Congrats to Team Alcaraz for winning the Australian Open.
He lost the first set against a sharp Djokovic, but then found his footing and did not look back.
Final score 2-6, 6-2, 6-3, 7-5.
Alcaraz has commemorated previous major wins with small tattoos—
a strawberry🍓for Wimbledon,
the Eiffel Tower 🗼for the French Open,
the date of his first U.S. Open title 🇺🇸,
and after his second U.S. Open title in New York, the Statue of Liberty 🗽 and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Word is that he will now add a kangaroo tattoo 🦘 om his leg for Australia.
Post on X from German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Happy Friday.
It’s finals weekend at the 2026 Australian Open.
World No 1 Carlos Alcaraz (22, 🇪🇸) survived his marathon 5½ hour 5-setter semifinal match against Alexander Zverev (28, 🇩🇪) 6-4, 7-6 (7-5), 6-7 (3-7), 6-7 (4-7), 7-5.
He will meet Novak Djokovic (38, 🇷🇸) in the final.
Djokovic was not supposed to beat world No 2 Jannik Sinner (24, 🇮🇹) in the semis, but he did: 3-6, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4.
In the women’s final Aryna Sabalenka (27) will meet Elena Rybakina (26, 🇰🇿).
P.S. There are AI-animated versions of the matches posted on espn.com in addition to the real ones. Why? Just for fun, I guess. Alcaraz is in green.
The animated players play with an oversized tennis ball. The AI engine is still a work-in-progress when it comes to the finer detail, though— such as showing the hands of the players gripping the racquets.
Sam Darnold threw three touchdown passes, and the Seattle Seahawks outlasted the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 in a thrilling NFC (National Football Conference) Championship Game on Sunday to advance to the Super Bowl for the first time since the 2014 season.
They will face the New England Patriots on Feb. 8 in a rematch of Super Bowl XLIX.
– Nate Atkins and Michael-Shawn Dugar reporting in The Athletic in the New York Times
That’s Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold, speaking into the microphone. Darnold has been with the Seattle Seahawks only since March 2025. He signed a multi-year contract after his strong 2024 season with the Minnesota Vikings. To the right of Darnold, his face hidden somewhat behind his clapping hands, is Seahawks head coach Mike McDonald (age 38), himself hired just the year before in January 2024. In just two seasons, Macdonald took a 9-8, middling team to 14 regular season wins and a Super Bowl berth. [Headline from the Seattle Times. Photo by Nick Wagner/ Seattle Times]
Happy Friday.
It is a major sports weekend for Seattle— the Seahawks face the Los Angeles Rams this Sunday for the NFC Championship and a spot in Super Bowl LX.
I spent a lot of time this week sorting the hundreds of loose stamps I had bought in Tokyo, by year. Here are some ones with nice postmarks and a sports theme.
International Table Tennis Championships, Tokyo Issued by Japan Post, Apr. 2, 1956 Perf. 13¼ x 13½ |Litho. |National Printing Bureau 618 A369 |10 yen |red-brown |Table tennis players Postmarked 31.4.5 which means 1956 April 5. The 31 refers to the 31st year of Emperor Hirohito’s reign (1925 + 31 = 1956). Softball at 33rd National Athletic Meet, Nagano Prefecture Issued by Japan Post, Oct. 14, 1978 Perf. 12¾ x 13 |Litho. |National Printing Bureau 1348 A938 |20 yen |multi-colored |Softball Players and Mt Yari Postmarked 59.7.3 (let’s say) which means 1984 July 3. The 59 refers to the 59th year of Emperor Hirohito’s reign (1925 + 59 = 1984). Badminton at 36th National Athletic Meet, Nagano Prefecture Issued by Japan Post, Oct. 13, 1981 Perf. 12¾ x 13 |Litho. |National Printing Bureau 1485 A1064 | 40 yen |multi-colored |Badminton player and Lake Biwa Postmarked 86.2.6 8-12 which means 1986 Feb. 6 8am-12 noon The 86 now refers to the Gregorian calendar year 1986. Handball at 40th National Athletic Meet, Tottori City Sports Arena Issued by Japan Post, Oct. 19, 1985 1665 A1233 | 40 yen |multi-colored |Handball Player and Mt Daisen Postmarked 89.6.21 12-18 which means 1989 Jun.21 12 noon- 6pm (Chofu is a city in Tokyo prefecture) The 89 now refers to the Gregorian calendar year 1989. [Sources: 2021 Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue Vol. 4A, stampworld.com]
Here is a summary of posts on X (generated by Grok):
Roger Federer stole the show at the Australian Open’s opening. The 44-year-old retired legend teamed with Andre Agassi and Ash Barty for a record-breaking exhibition doubles match against Lleyton Hewitt and Pat Rafter on Saturday night. Federer dazzled with elegant shots, recreated his iconic ball kid catch alongside now-grown Dylan Alcott, and shared a warm embrace with Novak Djokovic courtside while his four kids watched from the stands. The night ended with fireworks and a heartfelt tribute, setting a nostalgic tone as the main Australian Open draw begins January 18 with Jannik Sinner as favorite and Djokovic eyeing an 11th title.
Here is Carlos Alcaraz (22, 🇪🇸) hitting a ‘tweener’ (a between-the-legs shot) against Adam Walton (26, 🇦🇺) on his way to a 6-3 7-6 6-2 victory. Alcaraz split with his coach of 7 years (Juan Carlos Ferrero) in December. If Alcaraz pulls off a win at this Australian Open in spite of that, he will become the youngest man to complete a Career Grand Slam*. (Don Budge from the USA was 22 years, 357 days when he won the 1938 French Championships to complete his Career Grand Slam). *Winning the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. [Still image from highlights of the match at ausopen.com]
The Seahawks are through to the NFC (National Football Conference) Championship game and are now one just win away from playing in the Super Bowl.
Matt Barrows, Michael-Shawn Dugar and Vic Tafur writes for The Athletic in the New York Times:
The Seattle Seahawks hadn’t hosted a playoff game in front of their fans in nearly a decade. It took them only a few seconds Saturday night to give the roaring 12s something to celebrate.
Rashid Shaheed returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, and top-seeded Seattle never let up, routing the sixth-seeded San Francisco 49ers 41-6 in an NFC divisional-round game. The Seahawks will host the winner of Sunday’s matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears in the NFC Championship Game next Sunday. Seattle hasn’t been in a conference title game since advancing to back-to-back Super Bowls in the 2013 and 2014 seasons.
Headline and picture posted on nytimes.com/athletic
There was more rain today (another inch or so).
I ventured outside with my umbrella before the gray outside tuned into black.
Here’s Republican Street and 15th Avenue East on Capitol Hill. The holiday lights on the trees are on already, to bring a little cheer to the gray outside.Looking down Thomas Street at 12th Avenue. The red beacon light is already blinking on the Space Needle’s flag post .. and is that an S on the flag? I wondered.And here’s the answer: yes, it’s an S for Seattle Torrent, the name for Seattle’s new women’s ice hockey team. They will play in Climate Pledge Arena. The eight teams in the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) are the Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Montréal Victoire, New York Sirens, Ottawa Charge, Seattle Torrent, Toronto Sceptres, and Vancouver Goldeneyes. [Picture posted on Space Needle’s Instagram, but without any names]
It was not to be— the Seattle Mariners playing in the World Series.
They lost 3-4 in Game 7 tonight against the Blue Jays, in the deciding game in the American League Championship Series (ALCS).
The Toronto Blue Jays will now take on the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.
Beautiful fall foliage surrounds the playfields at Miller Community Center on 19th Avenue East on Capitol Hill.
Happy Friday.
The new pickleball court facility called Sideout Tsunami Center is open for business (but the official grand opening will be in November).
This weekend, the center is hosting the finals of the National Pickleball League team competition in the “Champions Pro” division for players aged 50 and above.
I stopped by this afternoon to check out the new courts and the action there.
P.S. A win for the Mariners in Game 5!
From the Seattle Times:
Cal Raleigh and Eugenio Suárez delivered eighth-inning homers to send the Mariners to within a win of the World Series, and send T-Mobile Park into a frenzy.
A little pro shop tucked into the corner by the entrance. The facility is at 2300 26th Avenue S in Seattle, in a non-descript building (a former Pepsi bottling plant) with a large, newly-paved parking lot outside.Twelve teams from all over the USA compete for gold, silver and bronze medals. Look for the logos of the Indy Drivers, the Austin Ignite, the Kansas City Stingers, the Boca Surge, the Naples JBB United, the Princeton Bruisers, the Denver Iconics, the Houston Hammers, the Seattle Tsunami, the Coachella Valley Scorpions, the Columbus Hotshots and the OKC Punishers.A first look at the courts. There are no pavilions or bleacher seats in the spaces between the courts. Maybe some will be added later for one or two show courts.Three mixed doubles pairs make up a team. Here is the No 1 team for Austin Ignite (left) facing off against the No 1 team of Coachella Valley Scorpions. It’s best out of three sets, first to 11 by one point. Coachella Valley Scorpions won this match.Pickleball in the Pacific Northwest. (The whale is a humpback whale.)
Game on, and on to Game 4.
The Toronto Blue Jays rocked George Kirby and the Mariners, 13-4, in Game 3 on Wednesday night, silencing a sold-out Seattle crowd and climbing back into this best-of-seven American League Championship Series in emphatic fashion.
– Adam Jude, Seattle Times staff reporter
Tim Booth, Seattle Times staff reporter, concludes his analysis
“ALCS: Three impressions as Mariners take 2-0 lead vs. Blue Jays” as follows (this series is best of 7 games): .. but general playoff history, momentum, belief, maybe a weird witch-induced aura are all on the side of the Mariners. The opportunity is there for Wednesday night to be one of the most important games in the history of T-Mobile Park.
Win and put a stranglehold on the series.
Lose and the Blue Jays are right back in it.
A guy takes his dog for a walk on Capitol Hill’s East Republican Street (dog jacket with a Halloween pumpkin design 🎃 ). It was clear and felt downright cold to me here— 6.00 pm (and 53°F/ 12°C) with 24 mins to go to sunset. It will be clear and cold here in the city through Thursday (‘cold’, because I’m not yet used to October’s normal highs of only 58°F/ 14°C or so).
It’s almost go time for Game 5.
Below is a ticket from the Mariners game against the Texas Rangers that I had attended wa-ay back in 2004. 🤗
10.30 pm:
They made it!
At the bottom of the 15th inning the score was still 2-2. Jorge Polanco delivered the walk-off* on a sharp groundball to right field to score J.P. Crawford and end the winner-take-all game 3-2 against the Tigers.
*A walk-off in baseball is a play where the home team scores the winning run in the bottom of the final inning, which immediately ends the game. The term walk-off comes from the fact that the visiting team “walks off” the field, as they have no more opportunities to bat.
What happens next?
From espn.com: Starting Sunday in Toronto, the No. 2 seed Seattle Mariners and No. 1 seed Toronto Blue Jays will clash with a trip to the World Series on the line. Seattle outlasted the Detroit Tigers in a thrilling ALDS Game 5 on Friday night, two days after Toronto dispatched the AL East rival New York Yankees to get to the ALCS.
I believe the Mariners batter pictured on the ticket is Bret Boone. The Seattle Mariners 2004 season was not a happy one. It was their 28th, and they finished last in the American League West at 63–99 (63 games won and 99 lost). P.S. Two days before, on October 1, Ichiro Suzuki set a new major league record for hits, breaking George Sisler’s 84-year-old mark with a pair of early singles. Fans in downtown Tokyo watched Suzuki in sports bars and on big-screen monitors. [Source: Wikipedia]
The Mariners crashed to a 3-9 defeat in Game 4 today in Detroit.
Game 5— the deciding game— will start at 5:08 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday night in Seattle.
A picture is from yesterday. The leaves have turned golden on the trees lining Martin Luther King Jr Way in Central District.
There was a rain delay to the start of the game in Detroit.
Once the game started, though, the Mariners were the first to put several runs on the board. They held off a late attempt by the Tigers to come back in the 9th inning.
A summary of the match generated by Chat GPT.Seattle Mariners’ Randy Arozarena is tagged out at first in Game 3 of the ALDS Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025 in Detroit. [Photo by Dean Rutz / The Seattle Times, caption from The Seattle Times]
Just a small town girl Livin’ in a lonely world She took the midnight train going anywhere Just a city boy Born and raised in South Detroit He took the midnight train going anywhere
A singer in a smokey room A smell of wine and cheap perfume For a smile they can share the night It goes on and on and on and on
Strangers waitin’ Up and down the boulevard Their shadows searchin’ in the night Streetlights, people
Livin’ just to find emotion Hidin’ somewhere in the night Workin’ hard to get my fill Everybody wants a thrill Payin’ anything to roll the dice Just one more time
Some’ll win, some will lose Some are born to sing the blues Whoa, the movie never ends It goes on and on and on and on
Strangers waiting Up and down the boulevard Their shadows searching in the night Streetlights, people Livin’ just to find emotion Hidin’, somewhere in the night
Don’t stop believin’ Hold on to that feeling Streetlights, people
Don’t stop believin’ Hold on Streetlights, people
Don’t stop believin’ Hold on to that feeling Streetlights, people
– Lyrics from Don’t Stop Believin’, a song by Journey from their album Escape (1981)
Go Mariners!
The Mariners* are in Detroit for the third and fourth games (Tuesday night & Wednesday night) in the playoff series against the Detroit Tigers.
The Mariners and Tigers are drawn 1-1 in the series.
*Baseball team from Seattle that competes in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member of the American League (AL) West Division.
“The M’s,” named for Seattle’s nautical heritage, have never won a World Series. They have won the AL West Division four times and appeared in the playoffs in 2000, 2022, and now this year, 2025.
A sunset picture from last night (sunset now at 6.40 pm), from where I was standing at East Mercer St & 13th Ave East. That’s the Mariners flag on the Space Needle. The graffiti on the ‘Stop Sign Ahead’ sign reads “Don’t Stop Believin’ “, likely a reference to the 1981 classic pop song with the same title, from Journey.
I should have stayed on in Tokyo for another week so that I could catch some of the action at the Japan Open ATP 500 men’s tennis tournament there.
World No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz (🇪🇸, 22) made his debut in Japan there, today.
He scared everybody with an ankle injury in the first set of his match, but recovered to beat Argentinian Sebastian Baez (🇦🇷, 24) by 6-4, 6-2 in the second round.
Here is my picture from last Friday on the elevated Yurikamome Line. The structures on the left of the track are in Ariake Tennis no Mori Park with its center court Ariake Coliseum.
The tennis park opened in 1983 with 32 hard courts. It was extensively renovated to serve as the tennis venue for the 2020 Summer Olympics and today houses a total of 49 tennis courts (33 hard courts and 16 artificial grass courts with sand infill). Look for the elevated Yurikamome Line on the left of the picture. The Ariake Tennis no Mori Park train station is towards the top right of the picture. [Graphic from Olympic and Paralympic Games TOKYO2020 website]Here’s Carlos at the start of his match against Sebastian Baez— his buzz cut from the US Open now grown out a little (and bleached silver, not blond, he says). Carlos is doing a Japanese bow as he greets the representative from Kinoshita Group (I couldn’t get his name). The man in the middle is the umpire of the match, Fergus Murphy from Dublin, Ireland. [Still from TennisTV coverage of the match]
From the New York Post by reporters Chris Harris, Bridget Reilly, Anna Young and Shane Galvin:
The “entitled” jerk who seemingly snatched a hat autographed by tennis star Kamil Majchrzak from a young boy at the US Open has been identified as a Polish millionaire. (My note: I edited out his name).
Majchrzak, fresh off his victory over ninth seed Karen Khachanov when the incident unfolded Thursday night, confirmed his identity to The Post on Saturday and said he was initially oblivious to the now-viral snafu.
“Obviously it was some kind of confusion,” the tennis pro said, adding that the millionaire sponsors his tennis federation in Poland.
Happy Friday.
It’s Labor Day weekend here in the United States— the unofficial end of summer.
There was plenty of action on Day 6 of the US Open. Ben Stiller and Steve Carell were seen in the stands today.
Coqodaq is an upscale NYC restaurant that serves Korean-style fried chicken and champagne from a location in the lower bowl concourse of Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Reportedly one of the most sought-after food items at this year’s Open, is their chicken nuggets garnished with caviar ($100).
Here is the Carlos Alcaraz 2025 US Open look: a buzz cut, a pink tank top and plum shorts and shoes. He is through to the Sweet Sixteen without dropping a set, so far. P.S. Medvedev was fined $42,000 for his conduct in his first-round match on Sunday. (Should it not have been a much bigger fine?) [Live update reporting from The Athletic/ The New York Times, photo by Getty Images]
On day one of the 2025 tournament, 2021 champion Daniil Medvedev provided a signal example by inciting the crowd to delay his match against France’s Benjamin Bonzi for six minutes — while he was down match point. A photographer walked onto the court between Bonzi’s first and second serves. Umpire Greg Allensworth ruled that Bonzi should get a first serve. Irate, Medvedev approached Allensworth’s chair, whipping up the crowd to boo and chant. After berating Allensworth, Medvedev returned to the baseline. Bonzi got ready to serve. The crowd didn’t stop.
– Matthew Futterman writing for The Athletic in the New York Times, saying that the Medvedev incident is a signal example of the complete absence of tennis etiquette at the US Open
What also happened— after Medvedev had lost the first-round match against Bonzi in five sets on Sunday— is that he smashed his racket on the court and against the bench that he sat on. Still enraged and not satisfied with the damage to it, he went on and smashed the broken frame for a few minutes more, to smithereens.
By the way: Medvedev was fined AUD 76,000 ($49,000) in this year’s Australian Open for smashing a tennis net camera in the first round, and for unsportsmanlike conduct in the second round.
Medvedev getting the crowd riled up at the end of the third set, tennis racket still intact. At the post-match press conference, Medvedev refused to speak about his outburst against the umpire, his taunting of the booing fans, and destroying his racket. He said “I’m getting a big enough fine. So if I speak I’m in big trouble, so I’m not going to speak”. [Picture posted on The Athletic/ The New York Times]
