The awards keep coming in for the Orioles.

Baltimore’s top executive, manager and best player were honored by The Sporting News on Thursday morning after leading the Orioles to a 101-win regular season.

Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias was named MLB Executive of the Year and Brandon Hyde won AL Manager of the Year, as voted by their front office and managerial peers. Infielder Gunnar Henderson was named AL Rookie of the Year, as voted by the 376 players who submitted ballots, according to The Sporting News.

Elias took over in November 2018 after the Orioles lost a franchise-worst 115 games. The rebuild he led produced 100-loss seasons in 2019 and 2021, but it started to bear fruit in 2022 when Baltimore was the American League’s best team not to make the playoffs. The club took another step this year as the AL’s top regular season team while also boasting the sport’s top farm system.

Elias hired Hyde to lead the Orioles through the painful rebuild. After a 110-loss campaign in 2021, the Orioles won 31 more games in 2022 as one of MLB’s biggest surprises. While almost every team in MLB history to have such an improvement regresses the following year, Hyde’s Orioles didn’t, winning 18 more games to mark the greatest two-year turnaround in MLB history.

Henderson hit .255 with a team-best .814 OPS, 28 home runs, 29 doubles, nine triples and 10 steals. The 22-year-old rookie overcame a slow start and emerged in the summer as the Orioles’ best player, winning Most Valuable Oriole, as voted by local media. His 6.3 wins above replacement ranked ninth among MLB players on Baseball-Reference.

Elias, Hyde and Henderson could all win the same awards from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America next month.

MLB executives also voted for All-Star teams on their Sporting News ballots. Adley Rutschman, one of the Orioles’ three Gold Glove Award finalists, tied with Seattle’s Cal Raleigh for the AL’s catcher spot, while closer Félix Bautista, who missed the final six weeks of the season with a torn elbow ligament, was picked as the AL’s top reliever.

()

If you care about Israel, you should be more worried than any time since 1967. Back then, Israel defeated the armies of three Arab states — Egypt, Syria and Jordan — in what became known as the Six-Day War. Today, if you look closely, you’ll see that Israel is now fighting the Six-Front War.

This war is being fought by and through nonstate actors, nation-states, social networks, ideological movements, West Bank communities and Israeli political factions, and it is the most complex war that I’ve ever covered. But one thing is crystal clear to me: Israel cannot win this six-front war alone. It can win only if Israel — and the United States — can assemble a global alliance.

Unfortunately, Israel today has a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a ruling coalition that will not and cannot produce the keystone needed to sustain such a global alliance. That keystone is to declare an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the overhaul of Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority so that it becomes a credible, legitimate Palestinian partner than can govern a post-Hamas Gaza Strip and forge a broader two-state solution including the West Bank.

If Israel is asking its best allies to help the Jewish state seek justice in Gaza while also asking them to look the other way as Israel builds a settlement kingdom in the West Bank with the expressed goal of annexation, that is strategically and morally incoherent.

It won’t work. Israel will not be able to generate the time, the financial assistance, the legitimacy, the Palestinian partner or the global allies it needs to win this six-front war.

And all six fronts are now hiding in plain sight.

First front

First, Israel is fighting a full-scale war against Hamas in and around Gaza, in which, we can now see, Hamas still has so much residual capacity that it was able to launch a seaborne attack on Israel on Tuesday and on Wednesday fired long-range rockets toward Israel’s southern port city of Eilat and northern port city of Haifa.

It is terrifying to see how many resources Hamas diverted to build weapons rather than Gaza’s human capital — and how effectively it hid that from Israel and the world. Indeed, it is hard not to notice the contrast between Gaza’s evident human poverty and the wealth of weaponry Hamas has built and deployed.

Hamas’ dream has long been the unification of the fronts surrounding Israel, regionally and globally. Israel’s strategy has always been to act in ways to prevent that — until this Netanyahu coalition of ultra-Orthodox and Jewish supremacists came to power in December and began behaving in ways that actually helped foster the unification of the anti-Israel fronts.

How so? The Jewish supremacists in Netanyahu’s Cabinet immediately began to challenge the status quo on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and where one of Islam’s holiest sites, Al-Aqsa Mosque, stands. The Netanyahu government began taking steps to impose much harsher conditions on Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza held in Israeli jails. And it laid plans for a huge expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to prevent a contiguous Palestinian state from ever coming into being there. This is the first Israeli government ever to make annexation of the West Bank a stated objective in its coalition agreement.

On top of all of this, the United States appeared to be getting close to forging a deal for Saudi Arabia to normalize diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel — which would have been the crowning achievement of Netanyahu’s effort to prove that Israel could have normal relations with Arab and Muslim states and not have to give one inch to the Palestinians.

Second

Which leads to the second front: Israel against Iran and its other proxies.

That is, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Islamist militias in Syria and Iraq and the Houthi militia in Yemen.

All of them in recent days have launched drones and rockets toward Israel or at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. I believe that Iran, like Hamas, saw the U.S.-Israel effort to normalize relations between Israel and Arab-Muslim states as a strategic threat that would have left Iran and its proxies isolated in the region. At the same time, I believe Hezbollah came to realize that if Israel obliterated Hamas, as it declared it would, Hezbollah would be next. It would also be much weaker without Hamas draining energy and focus from Israel’s military. Therefore, Hezbollah decided that, at a minimum, it needed to open a low-grade second front against Israel.

As a result, Israel has been forced to evacuate some 130,000 civilians from its northern border along with the tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the southwestern border with Gaza. This whole displacement puts a huge stress on housing and the Israeli treasury.

Third

The third front is the universe of social networks and other digital narratives about who is good and who is evil.

When the world gets this interdependent, when — thanks to smartphones and social networks — nothing is hidden and we can hear each other whisper, the dominant narrative has real strategic value. That social media was so easily manipulated by Hamas that the episode of a misfired Palestinian missile hitting a Gaza hospital was initially blamed on Israel is deeply disturbing, because these narratives shape the decisions of governments and politicians and the relationship between chief executives and their employees.

Fourth

The fourth front is the intellectual/philosophical struggle between the international progressive movement and Israel.

I believe that some elements of that progressive movement, which I realize is big and diverse, have lost their moral bearings on this issue. For instance, we’ve seen numerous demonstrations on American college campuses that essentially blame Israel for the barbaric Hamas invasion, arguing that Hamas is engaged in a legitimate “anti-colonial struggle.” These progressive demonstrators seem to believe that all of Israel is a colonial enterprise — not just the West Bank settlements — and therefore the Jewish people do not have the right either to self-determination or self-defense in their ancestral homeland, whether it’s within post-1967 borders or pre-1967 ones.

And for an intellectual community seemingly concerned about nations occupying other nations and denying their right to self-rule, you don’t see a lot of progressive college campus demonstrations against the biggest oppressing power in the Middle East today: Iran.

Besides crushing its own women seeking greater freedom of thought and dress, Iran is effectively controlling four Arab states — Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — through its proxies. Lebanon, a country I know well, has not been able to elect a new president for a year in large part because Iran refuses to allow the Lebanese to have any president who will not always bend to Tehran’s wishes and interests. Unfortunately, independent Lebanese are powerless to remove Iran’s grip over their parliament and government, exercised largely through the barrel of Hezbollah guns. Middle East Eye reported that back in 2014 Ali Reza Zakani, a Tehran city representative in the Iranian parliament, was boasting about how Iran now rules in four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa, Yemen.

To reduce this incredibly complex struggle of two peoples for the same land to a colonial war is to commit intellectual fraud. Or as Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi put it in The Times of Israel on Wednesday: “To blame the occupation and its consequences wholly on Israel is to dismiss the history of Israeli peace offers and Palestinian rejection. To label Israel as one more colonialist creation is to distort the unique story of the homecoming of an uprooted people, a majority of whom were refugees from destroyed Jewish communities in the Middle East.”

But here’s what’s also intellectually corrupt: buying into the Israeli right-wing settler narrative, now being spread far and wide inside Israel, that Hamas violence is so savage it clearly has nothing to do with anything settlers have done — so more settlements are just fine.

My view: This is a territorial dispute between two people claiming the same land which needs to be divided as equitably as possible. Such a compromise is the cornerstone for any success against Hamas. So, if you are for a two-state solution, you are my friend and if you are against a two-state solution, you are not my friend.

Fifth

The fifth front is inside Israel and the occupied territories.

In the West Bank, right-wing Jewish settlers are attacking Palestinians, while disrupting the efforts of Israel’s military to keep a lid on it in collaboration with the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas. We must remember that the authority has recognized Israel’s right to exist as part of the Oslo accords. It would be terrible if that front explodes into a confrontation between the authority and Israel, because then there would be scant hope for ever enlisting the authority’s help in governing Gaza.

But there will also be no hope for that if Palestinians in the West Bank and around the world don’t insist on building a more effective, non-corrupt Palestinian Authority. That is long past due — and it is not just Israel’s fault that it has not happened. Palestinians have agency, too.

Sixth

The sixth front is inside Israel itself, mostly between its Jewish citizens.

That front has been papered over for the moment, but it lurks just beneath the surface. It is the clash driven by Netanyahu’s enduring political strategy at home: divide and rule. He has built his whole political career on pitting factions of Israeli society against one another, eroding the kind of societal unity that is essential to win the war.

His government took that strategy to an extreme after it came into office in December and immediately moved to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its powers to check decisions of the executive and legislative branches. In the process he turned tens of thousands of Israelis out every Saturday to protect their democracy and prompted air force pilots and other elite war-fighters to suspend their reserve duty, saying they would not serve a country heading toward dictatorship. It divided and distracted Israel and its military at exactly the wrong time — not that there was ever a good time.

How do you win a six-front war?

I repeat: only with a coalition of people and nations who believe in democratic values and the right of self-determination for all people. Until and unless Israel generates a government that can generate that coalition, it will not have the time, the resources, the Palestinian partner and the legitimacy it needs to take down Hamas in Gaza. It will be fighting mostly alongside the United States as its only true and sustainable ally.

And a lot of the strength of that alliance today rests on Joe Biden and the fact that he brings to this crisis a set of core, gut principles about America’s role in the world, right versus wrong, democracy versus autocracy. Another president with those instincts may not come along again anytime soon.

In other words, Biden has created diplomatic working capital — that comes with a time limit — for both Israelis and the Palestinian Authority. They must both use it wisely.

Thomas Friedman, who was born in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Louis Park, writes a column for the New York Times.

Country star Chris Stapleton will play his largest local headlining show to date when he hits U.S. Bank Stadium on April 6.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Nov. 3 via Ticketmaster. Citi cardholders have access to a presale that starts at 10 a.m. Oct. 31. Neither the venue nor the promoter announced ticket prices. Lainey Wilson (“Things a Man Oughta Know,” “Heart Like a Truck”) and Marcus King (“The Well,” “Blood on the Tracks”) open.

Initially known as the songwriter and frontman of the SteelDrivers, Chris Stapleton established himself as a solo star with the release of his debut, “Traveller,” in 2015. Not only did it go platinum six times, it helped Stapleton fill a few shelves with awards. The 45-year-old Kentucky native has won eight Grammy Awards, 10 Academy of Country Music Awards and 14 Country Music Association Awards.

His best-known include “Tennessee Whiskey,” “Broken Halos,” “Nobody to Blame,” “Millionaire,” “Starting Over” and “You Should Probably Leave.”

In July, Stapleton released “White Horse,” the first single off his fifth solo album “Higher,” which is due out Nov. 10. He co-wrote the song with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, who has won Grammys for his work with Adele and the Chicks. Stapleton opened for George Strait in 2021 and headlined Xcel Energy Center in 2017 and 2022.

Related Articles

Last KISS: Saying farewell to band with a look back at its biggest moments

Ross Raihala: Here’s the story behind my Twitter feud with country superstar Luke Bryan

Concert review: A distracted, slow-moving Luke Bryan phoned it in at the X

South African musician Abel Selaocoe is a dynamic partner with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra

Review: ‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’ among greatest concert films of all time

Every week of Darnell Wright’s rookie season, there has been social media examination of how the Chicago Bears first-round pick is faring — clips of him plowing a path in the run game with his athleticism, holding his own to allow quarterback Justin Fields time and, yes, getting beat by veteran pass rushers.

But the film of Wright’s performance against the Las Vegas Raiders and two-time Pro Bowl defensive end Maxx Crosby on Sunday was unusual. For several plays in the Bears’ 30-12 victory, it looked like Wright was keeping Crosby away from backup quarterback Tyson Bagent with the use of only his right arm.

Wright dealt with a left shoulder injury all last week in practice, and coach Matt Eberflus said he pushed through pain to help a Bears offensive line that paved the way for 173 rushing yards and allowed just one sack of Bagent. Eberflus commended Wright “for gutting it through,” even if it didn’t look pretty at times.

“To do that against arguably one of the best edge rushers in the league, he’s a dog,” offensive tackle Larry Borom said. “Everyone knew he was dealing with something. But for him to gut through it for the team, that speaks everything.”

Wright’s status this week is worth monitoring closely as the Bears prepare to face the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday night at SoFi Stadium. Khalil Mack and Joey Bosa will be trying to get after Bagent, who is expected to make his second start in place of Fields.

Wright was present for practice Wednesday at Halas Hall but didn’t participate as he recovers from the shoulder injury and a new issue with his toe. The Bears have designated left tackle Braxton Jones to return from injured reserve after he was sidelined five weeks with a neck injury.

They also have Borom, who filled in for Jones and could take over for Wright at right tackle if needed. Ja’Tyre Carter is another option at tackle. Offensive coordinator Luke Getsy said they’ve “explored a bunch of different options” with the positions in flux.

Eberflus said the Bears will measure Wright’s “functionality” and strength in practice to see if they’re up to par for Sunday. If Wright is healthy enough to play, Mack would be the latest in a series of good pass rushers the rookie has faced. If he isn’t, he’ll miss the continuation of growth opportunities from his first two months in the NFL.

Those challenges have taught the 6-foot-6, 333-pound Wright plenty about what he has to learn — and who he wants to be as a player.

“The main thing I’ve learned is the room for error is a lot smaller,” Wright told the Tribune earlier this month. “You can still get away with some things, but it’s a lot, lot less than previously. And there’s a long way for me to go to be what I see myself as being.

“It would have been weird if I came in and was just as good as anyone. I don’t think I would want it that way. I mean, it would be cool, but it would be kind of weird.”

A ‘vast’ difference

Of all the players Wright has tried to stop this season, from Shaq Barrett to Danielle Hunter to Crosby, the one he said gave him the most eye-opening welcome to the NFL was Chris Jones in the 41-10 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.

On third-and-6 in the first quarter with the Bears at the Chiefs 36-yard line, Wright found himself against Jones one on one. Jones slid by Wright on the outside and took down Fields for an 8-yard loss, forcing the Bears to punt.

“I realized the difference in how good some players can be. Like the difference between me and him is so vast,” Wright said. “After that game, I realized, OK, when I can get to the day when I can block someone like him easily and not need any help or not need any type of special treatment … that’s when I was like, OK, now I have a clear goal — to be that good.”

The Bears have seen a lot of promise from Wright, the No. 10 draft pick out of Tennessee.

Offensive line coach Chris Morgan said Wright has been “everything that we thought he would be” when they were scouting him: smart, big, strong and driven.

Wright’s natural gifts start with a rare combination of movement skills and size, according to Borom and guard Teven Jenkins, who called him “one of the most athletic tackles I’ve been around.”

“It hurts me to say because I want to be that athletic tackle too,” Jenkins said.

The most impressive thing he does?

“It’s got to be the way he pulls,” Jenkins said.” He comes around the edge and still has that same speed, doesn’t slow down and is still able to actually block his defender. You can see his recovery ability on pass (protection). … I’ve never seen someone his size get the whole spin — come back around, spin and pick up his block again. It’s crazy.”

But Wright also has had a lot of learning moments like the one against Jones as he tries to develop consistency.

Wright has given up five sacks this year, according to Pro Football Focus, and he also has five penalties, including three false starts.

After the 19-13 loss to the Minnesota Vikings in Week 6 — a rough day for the Bears offensive line — Getsy noted two of Wright’s mistakes.

Getsy said Wright didn’t finish a block on Hunter during a Fields scramble that resulted in Fields’ thumb injury. And earlier in the game, a Wright mistake contributed to a Fields interception. The rookie didn’t execute the call from the center and picked up safety Josh Metellus on the outside, leaving running back D’Onta Foreman inside to block Hunter, who pressured Fields.

Jenkins said such mistakes are part of the process for a rookie offensive lineman.

“Just don’t be afraid to make mistakes,” Jenkins said. “My first game, when I came in on ‘Sunday Night Football’ (in 2021 against the Green Bay Packers), I gave up two strip-sacks to Preston Smith. Those things will happen. I had to go learn from them and grow from them. And I did. Hopefully he gets those lessons.”

For Wright, the lessons are a continuation of growth that really took off a couple of years ago in college.

Figuring it out

In 2020-21, amid a snowball of distressing circumstances at Tennessee, Wright wasn’t sure if football was the path for him.

The COVID-19 pandemic altered his college experience at the end of his freshman year in the spring of 2020. The Volunteers returned to play 10 games in the fall, but they went 3-7, became the subject of an NCAA investigation for recruiting violations and fired the coaching staff by January 2021.

“Just my first experience, thinking I’m going to be in college and I’m going to have this good career and then we start out with all of that, I’m like (a teenager) at the time,” Wright said. “It was at that point I was thinking maybe football is probably not the thing. Just because things weren’t going that well. I wasn’t playing great and also with what was going on with the team.”

But as Wright settled in with a new coaching staff, led by head coach Josh Heupel and offensive line coach Glen Elarbee, he began to regain confidence in himself and his path.

Fewer distractions also allowed him to grow in his knowledge of the game. Heupel said in the spring that Wright went from being a “very young football player” in his fundamentals and football IQ to a dominant player who made first-team All-SEC as a senior.

“I feel like I gained a little bit of my confidence back, or at least a little bit of, ‘Yeah, this is my thing,’” Wright said. “Just getting that fresh start, a little reset my junior year. And then somewhere around my senior year was when Coach Heupel sat me down and was telling me, ‘Yeah, you could probably play at a high level. You just have to stay consistent and get better.’”

Now, with another reset in his career, Wright is looking for that improvement at the next level.

One of his favorite plays this season wasn’t one of those splashy viral run-blocking clips, such as when he bowled over Washington Commanders cornerback Emmanuel Forbes Jr.: “He’s a smaller guy, so that’s expected to happen.”

It was during the Denver Broncos game when Wright got the offensive line into the right call and “didn’t have to rely on them telling me what to do.”

“I was fending for myself and helping out the team,” he said, “instead of just being somebody that has to get the call from someone.”

When Getsy was asked about Wright’s growth, he pointed to Wright “figuring out his game, figuring out the system, figuring out how to play next to somebody.”

Morgan said the questions Wright asks and feedback he provides are different than they were three months ago, when he was just beginning training camp. Morgan cited improvement in what Wright looks at presnap and his understanding of how he can better break down an opponent and how an opponent is breaking him down.

Jenkins said he has seen a more vocal Wright as he settles into his new home.

“Sometimes he was hesitant to ask the question, and now you can see him asking the question and he’s getting more involved,” Jenkins said. “He’s not afraid to speak up in meetings. He’s getting out of his shell for sure.”

‘This guy likes football’

Wright has seen the talk on social media. He knows the comparisons are bound to be made, given the circumstances.

Jalen Carter, at one point projected to be the first defensive player selected in this year’s draft, dropped to No. 9 amid character concerns stemming in part from his pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of reckless driving and racing in connection with a fatal crash in January.

The Bears owned the No. 9 pick, but they opted not to draft Carter. General manager Ryan Poles traded back one spot in exchange for a 2024 fourth-round pick from the Philadelphia Eagles, a more veteran team perhaps better equipped to help a young player such as Carter grow. The Bears took Wright at No. 10.

Carter has had early success with the Eagles, totaling 3 1/2 sacks, two forced fumbles, five quarterback hits and 13 tackles. If that success grows, some Bears observers are bound to ask “What if?” — even if the Bears had good reason to pick Wright over Carter.

But that won’t bother Wright, who trained with Carter before the draft.

“He’s a great player,” Wright said. “You couldn’t have gone wrong with picking him. … I’ll never talk bad about somebody.”

Wright is more focused on his own path, overseen by Morgan.

When the Bears drafted Wright, they told of the predraft workout Morgan conducted with him. It was a grueling physical and mental test that helped convince Poles that Wright would be a good addition to an offensive line in need.

Wright said his relationship with Morgan worked off the bat because they were honest with each other.

“You might get in the draft process and a coach may say, ‘I do this and I do that.’ But they may be exaggerating this or making it sound good,” Wright said. “Me and him were just brutally honest, like, ‘This is what I am.’

“If we’re honest with each other and we put our best foot forward, it’s going to work. We both just want to be great. Everything is in front of us right now — me as a player, him as a coach coaching me.”

Morgan appreciates Wright’s uncomplicated drive to get better.

“There’s not a bunch of other stuff with this guy,” he said. “This guy likes football.”

As Wright comes to understand what it takes to play at this level, he has kept his goals simple: improve every year and stay healthy.

The former requires the latter, even if he was able to gut through the Raiders game. So his health status this week and beyond will be big for the Bears and the rookie.

“As long as I’m getting better every year and staying healthy,” Wright said, “I know that will be a good outcome.”

()