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While present for meetings with NFL teams, Hunter isn’t doing drills at the combine this week in Indianapolis.

As a wide receiver, Hunter reeled in 96 receptions for 1,258 yards and 15 touchdowns at Colorado last season. His reception and touchdown totals led the Big 12. As a defensive back, Hunter totaled four interceptions, 11 passes defended and 36 combined tackles, helping him win Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year honors. Furthermore, Hunter, a two-time All-American, won the 2024 Heisman Trophy Award.

Hunter spent the previous two seasons in Colorado, preceded by playing one season with the Jackson State Tigers; he followed head coach Deion Sanders from Jackson State to Colorado in 2023.

On the other hand, Ohtani just had one of the best offensive seasons in MLB history, highlighted by becoming the first player to accomplish a 50-50 season (50 stolen bases and 50 home runs). The overwhelming, left-handed hitter finished the 2024 regular season with 54 home runs, 130 RBIs and 59 stolen bases, while posting a .310/.390/.646 slash line and helping the Dodgers win the 2024 World Series in what was his first season with the franchise. 

Ohtani hasn’t pitched in an MLB game since suffering a UCL tear in his pitching arm with the Los Angeles Angels in August 2023, merely serving as a designated hitter. That said, over the 86 career MLB starts that Ohtani has made, he has posted a 3.01 ERA, 1.08 WHIP and 608 strikeouts over 481.2 innings; when Ohtani makes a start, he also hits.

Both being the center of a defense’s attention in the passing game and shutting down the opposition’s best receiver (Hunter), or both hitting and pitching at an All-Star level (Ohtani)? It’s a fascinating debate. Granted, Hunter plays both ways more consistently, while injuries have unfortunately gotten in the way for Ohtani.

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Reporting by The Associated Press.

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Last season, Ohtani hit 54 home runs and stole 59 bases, which made him the first season in MLB history to reach at least 50 home runs and 50 steals in a single season. Time will tell if he can replicate that success this season, but he’s off to a strong start.

Ohtani and the Dodgers will start their 2025 regular season campaign with the Tokyo Series against the Chicago Cubs on March 18-19. The game will be broadacst on FOX/FS1.

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The Orioles came out on top, 11-8, and the 20-year-old Saballo had a home run in his lone at-bat.

Basallo, who was born in the Dominican Republic, signed with the Orioles as an international free agent in 2021. He was promoted to the triple-A Norfolk Tides in August after spending the majority of the year with the double-A Bowie Baysox.

The Orioles finished the 2024 season as the runner-up in the AL East, trailing only the New York Yankees.

Baltimore will open their MLB regular season against Toronto on March 27.

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“We’re going to engage Corbin Burnes,” Kendrick told Lovullo. “We’re going to see where this takes us.”

Adding the top starting pitcher on the market wasn’t part of Arizona’s business model when the offseason began, Kendrick admitted. There appeared to be more glaring needs on the D-backs’ roster, and the team usually operates with a payroll that ranks in the bottom half of the sport.

But when Burnes expressed his desire to stay close to home and his three young children — his twin daughters, Harper and Charlotte, were born last June — the model changed. Kendrick felt inspired. An opportunity had fallen in the D-backs’ lap, and they were ready to pounce.

“Once Ken got engaged, when he makes a commitment like that, he gets super aggressive,” Lovullo said. “I knew that there was a really good chance.”

What Lovullo wasn’t sure about, at least at the time, was Burnes’ perspective.

By late December, Blake Snell and Max Fried had already found new homes with the Dodgers and Yankees, respectively. That left Burnes as the lone nine-figure pitcher still looming on the market. A former Cy Young Award winner and an All-Star each of the past four seasons, it should come as little surprise that he was drawing significant interest.

While he has seen his strikeout rate steadily decline since his 2021 Cy Young season, Burnes has still been one of the most productive pitchers in baseball in that time. Among pitchers who’ve thrown at least 500 innings over the last three years, he ranks third in ERA, strikeouts and innings pitched. He has also finished in the top eight in Cy Young voting in each of the past five seasons.

He was a workhorse unlike any other pitcher on the market.

“We had heard from four or five other teams before we heard from [the D-backs], before we kind of got in contact with them,” Burnes told FOX Sports. “We had a couple offers on the table already. One was in writing, a couple verbal, nothing that was really serious yet, just to get the door open and start negotiations. But we never really pursued it hard because we were waiting to see if these guys and more teams were going to jump in.”

The more teams that were interested, Burnes figured, the more leverage there would be in negotiations. He described his first experience of free agency as “pretty stressful,” but he also told his agent, Scott Boras, that he had no problem being patient.

While other teams had deeper pockets, none could offer Arizona’s proximity. And though the D-backs aren’t to be confused with MLB’s luxury-tax offenders, and are still operating with a payroll nearly $200 million less than that of the rival Dodgers, they will splurge occasionally and selectively.

Much like they did nine years ago, when they surprised the baseball world by signing Zack Greinke, they operated in relative stealth as they lured in the pitching prize of the offseason.

The free-agency process went longer into the offseason than Burnes would’ve liked, but he eventually landed where he wanted.

“Just when we started to look at everything, this was the ideal spot,” Burnes said.

Once negotiations began, both sides moved expeditiously. Two days after his chat with Kendrick, Lovullo, a Southern California native who has family ties in Western New York, was visiting his mother on the West Coast when he said he received “a wall of text messages.” One came from Buffalo Bills’ long snapper Reid Ferguson.

“Corbin Burnes??” the text read. Then came another: “That’s an unbelievable addition.”

‘What!?” Lovullo responded before going straight to Google to see the news.

Initial phone calls between Burnes’ representation and the Diamondbacks went directly between owner and agent. Boras tried to sell Kendrick on the value of having “two true No. 1 starters” in Burnes and Zac Gallen, much the same way the 2001 champion Diamondbacks won with Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling.

“We began to talk and realized there was probably a model we could make work,” Kendrick said at Burnes’ introductory press conference.

The D-backs would typically loop Lovullo in before a deal of that magnitude was finalized, but the operation in the days leading up to Burnes’ signing shortly after Christmas was unusual. General manager Mike Hazen was with his kids in New Zealand. Assistant general manager Amiel Sawdaye was in Paris with family. It wasn’t until well after 10 p.m. PT on the night of Dec. 27 when reports first emerged about Burnes’ decision.

Over the course of a few days, Burnes and the Diamondbacks had hammered out the terms on the richest contract in franchise history, a six-year, $210-million pact that surpassed Greinke’s eerily similar six-year, $206.5 million deal. Burnes will have the ability to opt out after the 2026 season.

“I hope it sends the message that we’re in it to win it,” Kendrick said.

Burnes had spent six springs close to home in Phoenix, where he and his family had moved in 2018, while playing for the Brewers. Last year, after getting traded to Baltimore, he experienced spring training in Florida for the first time. Another first was fast approaching.

For years, he and his wife had discussed what free agency might look like and where they might like to go. They hoped their family could be together as much as possible. “There’s really only one spot you can do that,” Burnes said.

But staying close to his home in Scottsdale was not the sole reason for his decision. Burnes wasn’t going to tie himself long-term to a losing effort. The Diamondbacks had left an imprint on him during their surprising march to the World Series in 2023. On April 11 of that season, Burnes shut the D-backs out over eight innings. The next time he faced them in June, they looked like a different group. He surrendered a season-high seven runs over five innings.

Milwaukee and Arizona would meet again with much higher stakes in the wild-card round. In Game 1, the Brewers spotted Burnes an early 3-0 lead when the D-backs stormed back, tagging him for four runs over four innings. Burnes saw a young group he thought would be competitive for a long time.

“Obviously when you’re going to sign a long-term deal, you want to be able to win every year you’re there,” Burnes said. “First, you’ve got to look at teams that are contacting you that are going to be consistent winners over the course of that deal. You have that and obviously the family aspect of it, and the stage of life me and my wife are in right now, as easy as it can be on the family as possible, the better.”

The signing was a stunner not only because the Diamondbacks outlasted the league’s biggest spenders but also because they already had a full and formidable rotation without Burnes. Still, the group was coming off a year marred by injury and underperformance.

Their starters had a 4.79 ERA last season, fourth-worst in the majors. A hamstring injury cost Gallen a month. A shoulder injury limited Merrill Kelly to 13 starts. Their major offseason signings of Eduardo Rodriguez and Jordan Montgomery did not yield production. Rodriguez finished with a 5.04 ERA in 10 starts after dealing with a lat strain. More troublingly, Montgomery, a year after helping lift the Texas Rangers past the Diamondbacks in the World Series, had a 6.23 ERA in 25 appearances and spent the end of the year bouncing between the rotation and bullpen.

Arizona’s struggles on the mound, both starting and in relief, helped explain how a Diamondbacks group that scored more runs than any team in baseball last year still missed the postseason. The D-backs could have simply hoped for better health and production in 2025.

Instead, at a time when the Dodgers had already flexed their financial might, throwing tax payments to the wind as they continued to add a staggering amount of talent in their quest to repeat as champions, Arizona still tried to compete in a way many teams did not this winter. Even with Madison Bumgarner’s $85 million contract coming off the books and Christian Walker and Paul Sewald signing elsewhere, the addition of Burnes represented a significant financial commitment for an Arizona team that is currently slated to operate its highest-ever Opening Day payroll, a figure roughly $20 million more than the one they sported a season ago.

Shortly after the D-backs signed their new ace, Lovullo gave Burnes a call. In their first conversation, Lovullo wanted to reiterate the amount of work still ahead for a D-backs group looking to rebound. He enjoyed Burnes’ response.

“Let’s go, are you ready to win a s*** ton of games?” Lovullo recalled Burnes saying on The Jim Rome Show.

That, Burnes said when asked about the conversation, was probably an accurate recollection.

With the Dodgers dominating the NL West, the Diamondbacks have made the postseason just twice in the last 13 years. In 2017, they were swept by the Dodgers in the National League Division Series. Six years later, they answered back, sweeping the Dodgers in the NLDS during their unexpected 2023 run.

Perhaps, by adding a star of Burnes’ caliber, another surprise awaits.

“Obviously, the market these guys are in, they don’t get to do that very often,” Burnes said. “It’s kind of your window to go after it and get it. The fact that ownership recognized that and went out and got me and made the trade for [Josh] Naylor and made some other good moves shows they’re ready to go, ready to compete. I think Torey was fired up about it, so when he called me, I kind of echoed that. I’m excited.”

Rowan Kavner is an MLB writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the L.A. Dodgers, LA Clippers and Dallas Cowboys. An LSU grad, Rowan was born in California, grew up in Texas, then moved back to the West Coast in 2014. Follow him on Twitter at @RowanKavner.

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If “The Replacements” has a cult following for one of Hackman’s final acting roles, “Hoosiers” is one of his most iconic. Both characters are out-of-work, out-of-luck coaches leading underdog teams to predictable movie success, though “Hoosiers” is a little more subtle in unfolding its story.

Hackman was convincing as anything — a cop, a lawyer, a cowboy, a soldier, heroes and villains alike — but he always seemed right to play a coach. Even back in 1969, when he wasn’t even 40 yet, he played Robert Redford’s ski coach in “Downhill Racer,” always conveying toughness, authority and respect — and of course, a great quotability.

“My team is on the floor,” Coach Dale famously tells the official expecting him to replace a player who has fouled out of the team’s first game. Dale was unrelenting in his desire for his team to pass the ball at least four times before taking a shot and proved his point by choosing to finish the game short-handed.

“It was Dentyne,” Hickory High’s Buddy Walker says to Dale, long after his coach had told him he wants him to play defense so pressing that he knows what brand of gum his opponent is chewing.

“Hoosiers” was set 35 years in the past, yet was so ahead of its time. We learned about meddlesome parents and boosters, the fear of a high school athlete’s life peaking at 17 years old and quick-cut musical montages of a team’s steady improvement. I still like the little things you notice: The actor who plays principal Cletus Summers is Sheb Wooley, who sang “The Purple People Eater” back in the 1950s, and the assistant coach who proclaims “Coach stays!” is also the Mountie who says, “I don’t approve of your methods” in “The Untouchables.”

“Hoosiers” was in the middle — some would say the heart — of an amazing five-year run of sports movies, after “The Natural” and leading up to “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams.” You can argue “Hoosiers” is one of the best, if not the best, sports movies ever, still good for goosebumps in the state final no matter how many times you’ve seen it. So much of that is Hackman, playing a flawed character who has to win the audience over as he does the team and the town.

We lost Hackman on Thursday, but we also found him again, with social media flooded with old clips from a career so long and varied you’d forgotten huge movies he was in, scenes you hadn’t seen in decades, like Hackman himself. The back-and-forth with Denzel Washington in “Crimson Tide,” the absolute camp of his Lex Luthor in the Superman movies, the frenetic car chase in “The French Connection.”

I spent $3.95 to rent “Hoosiers” on Thursday, and it holds up so well almost 40 years later, the formula for so many sports movies that followed. You know Hickory is going to win the unlikely championship, and you still watch the old coach from the ’80s.

Sports was just a small part of his body of work, but for a trip back in time as Norman Dale, Hackman was irreplaceable. 

Greg Auman is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He previously spent a decade covering the Buccaneers for the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.

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But Cortes also gave the Dodgers credit for taking care of business and not letting the series go back to Yankee Stadium, where New York was undefeated in the ALCS.

“It didn’t happen that way and they deserve all the credit in the world, they won the World Series,” Cortes said. “At the moment, they showed they were the better team.”

The Dodgers and Yankees will go head-to-head in a rematch of the 2024 World Series starting May 30 at Dodger Stadium. The second game of that series will be broadcast on FOX.

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Four players were hit by pitches in the game. Lovelady also was charged with a wild pitch.

“It’s early spring training so guys don’t have their command down,” Thomson said. “There were a bunch of guys hit today. I can’t speak for the kid but maybe he was a little nervous, it’s Bryce Harper. It’s baseball.”

Reporting by The Associated Press.

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Trout played just 29 games last season and had surgery on May 3 to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee.

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He missed all but 36 games of the 2021 season with a strained right calf, and was out between July 12 and Aug. 19 in 2022 because of an injury to his upper back and ribcage. Trout broke the hamate bone in his left hand when he fouled off a pitch on July 3, 2023, missing all but one game after July 3.

Trout’s last MVP season came in 2019 when he hit .291 with 45 homers and 104 RBIs. He has a .299 career average with 378 homers over 14 seasons with the Angels.

Trout said his transition to right field has gone well. He’s played one game at the position so far this spring training and said he’s scheduled to be in right again later this week.

“Looking forward to it, getting some reads off the bat,” Trout said. “It’s different visuals you’ve got to work on and then you’ve got different angles on the line at different stadiums. It’ll be an adjustment but I’m enjoying it.”

Reporting by The Associated Press.

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