October 2025

There were 529 posts published in October 2025 (this is page 1 of 53).

World Series 2025: George Springer returns, while Dodgers retool lineup ahead of Game 6

Both the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers will enter Game 6 of the 2025 World Series with different lineups. The former for a happy reason and the latter for an unhappy reason.

In the case of the Blue Jays, who lead the series 3-2 and are on the verge of their first championship since 1993, they are welcoming back designated hitter George Springer, who missed Games 4 and 5 due to a side injury he sustained in Game 3.

Toronto manager John Schneider said Thursday that he expected Springer’s return, assuming his progression continued, and it appears that it has.

Springer’s presence means Bo Bichette, who is still recovering from a knee sprain, will be forced to field again at second base. It’s an exchange Toronto is fine making, as Springer was one of their most valuable players of the regular season and their most experienced postseason hitter.

“He was pretty close in Game 5. I think having the extra day and a half helped,” Schneider said Friday. “I think the feedback we got from him in the last couple days helped, and watching him swing … The season has the potential to just be two games. If it had the potential to be another two weeks, maybe a little bit different, but he’s ready to go.”

Meanwhile, the Dodgers are once again making some moves in an attempt to jump-start a lineup that has gone whisper-quiet since the regular innings of Game 3. Mookie Betts has been moved from third to cleanup hitter amid a quiet postseason, and Miguel Rojas is getting a start at second base.

Rojas’ start means another benching for Andy Pages amid the young outfielder’s historically awful postseason slump. Tommy Edman, who is still dealing with a nagging ankle injury, shifts from second base to center field as part of the move.

Despite being down 3-2, the Dodgers enter Friday as -140 favorites at BetMGM to win Game 6 and force a winner-take-all Game 7. That’s mostly thanks to Yoshinobu Yamamoto starting after throwing a second straight complete game in Game 2.

As for the rest of the Dodgers’ pitching plans, manager Dave Roberts told reporters Friday that Tyler Glasnow, one of the candidates to start a potential Game 7, will be available out of the bullpen in Game 6.

“He’ll be in there,” Roberts said. “You got to win today, which is most important, but you still got to win two games. So how we balance that, the game will tell.”

George Springer is back. The Dodgers are hoping their offense is, too. (Photo by Luke Hales/Getty Images)
Luke Hales via Getty Images

You would imagine the Dodgers’ Plan A is another long start from Yamamoto. But if the right-hander falters, Glasnow gives them another multi-inning arm ready to go, though he was less than sharp in Game 3. 

One arm that will not be available Friday is Shohei Ohtani.

“Shohei’s not a part of the pitching plan today,” Roberts said. “Win this game tonight, then we can kind of circle up and have that conversation for tomorrow.”

Whether or not Glasnow appears in Game 6, Ohtani would be a strong candidate to start Game 7 on three days’ rest after his previous start in Game 4, given the MLB rules allowing him to stay in the game as DH if he exits as the starting pitcher but not if he appears as a reliever. 

He might not make a full start — perhaps just one turn through the order — but he could be a major weapon in an all-hands-on-deck situation.

Pacers announce Obi Toppin has been diagnosed with stress fracture in foot, will receive surgery

The Indiana Pacers are going to be missing one of their key bench players moving forward. The Pacers announced Friday that big man Obi Toppin has been diagnosed with a partial stress fracture in his right foot.

The fracture, which is on the fifth metatarsal (the bone of the pinky toe), will require surgery. Toppin will travel to New York to undergo that surgery.

It is unclear how long Toppin will be out, but he has been placed on injured reserve.

Toppin started the season strong, putting up 20 points off the bench in the Pacers’ season-opening double-OT loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. Toppin missed Indiana’s last game (a loss to the Dallas Mavericks) after being ruled out with a “right foot stress reaction.”

In his first three games of the season, Toppin has averaged 14 points and 27 minutes per game off the bench.

Toppin is the latest injury blow for the Pacers, who are playing the entire season without star Tyrese Haliburton, who is recovering from an Achilles tear suffered during Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Though there was initially some hope from fans that the point guard could return before the end of the year, president of basketball operations Kevin Pritchard confirmed in July that Haliburton would miss the whole season, with the team not wanting to “jeopardize” his long-term health.

The Pacers’ ability to adjust to Haliburton’s absence was one of the big questions heading into this season. But without the guard, forward Pascal Siakam has stepped up, leading Indiana across four major categories (points, rebounds, assists, steals) in the first four games of the year. In addition, third-year guard Ben Sheppard has also continued to develop as a starting shooting guard, with players like Jarace Walker and RayJ Dennis contributing significant points.

Thunder’s Jalen Williams undergoes follow-up procedure on wrist that delays his return to play

The defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder are 6-0, and their No. 2 scoring option isn’t even back in the lineup yet.

They’ll have to wait a little longer for Jalen Williams’ return, though, as the standout, two-way wing has undergone a follow-up procedure on his right wrist and will be re-evaluated in 10-14 days, the team announced Friday.

The procedure was performed at Cedars-Sinai Health in Los Angeles, where Williams had a screw removed in the wrist of his shooting hand. The screw was creating irritation during the final stages of his return-to-play process.

Williams originally had offseason surgery to repair a torn ligament in the wrist and, at the time, was expected to be available for the start of the 2025-26 campaign.

In July, Williams agreed to a five-year maximum rookie contract extension with the Thunder that reportedly could reach $287 million.

The 24-year-old is coming off a breakout season, in which he averaged 21.6 points, 5.3 rebounds, 5.1 assists and 1.6 steals per game for a 68-win Oklahoma City squad that won it all.

Although his numbers occasionally fluctuated, he kept up that kind of production during the Thunder’s playoff run while delivering iconic performances, such as a 34-point clinic in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals against the Minnesota Timberwolves and a 40-point NBA Finals masterclass in a series-tilting Game 5 win over the Indiana Pacers.

[Get more Thunder news: Oklahoma City team feed]

What made those outings all the more impressive was the fact that Williams quietly suffered his wrist injury in the final week of the regular season, during an April 9 victory against the Phoenix Suns.

In a post-surgery video on his YouTube channel this summer, Williams explained that he had already been dealing with a wrist sprain the majority of the season. A jump ball with Suns star Devin Booker made things more difficult for him.

“I remember pulling my hand out the mix, bro, and I kind of heard almost, like, a paper-ripping noise — or, like, air, like a switch,” Williams said in the July video. “And I’m, like, looking around a little bit, and then my hand is just on fire. The whole top of my wrist is on fire.”

Still, Williams clocked out of that game with 33 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists and 3 steals in 36 minutes. He noted in that same YouTube video that he received lidocaine injections before every Thunder playoff game to relieve his wrist pain before tipoff.

The Thunder can afford Williams’ recovery taking longer than expected.

After sweating out back-to-back double-overtime wins to start the season, Oklahoma City has more handily rattled off four more victories, in large part thanks to the continued stardom of reigning NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

How Apple Plans to Improve AI Image Editors

Apple might be dead last in the AI race—at least when you consider competition from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta—but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t working on the tech. In fact, it seems most of the work Apple does on AI is behind the scenes: While Apple Intelligence is, well, there, the company’s researchers are working on other ways to improve AI models for everyone, not just Apple users. The latest project? Improving AI image editors based on text prompts.

In a paper published last week, researchers introduced Pico-Banana-400K, a dataset of 400,000 “text-guided” images selected to improve AI-based image editing. Apple believes its image dataset improves upon existing sets by including higher quality images with more diversity: The researchers found that existing datasets either use images produced by AI models, or are not varied enough, which can hinder efforts to improve the models.

Funnily enough, Pico-Banana-400K is designed to work with Nano Banana, Google’s image editing model. Researchers say using Nano Banana, their dataset can generate 35 different types of edits, as well as tap into Gemini-2.5-Pro to asses quality the edits, and whether those edits should remain as part of the overall dataset.

As part of these 400,000 images, there are 258,000 samples of single edits (where Apple compares the original images to one with edits); 56,000 “preference pairs,” which distinguishes between failed and successful edit generations; and 72,000 “multi-turn sequences,” which walks through two to five edits.

Researchers note that different functions had different success rates in this dataset. Global edits and stylization are “easy,” achieving the highest success rates; object semantics and scene context are “moderate;” while precise geometry, layout, and typography are “hard.” The highest performing function, “strong artistic style transfer,” which could include changing an image’s style to “Van Gogh” or anime, has a 93% success rate. The lowest performing function, “change font style or color of visible text if there is text,” only succeeded 58% of the time. Other tested functions include “add new text” (67% success rate), “zoom in” (74% success rate), and “add film grain or vintage filter” (91% success rate).

Unlike many of Apple’s products, which are typically closed to the company’s own platforms, Pico-Banana-400K is open for all researchers and AI developers to use. It’s cool to see Apple researchers contributing to open research like this, especially in an area Apple is generally behind in. Will we actually get an AI-powered Siri anytime soon? Unclear. But it is clear Apple is actively working on AI, perhaps just in its own way.