Alex Verdugo, Kiké Hernández, And Hunter Renfroe Not Always Perfect But The Trio Is Earning Respect
Probably not. Benintendi, Betts, Bradley, Evans, Lynn, and Rice were all drafted and developed by the Red Sox. Outside of Benintendi, they all became All-Stars in Boston.
Verdugo, Hernández, and Renfroe were welded together via trade and free agency and the pieces don’t always dovetail.
Verdugo has 36 starts in left and 35 in the other two spots while Hernández is an occasional second baseman. The Sox also give occasional starts in left field to J.D. Martinez, whose best attribute as an outfielder is usually that he’s quite a hitter.
But even Martinez joined in on what has been a daily dose of game-changing defense on Saturday.
Martinez broke in and caught a line drive with one out in the 10th inning and fired a strike to Christian Vazquez to get the final out of the inning at the plate as Sean Murphy was tagged out trying to tag up and score what would have been the winning run.
It was a copy of the play Kiké Hernández made in center field on Friday night to help Adam Ottavino get out of a jam in a 3-2 victory in 10 innings.
Martinez’s heave was wasted. The Sox scored twice in the 12th inning, but Matt Andriese allowed three in the bottom of the inning and the Athletics escaped with a 7-6 victory.
The loss snapped an eight-game win streak for the Sox.
This outfield group may not be homegrown heroes. But Sox manager Alex Cora thinks it’s about time they earned your respect.
“The way we play defense in the outfield is elite. Put it that way,” Cora said Friday.
“I know a lot of people had their doubts coming into the season because we didn’t have Mookie, Benny, and Jackie. But these three guys, they’re playing up there. They’re playing elite defense.
“They throw to the right bases, they keep their throws down, their routes are great, [and] the communication is outstanding. Defensively we have one of the best outfields in the big leagues if not the best.”
Cora was understandably enthused after Hernández made one of the most important defensive plays of the season on Friday, a catch in center field followed by a perfect throw to the plate to complete a double play in the 10th inning and get Ottavino out of a jam.
But the numbers are on the manager’s side. Sox outfielders lead the majors with 26 assists this season and have 22 defensive runs saved, second to Tampa Bay’s 26.
Ultimate zone rating, an advanced statistic that measures a variety of defensive contributions, has the Sox fourth in the majors at 9.2 behind the Brewers (12.0), Rockies (10.7), and Rays (10.1). Sox outfielders had 25 DRS in 2018 with a 26.4 UZR.
The current group doesn’t always make it look easy. They’ve crashed into walls or sprawled on the ground more often than the three B’s did. But they’re getting the job done for a first-place team.
Verdugo leads left fielders with 8 DRS. Hernández is second among center fielders with 8 and Renfroe is third in right field with 6. (Bradley has 6 DRS, Betts 4 and Benintendi minus-1).
“It’s teamwork. We did it in spring training,” Cora said. “The three are great outfielders.”
Pregame analysis and scouting have played a big role in giving the outfielders a good sense of positioning and which opposing base runners will be a challenge.
First base coach Tom Goodwin, who coaches the outfielders, coordinates that process.
“The information, we get it and we provide it to them. But in the end, they’ve got to do the job,” Cora said. “Goody’s been on top of it, and you see the results.”
Said Hernández: “We work really hard at it. Every day we’re out there taking live reads off the bat in BP.”
That Hernández and Verdugo were Dodgers teammates in 2019 and parts of the two seasons before that has helped. Renfroe was an above-average defender for the Padres in 2019 and has recaptured that level of play with the Sox.
“I don’t even have to talk about what Hunter’s done in right field this year,” Hernández said. “It’s been a lot of fun to watch.
“I knew that he was a good defender because I played against him in the same division for two or three years. But I didn’t think he was this good. I don’t think there’s many right fielders in baseball that play better defense than he does. It’s been pretty special to watch.”
Eduardo Rodriguez, who pitched six shutout innings Friday, was even more demonstrative, half-jokingly saying he’d trust the defenders behind him with his life.
“I just try to keep the ball in the ballpark,” Rodriguez said. “Because I know the defense that I have. That’s how much I trust them.”
(Peter Abraham can be reached at peter.Abraham@globe.Com. Follow him on Twitter @peteabe.)
Peter Abraham can be reached at peter.Abraham@globe.Com. Follow him on Twitter @PeteAbe.
Kathryn Mitchell To Compete In Tokyo Olympics After Earning Australian Athletics Team Selection
BALLARAT javelin thrower Kathryn Mitchell will compete at her third Olympics after being named in the final 63-member squad who will travel to Tokyo later this month. Mitchell has been a dominant force at track-and-field competitions throughout the Australian season, but had still fallen 50cm short of an automatic qualifying position of 64 metres, with a season best throw of 63.5 metres. But her world ranking and the fact she had thrown the 12th longest of anyone in the world this year, meant she had done enough to earn selection for the Olympics. The javelin competition allows for the top 32 athletes in the world provided no more than three competitors are from any one country. Despite not being able to travel to international events this season, Mitchell was ranked well inside the cut off. Mitchell is the 2018 Commonwealth Games champion and will be part of a strong Australian contingent in the event which includes world champion Kelsey-Lee Barber as well as Mackenzie Little who have all ben picked in the squad. The Australia team which was named on Saturday is the third largest athletics squad this country has ever seen at an Olympic Games. Only the two home Olympics of Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000 have seen more athletes take to the track. The selection is a perfect birthday present for Mitchell who celebrates her 39th birthday this week. Mitchell has previously competed in the 2012 London games where she finished ninth and in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 where she was sixth. She has battled a tumultuous 18 months due to the worldwide pandemic and incredibly has managed to earn selection despite not having seen her coach and partner Uwe Hohn - who is the coach of the Indian team - for more than 18 months due to travel restrictions in and out of that country and into Australia. The team also features medal hope, and former Ballarat student Stewart McSweyn, who has confirmed his focus on the 1500-metres by dropping the 5000m and 10,000m despite earning selection in both longer distance events. Mitchell was one of 36 athletes given an exemption into the team, while a further 27 had already gained automatic selection, including McSweyn. Athletics Australia chief executive officer Peter Bromley said he was excited by what the team could achieve in Tokyo. "With just weeks to go until the Tokyo Games finally begin, it's incredibly exciting to see 36 more athletes announced to the Australian Olympic Athletics Team," Bromley said. "What's more exciting is the real mix of experience we have in this fourth wave selected. "We have 14 Olympians joining the team once again, including Jeff Riseley who will add Olympics number four to his list of achievements, and 22 debutants, all of who have made a lasting impression on the Australian athletics community, including our youngest athlete on the team, 18-year-old Ellie Beer. "This highlights to me that the future of athletics in our country is strong and bright.
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BALLARAT javelin thrower Kathryn Mitchell will compete at her third Olympics after being named in the final 63-member squad who will travel to Tokyo later this month.
Mitchell has been a dominant force at track-and-field competitions throughout the Australian season, but had still fallen 50cm short of an automatic qualifying position of 64 metres, with a season best throw of 63.5 metres.
But her world ranking and the fact she had thrown the 12th longest of anyone in the world this year, meant she had done enough to earn selection for the Olympics.
The javelin competition allows for the top 32 athletes in the world provided no more than three competitors are from any one country. Despite not being able to travel to international events this season, Mitchell was ranked well inside the cut off.
Mitchell is the 2018 Commonwealth Games champion and will be part of a strong Australian contingent in the event which includes world champion Kelsey-Lee Barber as well as Mackenzie Little who have all ben picked in the squad.
The Australia team which was named on Saturday is the third largest athletics squad this country has ever seen at an Olympic Games.
Only the two home Olympics of Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000 have seen more athletes take to the track.
Kathryn Mitchell won the 2018 Commonwealth Games gold medal.
The selection is a perfect birthday present for Mitchell who celebrates her 39th birthday this week.
Mitchell has previously competed in the 2012 London games where she finished ninth and in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 where she was sixth.
She has battled a tumultuous 18 months due to the worldwide pandemic and incredibly has managed to earn selection despite not having seen her coach and partner Uwe Hohn - who is the coach of the Indian team - for more than 18 months due to travel restrictions in and out of that country and into Australia.
The team also features medal hope, and former Ballarat student Stewart McSweyn, who has confirmed his focus on the 1500-metres by dropping the 5000m and 10,000m despite earning selection in both longer distance events.
Mitchell was one of 36 athletes given an exemption into the team, while a further 27 had already gained automatic selection, including McSweyn.
Athletics Australia chief executive officer Peter Bromley said he was excited by what the team could achieve in Tokyo.
"With just weeks to go until the Tokyo Games finally begin, it's incredibly exciting to see 36 more athletes announced to the Australian Olympic Athletics Team," Bromley said.
"What's more exciting is the real mix of experience we have in this fourth wave selected.
"We have 14 Olympians joining the team once again, including Jeff Riseley who will add Olympics number four to his list of achievements, and 22 debutants, all of who have made a lasting impression on the Australian athletics community, including our youngest athlete on the team, 18-year-old Ellie Beer.
"This highlights to me that the future of athletics in our country is strong and bright.
Utah AI/biotech Innovator Recursion Pharmaceuticals Is Growing (and Earning) Fast. Here’s Why
© Kristin Murphy, Deseret News Lawrie Allred, HTS engineer, hands a cell plate to a co-worker while seeding cells at Recursion Pharmaceuticals at The Gateway in Salt Lake City on Oct. 30, 2018.Utah biotech startup Recursion Pharmaceuticals is upending the realm of clinical-stage drug research, melding robot-driven automation with digital artificial intelligence on a mission to revolutionize how new medications are developed to battle some of the rarest and most challenging of human medical conditions.
And the company has been on an absolute tear in the last year, raising over $500 million via a public stock offering in April, expanding its footprint with a new research facility in Toronto and growing its staff by over 60%.
Recursion was founded in 2013 and outgrew two facilities at University of Utah’s Research Park before taking over a 100,000-plus square-foot space in downtown’s Gateway Center, the former home of Dick’s Sporting Goods. This week, the company announced it will double the footprint of its flagship research and office facility, signing a lease on an additional 100,000 square feet of space at the Gateway.
Recursion President/COO Tina Larson said the new real estate will help accommodate the company’s plans to continue growing its capacity and current staff of 250.
“Recursion is a pioneer in the emerging field of technology-enabled drug discovery,” Larson said in a statement. “To deliver on our mission we have grown our world-class team of scientists, engineers, clinicians and company builders by more than 60% in the last year.
“Expanding our laboratory footprint will allow us to grow our proprietary biological dataset even faster and add several novel capabilities in biology and chemistry research.”
Recursion’s innovative approach began as the core of doctoral research performed by company co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson at the University of Utah. The method relies on automating the once human-intensive process of peering through a microscope to assess if a chemical compound’s impact on a diseased cell is having a positive effect or advancing it toward being a healthy cell.
In a 2018 Deseret News profile of the company, Larson explained that Recursion has developed a technique to take a sample cell representing a genetic disorder and test it against the effects of hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds in a process that automates the visual evaluations and data gathering to allow for a lot of testing, in a very short period of time.
“We look at a disease we’re interested in against every chemical we can access,” Larson said. “We have so much robotics we can run hundreds of thousands of experiments very quickly in a way that you can’t do with traditional biology.”
The advanced automation identifies “hits” or impacts from particular chemical compounds on diseased cells that show promising results. Once identified, the Recursion team can hone in and pursue furthering the results through modifications to the compound.
New York City and Menlo Park, California-based Lux Capital was an early Recursion investor, participating in a $60 million round of funding for the company in 2017. Zavain Dar, a principal with Lux, said a former Stanford graduate school classmate of his put the company on Lux’s radar in 2016 and when he looked into it, he was “wildly impressed” with Recursion’s approach.
“Their process is exceptionally intelligent,” Dar said in 2018. “It removes human hubris and bias from the equation ... A factor that’s plagued pre-clinical drug discovery research for decades now.”
Dar noted the company’s innovation is entirely new and taking advantage of automation, wet-lab and machine learning advances that have put Recursion years ahead of its competition and “gone well above and beyond what anyone thought was possible.” Dar also believes the approach Recursion is developing could lead to compressing the time it takes to identify and bring a new drug to market from a decade-plus into the range of three to five years.
And Lux Capital has not been alone in its bullish stance on Recursion’s potential. Before entering the public markets this spring, Recursion had attracted over $460 million in venture investments, according to tech data aggregator Crunchbase.
At the end of regular trading on Friday, Recursion stock (RXRX) was trading at $36.50 per share on the Nasdaq exchange, earning the company a market capitalization of just over $6 billion.
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