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Yankees 6, Rays 1: Yankees Keep Pace With Red Sox, Preserving a Host of Season-Ending Scenarios

Starlin Castro, right, was congratulated in the dugout after leading off the sixth inning with a home run.

Yankees Manager Joe Girardi is a man who seeks out certainty. He does not like hypotheticals, waving away what-ifs as though they were a child with too many questions.

But on Wednesday, an unexpected possibility loomed, one so tantalizing that even Girardi could not help but consider it: a chance to catch the Boston Red Sox at the top of the American League East.

After seemingly cementing the division title last weekend, the Red Sox lost consecutive games at home to the Toronto Blue Jays, allowing the Yankees to creep within three games with just five to play.

The Yankees did their best to further close the gap, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays, 6-1, on Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium. But the Red Sox steadied themselves, rallying from a three-run deficit to beat back the Blue Jays, 10-7, to narrow their magic number for clinching the division to any combination of two wins or Yankees losses.

Even if the Yankees are unable to chase down the Red Sox, there will at least be a consolation that they pressured their rivals to the end. Since they last played the Red Sox, on Labor Day weekend, the Yankees have won 16 of 22 games but have only narrowed their deficit behind Boston by a half-game.

“I probably don’t even think about it sometimes,” first baseman Greg Bird said of the division standings. “I was looking today, though. Someone when I was on deck was saying the Sox are losing 3- or 4-1, and then I looked up and it was 9-4. So, I missed a lot there.”

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Advanced stages of CTE found in Aaron Hernandez’s brain

BOSTON — Former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez had a severe case of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, researchers said on Thursday. His lawyer announced a lawsuit against the NFL and the team, accusing them of hiding the true dangers of the sport.

Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the CTE Center at Boston University, said Hernandez had stage 3 (out of 4) of the disease, which can cause violent mood swings, depression and other cognitive disorders.

“We’re told it was the most severe case they had ever seen for someone of Aaron’s age,” attorney Jose Baez said.

Hernandez was 27 when he killed himself in April in the prison cell where he was serving a life-without-parole sentence for murder. Baez said Hernandez had shown signs of memory loss, impulsivity and aggression that could be attributed to CTE.

“When hindsight is 20-20, you look back and there are things you might have noticed,” he said. “But you don’t know.”

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The Lonely Road Back From a Very Public Injury


Michael Steele/Getty Images.

“I thought something was wrong,” he said. “I knew I had to come out.”

A few minutes later, in the treatment area that sits on the other side of the wall from the first-team changing room at City’s Etihad Stadium, Sala’s on-field suspicion — a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament — was confirmed with a few cursory tests.

Gundogan injured his right knee when he and Watford’s Nordin Amrabat collided during a match in December. He returned to the field briefly, but soon realized he could not continue.

Many athletes fear a torn A.C.L. more than any other injury. It is not as visibly painful, or as gruesome, as a broken bone, but it is much more menacing. Not so long ago, it was more often than not the end of a career; even now, many who suffer it find they are never quite the same.

Deep down, as Gundogan watched the second half of that December game against Watford on a laptop in silence, his knee packed in ice, he knew what was coming. He tried to be optimistic.

“People know what to do now,” he thought. “They know how to operate, how to do rehab, how long you are out.”

He had steeled himself for the worst. Now he just had to face it.

What he was facing, though, was intimidating. There would be the delicate hours of surgery, the endless days of rest, the long, slow weeks and months that would teach him first to walk, then to run, and finally to play again.

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Playing Football before 12 is tied to brain problem later

 

“The brain is going through this incredible time of growth between the years of 10 and 12, and if you subject that developing brain to repetitive head impacts, it may cause problems later in life,” Robert Stern, one of the authors of the study, said of the findings.

111 N.F.L. Brains. All But One Had C.T.E.

A neuropathologist has examined the brains of 111 N.F.L. players — and 110 were found to have C.T.E., the degenerative disease linked to repeated blows to the head.

The study is consistent with earlier findings by Stern and others that looked specifically at N.F.L. retirees. That research found that retirees who started playing before 12 years old had diminished mental flexibility compared to those who began playing tackle football at 12 or older.

A growing number of scientists argue that because the human brain develops rapidly at young ages, especially between 10 and 12, children should not play tackle football until their teenage years.

Last year, doctors at Wake Forest School of Medicine used advanced magnetic resonance imaging technology to find that boys between the ages of 8 and 13 who played just one season of tackle football had diminished brain function in parts of their brains.

The N.F.L., which long denied that there was any link between the game and brain damage, has in recent years been promoting what it considers safer tackling techniques aimed at reducing head-to-head collisions.

More recently, the league has been promoting flag football as an even safer alternative, an implicit acknowledgment that parents are worried about the dangers of the sport and turning away from it.

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