food education themselves.”

Pilot Light also encourages student-led actions that impact school cafeterias and local food systems, while fellows are required to do a classroom advocacy project.

Recently at Ancona School in Kenwood, educator Christopher Weber brought together 80 elementary students, parents and teachers for a day of learning and cooking to fill their neighborhood’s Love Fridge with homemade soups and bread, with custom labels to promote allergy safety, to raise awareness of food insecurity in their community.

At Langston Hughes Elementary in Roseland, STEM teacher LaTina Taylor spearheaded a project that quickly became one of the most cherished stories within Pilot Light. K-8 students spent the year caring for a flock of chickens in their school coop — a hands-on “living textbook” that taught them about agricultural responsibility, animal husbandry and sustainable closed-loop food systems. However, the students encountered a harsh reality of farming midyear when predators breached the coop overnight, killing four chickens. The students then moved to safeguard the sole surviving chicken, using their STEM training to build him a secure, predator-proof “fortress.”

Back at Ashburn Elementary, Leary pointed toward the window in her class. Outside is the class beehive project — a fully functioning wooden hive box, with one queen bee and 10,000 worker bees — constructed and installed by the Roof Crop Foundation using money she secured from a grant.

Leary learned of the urban farming company through Pilot Light. A week before, beekeeper AJ Appledorn-Orozco, who leads hands-on educational workshops and apiary programs for Roof Crop, had stopped by the class to introduce them to the “world of bees.” Leary took it a step further and dove into honey.

As Pilot Light continues to grow, the crux of it has been the same since day one, DeSorbo-Quinn said.

“We were founded with this idea of food being a common language,” she said. “There are only a few things that will universally engage people, and food is one of them. It’s an extraordinary teaching tool.”

​ Orange County Register 

Newport Harbor girls flag football opens ‘flood’ to beat Corona del Mar

• October 8, 2026

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NEWPORT BEACH — Newport Harbor pass rusher Aliyah Chappell felt a jolt of excitement as Corona del Mar’s girls flag football team lined up for a fourth-and-1 attempt near midfield on the opening series of the second half Wednesday night.

Newport Harbor led its Back Bay rival by six points and needed a defensive stop.

“Knowing what’s on the line as a senior, and it’s my last Battle of the Bay, I just wanted to give everything my all,” Chappell said.

Chappell recorded a sack for a 6-yard loss and helped spark host Newport Harbor to a 38-7 victory in the Sunset League.

Newport Harbor (19-4, 9-2), ranked No. 3 in Orange County, outscored No. 7 Corona del Mar 25-0 in the second half to remain one game behind first place Huntington Beach (21-3, 10-1) in the league race.

No. 2 Huntington Beach has clinched at least a share of the league title and plays host to Newport Harbor on Monday to close league.

After Chappell’s sack, Newport Harbor’s Scarlett Guyser rolled to her right and tossed a 2-yard TD to Blakely Irvine to cap a 33-yard scoring drive. Freshman Emma Yokoi caught extra-point as the Sailors opened a 20-7 lead.

On the ensuing possession, Yoki intercepted a pass and returned the ball to the Sea Kings 7. Skylie Cid followed with a 4-yard touchdown run to extend Newport Harbor’s lead to 26-7.

“(We) absolutely went on a flood,” said Chappell, who hoisted Cid during a touchdown celebration. “We all did it together.”

Guyser had a spectacular 19-yard touchdown scramble early in the fourth quarter.

Freshman Jordan Sanders later caught a short pass from Ally Shaw and raced along the sideline for a 46-yard touchdown.

On her touchdown run, Guyser juked past two pass rushers and eluded four defenders down field for her second rushing touchdown.

“She’s a great player,” Cid said of Guyser, who also threw two TDs. “She’s great at throwing as well as running.”

Newport Harbor recorded four sacks in improving to 10-0 all-time against Corona del Mar. Sanders had two sacks while Chappell and Caroline Eadie each added one.

Newport Harbor coach Jason Guyser called the performance the Sailors’ best of the season.

“That team is really good,” he said of Corona del Mar (13-7, 6-4), the reigning CIF-SS Division 2 champion. “They beat Huntington (Beach). They only lost by one the second time. They played Edison really tight. That’s a Top 15 team and we just did what we did.”

Corona del Mar’s Annasofia Dickens made a leaping 19-yard touchdown reception from freshman Charlotte Ring in the middle of the second quarter. Dickens also grabbed the extra-point as the Sea Kings tied the score 7-7.

Corona del Mar coach Theo Rokos remained confident in his team.

“We are playing at times like the best team out there and sometimes we lose collective consciousness,” he said. “Not making the fourth-and-1 and interception deep in our territory turned a tight game into a lopsided game.”

​ Orange County Register 

Ducks flattened by Oilers after 5-goal 2nd period

• October 8, 2026

ANAHEIM — Wednesday night’s heavyweight bout with the Edmonton Oilers began auspiciously for the Ducks, but after a five-goal second period they finished the fight on the mat staring up at the Honda Center ceiling.

Edmonton got a small measure of revenge against the team that ended its bid for a third straight Western Conference crown last spring, triumphing 5-2.

With the Ducks’ loss and the Colorado Avalanche falling to the Winnipeg Jets, there are no more undefeated teams in the NHL. The Philadelphia Flyers, who coveted Leo Carlsson, lie with the rival Kings and the Ducks’ next opponent at home, the Calgary Flames, as the league’s winless clubs.

Beckett Sennecke deposited two goals, both set up by Carlsson, in the first period. Lukáš Dostál stopped just 12 of 17 shots before being relieved by Ville Husso to begin the third period. Nikita Klepov, the 15th overall pick in June’s draft, made his pro debut and became the youngest Duck to appear in an NHL game at 18 years and 102 days.

Evan Bouchard scored two goals and assisted on another by Kasperi Kapanen. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl combined for seven points. They were a goal and two assists for McDavid and four assists for Draisaitl, including one on Vasily Podkolzin’s goal. Devon Levi made 28 saves.

The middle frame belonged to the visitors, which made the third period a mere formality.

The Oilers struck 11 seconds into the second, equalized on the power play at the 6:30 mark, took their first lead at 14:12, then pushed it to 5-2 at 16:50 and 19:08.

McDavid ascended to the top of the Art Ross Trophy leaderboard with his last-minute, 4-on-4 goal. He moved to his left to get wide of Tristan Luneau and flicked a shot back to his right that banked in off Dostál and chased him from the contest.

Draisaitl nearly set Podkolzin up for a tiebreaking goal and connected with him for a lead-extending one instead. His buttery stretch pass found Podkolzin behind the entire Ducks defense, allowing him to take it to the house.

Bouchard’s pair of goals put him in sole possession of the league lead with six. That’s more than Philadelphia has scored as a team this season and twice as many as Calgary has accumulated to date.

His hard shot off a soft pass from Draisaitl and against an overmatched Ducks fourth line gave the Oilers a 3-2 edge. He had scored Edmonton’s first goal with a seeing-eye shot from the far corner of the offensive zone that changed direction through staggered traffic before beating a visibly frustrated Dostál.

In between, McDavid’s patient exploration of the middle of the offensive zone got all four Ducks penalty killers to collapse, enabling him to feather a backhand pass to Kapanen for a swift redirection.

When the Ducks and Oilers last met, Edmonton was eliminated in six games in a first-round playoff clash. In that series, the Ducks went 8 for 16 on the power play, and they continued their magic with the extra man early on Wednesday.

After scoring on three consecutive power plays while defeating the Florida Panthers in their home opener, the Ducks cashed in on their first two opportunities against Edmonton on Wednesday to extend their streak to five straight conversions.

Sennecke kicked off the offense at 4:11 and then tallied again at 15:28 to put the Ducks up 2-0 at the first intermission.

His second goal was served to him wide open at the netfront after an aesthetically pleasing passing sequence on which all five players touched the puck.

He had already notched the first goal of the game and his first of the season, also from the doorstep. After Mikael Granlund lured Bouchard into the corner, he skated toward the near post and found Sennecke for a shot attempt.

UP NEXT

The Ducks will hit the road for a back-to-back set that will take them to Winnipeg on Friday and Calgary on Saturday.

More to come on this story.

​ Orange County Register 

Brewers eliminate Padres in Game 4, advance to NLCS rematch with Dodgers

• October 8, 2026

By GREG BEACHAM AP Sports Writer

SAN DIEGO — Garrett Mitchell tripled and scored the tiebreaking run in the fifth inning before making a pivotal catch on Manny Machado’s drive to the wall in the eighth, and the Milwaukee Brewers advanced to the National League Championship Series for the second straight season with a 3-1 victory over the San Diego Padres on Wednesday night, winning their best-of-five Division Series in four games.

Mitchell, a former Orange Lutheran and UCLA standout, also drove in Sal Frelick with Milwaukee’s first run as the Brewers snapped a 12-game postseason road losing streak that dated to 2018 and reached the team’s fifth LCS.

Machado nearly tied Game 4 with a 406-foot drive off reliever Abner Uribe, but Mitchell coolly tracked it down and reached just above the short wall in right-center field to keep it in the ballpark.

Second baseman Brice Turang then ended the eighth with an acrobatic catch of Ty France’s tailing pop-up in foul ground.

After fending off the surging Padres in four tight games decided by a combined five runs, the 103-win Brewers will get an NLCS rematch with the Dodgers, who eliminated the Atlanta Braves earlier Wednesday, also in four games.

The Dodgers swept Milwaukee last October on the way to their second consecutive World Series title.

Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a 429-foot homer on an otherwise tepid offensive night for the Padres, who repeatedly tested the majors’ best regular-season team before falling short of what would have been the fourth NLCS appearance in franchise history.

One night after the Padres avoided elimination in Game 3, Milwaukee claimed its first road playoff win since the 2018 NLCS by sticking to its season-long formula for success.

While four Brewers pitchers combined on a three-hitter and the defense made nearly every big play, Milwaukee’s lineup calmly worked counts, pounded 10 hits through the Padres’ defense and manufactured enough runs to head home smiling.

Game 2 hero Jackson Chourio capped his high-impact series by driving in Mitchell to become the Brewers’ career leader in postseason RBIs at just 22 years old. Chourio has 17 RBIs, including six in this series, in 16 playoff games.

Milwaukee opened the scoring in the third when Frelick reached on an infield single, stole second and came around on a single by Mitchell.

Brewers starter and former Padres draft pick Robert Gasser threw four innings of three-hit ball, but Tatis ended his 1-for-19 skid since San Diego’s playoff opener with a long shot to center in the third. It was the longest homer ever hit in the postseason at Petco Park by a San Diego player.

Padres starter Walker Buehler yielded just three hits and a run, but Manager Craig Stammen replaced him with Game 1 starter Robbie Ray after William Contreras’ leadoff single in the fourth.

Mitchell then stroked a mild liner perfectly over first base and into the right field corner leading off the fifth, and he scored on Chourio’s single through the drawn-in infield. Chourio surpassed Ryan Braun for the most postseason RBIs in Brewers history.

Jake Bauers singled leading off the sixth and went to third on Cooper Pratt’s ground-rule double before scoring on Frelick’s sacrifice fly.

The Padres were already down 3-1 in the seventh when Mason Miller allowed three baserunners, but no runs. The vaunted closer missed Game 3 for the birth of his first child.

After sitting below .500 and in 11th place in the NL in late July, San Diego roared into the first wild-card spot and then swept the Chicago Cubs in the Wild Card Series last week. The Padres had won 19 of 22 games before losing three of four to Milwaukee.

UP NEXT

The Brewers host the Dodgers in Game 1 on Sunday at 5 p.m. PT with ace Jacob Misiorowski almost certainly lined up to start. Milwaukee is four wins from only the second World Series berth in team history.

More to come on this story.

​ Orange County Register 

Reform California’s bizarre endorsement of Proposition 38

• October 8, 2026

With ballots out and too many things on everyone’s ballot, many voters will be relying on voting guides put out by newspapers, political parties, pundits, friends, and so on to use as cheat sheets. (Obviously, you should be consulting the guides put together by the editorial boards of the Southern California News Group and the San Diego Union-Tribune, since we surveyed and interviewed hundreds of candidates and ballot measure supporters and opponents.)

In right-wing circles, one of the more popular voter guides is from Reform California, the group run by San Diego Assemblyman Carl DeMaio. None of the endorsements from Reform California are ever really surprising — it’s usually “Whoever is a Republican and/or most aligned with Carl DeMaio.”

Likewise, on state ballot measures, the DeMaio list looks a lot like the one from the Southern California News Group editorial board. Opposition to Proposition 3 and 40, because they’re taxes, support for Propositions 41 and 42 because they’ll block the wealth tax, opposition to two big bond measures (Propositions 1 and 37).

Then there’s the bizarre exception: Proposition 38, an $8.4 billion bond measure which the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle described as “one of the most noxious deposits on California’s political dung heap in years.”

“This one is not a taxpayer-backed bond, it is a public-private partnership,” DeMaio explained to his followers.

The problem for that assertion is that it is indeed a taxpayer-backed bond.

As the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office notes, “The state General Fund cost to repay the bond would be $500 million to $600 million annually for about 20 years. The annual cost would be about one-quarter of 1 percent (0.25 percent) of the state’s total General Fund budget. Since the state has to pay interest on the money it borrows, the total cost of the bond would be about 10 percent more (after adjusting for inflation) than if the state paid up-front with money it already has.”

DeMaio counters that his group backs Prop. 38 “mainly because we see the bond as different from typical government borrowing,” because of a provision requiring “10 percent of all proceeds from the immunotherapies developed as a result of this act go to the state to offset the costs of this act.”

Where have we heard this before? Oh, right, the 2004 stem cell bond under Proposition 71, which likewise vowed to use the proceeds of the breakthrough treatments it would come up with to help pay the $3 billion bond. How did that go?

In 2020, the stem cell research backers came back to top off that 2004 investment with a new $5.5 billion ballot measure. At the time, the LAO noted that, far from the windfall of revenue supporters expected, “these inventions have provided a total of approximately $350,000 to the state.” No, I’m not missing any zeroes. $350,000.  Two years later, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine received $15.6 million in royalties. Still a drop in the bucket for a combined $8.5 billion in bonds, plus interest.

Prop. 38 asks voters to make that same bad bet — and in an even shadier way.

While the measure calls for half the money to be handed out to researchers across the state, the other half would go toward a research institute that isn’t named but narrowly defined by the language of Prop. 38 itself down to square footage so the only place it could be is the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy. Which, surprise, happens to be backed by Proposition 38’s chief backer, billionaire Gary K. Michelson.

To make matters worse, as the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board notes, the “California Institute for Immunology & Immunotherapy literally has no track record of developing, funding or bringing medical research to market. It isn’t even fully built.”

If that’s Carl DeMaio’s idea of a public-private partnership, then, yikes. It sounds either like a half-baked cynical money grab or boondoggle in the making.

As Robert Kaplan, a senior scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a distinguished research professor at UCLA, warned in these pages recently, the promise of repayment based on potential breakthroughs is one voters should be skeptical about given the nature of the bond and the nature of biomedical research.

“That warning is not pessimism,” he wrote. “It reflects how biomedical research works. Drug development is long and failure-prone. An often-cited National Institutes of Health estimate found that only 1 of every 10,000 promising compounds from early-stage research becomes a new drug; at least 90% of drugs entering preclinical studies fail. Immunotherapy has produced remarkable advances, but it is not exempt from these odds.”

Finally, DeMaio has uncritically parroted the promise by proponents that “every drug or treatment developed with the funding must be sold in California at 20% below the national average price.” Kaplan, in the official argument against the measure, points out the obvious hole in that claim: “While this may sound attractive, it could incentivize companies to prioritize selling these products in other states where the prices are not controlled.”

Taken together, it’s truly bizarre that a conservative group would lend its support to such a flawed, dishonest and expensive measure. For conservative voters wanting to do the right thing and oppose wasteful spending, always read the fine print of any measure or any voter guide.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

​ Orange County Register 

ALDS: Rays finish sweep of Yankees behind Mesa homer, fan interference call

• October 8, 2026

By RONALD BLUM AP Baseball Writer

NEW YORK — Victor Mesa Jr. hit a tiebreaking, two-run homer off Max Fried in the sixth inning, and the Tampa Bay Rays beat the New York Yankees, 4-3, on Wednesday night with the help of a fan interference call for a three-game sweep of their American League Division Series.

Ryan Vilade also homered for the Rays, who reached the AL Championship Series for the first time since 2020 and host the Chicago White Sox or Cleveland Guardians in the opener on Monday.

After Mesa’s homer gave the Rays a 4-2 lead, Anthony Volpe appeared to hit a two-run shot against Griffin Jax with two outs in the bottom half as a fan reached over the left field wall and caught the ball over the glove of a leaping Mesa.

A video review determined the ball would not have cleared the fence but would not have been caught by Mesa. Volpe was awarded an RBI double and George Lombard Jr. was allowed to score from first base. Jax recovered to strike out Spencer Jones.

Baseball’s adaptation of video technology was key to the inning.

Lombard reached with a one-out walk when a 3-and-1 pitch called a strike by plate umpire Dan Bellino was ruled inside on an ABS challenge. Austin Wells then walked on full-count changeup but an ABS challenge by Rays catcher Liam Hicks ruled the pitch caught the inside corner for a strikeout, bringing up Volpe.

Quite a change from 1996, when umpires did not have technology to assist and Derek Jeter’s homer for the Yankees helped turn around the ALCS opener despite young fan Jeffrey Meier reaching over the right field wall where Baltimore’s Tony Tarasco was set to catch the ball. MLB began using video replay for home run calls in 2008 and allowed challenges to ball/strike decisions starting this season.

Ian Seymour pitched 1⅓ scoreless innings for the win, Kevin Kelly struck out pinch-hitter Giancarlo Stanton to strand a runner in the eighth and Bryan Baker pitched the ninth for his third save of the series.

Seeking its first World Series title, Tampa Bay celebrated on the field of the big-spending Yankees for the second time in two weeks after clinching the AL East on Sept. 22. New York opened the season with MLB’s third-highest payroll at $303 million while the Rays were 26th at $91 million.

Swept in a best-of-five postseason matchup for the first time since the 1980 ALCS against Kansas City, the Yankees ended their 17th straight season without a World Series crown. That equaled their longest drought since winning their first championship in 1923, a gap between titles in 1978 and ’96.

Yankees captain Aaron Judge missed the postseason after straining a calf on Sept. 16. The three-time AL MVP played just seven games after May 31 because of a fractured rib and the leg injury, an absence the team couldn’t overcome.

New York batted .130 in the series and was outscored 10-5.

After sweeping Boston in the Wild Card Series, New York never led against the Rays and has not advanced past a higher-seeded team in the postseason since 2020.

Jonathan Aranda put the Rays ahead with an RBI single in the third and Ben Rice tied the score against Nick Martinez with a single in the bottom half, his eighth RBI of the postseason.

Vilade, a 27-year-old getting extensive major league playing time this year with his sixth major league organization, hit an opposite-field, 340-foot drive into the right field short porch in the fourth. The ball, just over the glove of a jumping Jones, would not have been out of any other big league ballpark.

Volpe, starting at second base in place of Jazz Chisholm Jr., hit a 96.6 mph liner off Martinez’s back with two outs in the fourth for an infield single, and Seymour relieved. Jones’ opposite-field double landed beyond Mesa, driving in Volpe.

Junior Caminero singled in the sixth and Mesa sent a sweeper deep into the right-field seats to chase Fried. It was the first home run he allowed to a left-handed hitter since August 2025.

UP NEXT

Tampa Bay gets four days off and will have played just three games in 14 days before starting the best-of-seven ALCS.

More to come on this story.

​ Orange County Register 

Three USC linebackers earn game balls after Washington win

• October 8, 2026

LOS ANGELES — The USC linebacking corps was asked to step up prior to Saturday’s game against Washington. They were shorthanded, down a middle linebacker in Desmond Stephens II, who was serving a one-game suspension.

“I felt like, all week, I just attacked everything,” linebacker Ta’Mere Robinson said. “Whether that was getting the call from a safety, getting a call on my own, setting in the front, going to coaches, asking questions if I was unsure of something.”

No. 19 USC (5-1 overall, 2-1 Big Ten) won the game, 25-21, and the position group answered the call well enough to see three linebackers receive game balls.

Robinson, Deven Bryant and Elijah Newby were each recognized after the defense tied a season-high in sacks with five and registered 48 total tackles. Robinson and Newby tied for second-most tackles in the game with six tackles apiece.

“Whether it’s somebody else getting more reps,” head coach Lincoln Riley said, “or it’s just the ability to just simply rotate guys to keep them fresh or using guys different from a package standpoint – we certainly look at it as a positive and feel like we know a little bit more, developed some more depth in that room than maybe we felt 10 days ago.”

There might be increased competition for playing time at linebacker, based on what the coaching staff saw against the Huskies.

“Des is a good player and important part of this football team,” Riley said, “so we view this a lot like we’re coming back off of any normal game, like nothing else happened. We’ve seen how each group has played, and I think what we learned this week is we’ve got a handful of guys in there that can go out there and play really, really well.”

Robinson had his first career start, and started in place of Stephens. It was a long time coming for the senior transfer from Penn State who has dealt with injury throughout his playing career.

He shined right out of the gate, logging four tackles in the first quarter and sacking Washington quarterback Demond Williams for a loss of 5 yards to push the Huskies back to USC’s 45-yard line.

Newby also recorded a strip sack late in the third quarter, allowing defensive tackle Jahkeem Stewart to scoop up the ball and run 48 yards for the go-ahead touchdown.

“The linebackers, they did great,” Stewart said. “They’re trusting us for sure, and we just got to trust them. And that’s all it takes, is us just trusting each other, playing as one. And once we do that, we’ll have great things coming.”

COMMUNICATING IN A ‘WHITE OUT’

USC’s offensive line has protected quarterback Jayden Maiava well this season, giving up an average of just one sack per game. It comes down to communicating and ID-ing plays, according to center Tobias Raymond.

That communication will be challenged by the loud environment of the “White Out” game when the Trojans head to Penn State (3-2, 0-2) this weekend.

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Crowd noise and songs like the “Circle of Life” and “Mo Bamba” were blaring from the practice facility’s sound system on Tuesday and Wednesday to get all the USC players, especially the offensive linemen, ready.

“When Jayden gives us a call, it’s all about echoing and like talking back and forth,” Raymond said. “One thing really good about communication and being loud – I feel like it gives confidence to the guys around you … it builds confidence in terms of like man, we’re yelling, we’re getting the juices flowing, and we’re on the same page.”

​ Orange County Register 

Andy Pages comes through in the clutch to send Dodgers to NLCS

• October 8, 2026

ATLANTA — Overmatched last postseason and benched during the World Series, Andy Pages used the embarrassment to fuel an All-Star season in 2026.

But he was hit by a pitch on Aug. 21 that broke a bone in his hand, didn’t return until the final six games of the regular season and started the postseason, trying to do too much (by his manager’s estimation) to make up for last fall’s lack of contributions.

The accounts have been reconciled. It was Pages’ clutch two-out, two-run single in the seventh inning that broke a tie and lifted the Dodgers to a 4-1 victory on Wednesday night in Game 4 of their National League Division Series with the Atlanta Braves.

The victory sends the Dodgers to the National League Championship Series against either the Milwaukee Brewers or San Diego Padres. The Dodgers have reached baseball’s Final Four for the fifth time in the past seven years, the eighth time in the past 11. Their quest for a ‘three-peat’ will continue Sunday either in Milwaukee or at home against the Padres.

This series was decided by the Dodgers’ first and only hit with a runner in scoring position in the four games.

“No, it was not (part of the plan). But the one was big,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said, shivering under the dousing of chilled beer and champagne in the post-game locker room. “I think it speaks to the vast number of ways we can win a baseball game. But certainly, for quality of life, (I) would like us to cash in a few more of those opportunities in the next round.”

A veteran of these celebrations, Max Muncy, said statistics — like 1 for 16 with RISP — are meaningless in October as long as they add up to a win.

“It doesn’t matter how you win. You just win,” Muncy said. “No one cares about their personal stats. The end result, the ‘W’ at the end is the most important part and that’s what everyone is focused on. Obviously you’d like to have more hits with runners in scoring position but it’s the postseason. It’s hard to do that. It’s really hard to string together a few hits in a row.

“But we were able to do it tonight – once. And that’s really all that matters.”

With the score tied 1-1, Teoscar Hernandez – fresh off a collision with the left field wall that left him on the warning track dirt, rubbing the left side of his head – singled with one out off Braves starter Tyler Mahle. It was just the third hit off Mahle and it came on just his 85th pitch. But Braves manager Walt Weiss went to his bullpen, bringing in Game 2 hero Didier Fuentes to face Muncy.

Fuentes got Muncy to ground out, Hernandez moving to second, but he walked pinch-hitter Josue De Paula and Kyle Tucker to load the bases with two outs.

Weiss had a quick hook, pulling Fuentes and handing the ball to veteran Robert Suarez to face Pages.

“Didi didn’t look quite the same; the ball wasn’t coming out quite the same,” Weiss said of Fuentes. “So I made a quick move there to Suarez.

“You tip your cap to Pages, man. He hit a 100-mile-an-hour heater back through the middle.”

Pages got ahead in the count, 3-and-1, then swung and missed at a 99.1 mph fastball from Suarez. He got another fastball on the full count and didn’t miss, stroking it through the middle to drive in two runs and put the Dodgers in the lead.

“Incredibly happy for him,” Hernandez said of Pages, his sidekick in the real “Big Bro-Little Bro” pairing in the Dodgers’ clubhouse. “Especially after seeing all the people saying he’s not going to hit in the postseason, that he was one of the worst postseason hitters in the league. I think after today that opinion is going to change.

“He missed a month. At the end of the season, he got a couple hits, a couple big hits, a couple homers. But we know it takes time to get consistent, getting good at-bats, getting good contact. I think his timing is coming back and he showed that the past two days.”

What Pages didn’t show postgame was how much last October had lived in him.

“For me, what happened last year, happened. It’s in the past now,” he said in Spanish. “All I can do now is be in the moment, and being in the moment today, I was able to get the result.”

Friedman praised the 25-year-old Pages as “a guy that keeps getting better,” having turned himself into an outstanding defensive outfielder and emerging from last October with his breakout season.

“That says a lot about someone,” Friedman said. “And so for him to have the struggles he had last October, and for him to emerge out of it the way he has so far, I can’t say enough about him and how important he is to this team.”

It was a struggle to score any runs in Atlanta. After Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Chris Sale squared off in Game 3, Mahle and Tyler Glasnow allowed just a dirty run each through the first six innings.

In the bottom of the first, Michael Harris II led off with a single off of Glasnow. He stole second, went to third on a ground out and score when Glasnow spiked a knuckle curve in the dirt well in front of home plate. It bounced off Will Smith’s chest protector back towards the mound and Glasnow couldn’t retrieve it in time to get Harris.

In the top of the second, Shohei Ohtani took a five-pitch walk, stole second and went to third when Braves catcher Sean Murphy threw the ball into center field. Ohtani scored when Braves shortstop Mauricio Dubon dropped Muncy’s pop-up in shallow left field.

Glasnow didn’t give up another hit after that leadoff single to Harris in the first inning. He did walk five, though, including two in the fifth inning that prompted Manager Dave Roberts to pull him from the game after 78 pitches.

Dodgers pitchers somehow walked 18 batters in the series but let none of them score. Alex Vesia retired Matt Olson to end that fifth inning. Edgardo Henriquez held the Braves scoreless over the next two. Tanner Scott retired the slumping heart of the Braves’ order and Muncy gave Edwin Diaz cushion in the ninth inning with a solo home run (his 19th career postseason homer, a franchise record).

“I just feel like everybody out there in the baseball world thinks that it’s gonna be easy for us just because of the team that we have, and it’s never gonna be easy to win baseball games. Especially in October, when everybody’s throwing their best at you,” said Miguel Rojas who was held out of the game with a back injury. “So we feel really proud and feel like the expectations are there, and those are the things that weigh the most on our shoulders, to be honest. And all we have to do is play clean baseball, like we’ve been doing.”

As the Dodgers’ celebration wound down, Game 4 of the NLDS between the Brewers and Padres was just about to begin. Friedman was asked what outcome he was rooting for in that series.

“I just want chaos,” he said.

​ Orange County Register