Beltré honored by Rangers for his Hall of Fame induction that he's still trying to soak in

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Beltré honored by Rangers for his Hall of Fame induction that he's still trying to soak in

2024-08-18 04:58 Last Updated At：05:00

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Adrián Beltré still hasn’t had an opportunity to just stop and really let it soak in that he is enshrined in baseball's Hall of Fame.

“I understand, and I know what that weekend was,” Beltré said. “But I’d be lying to you if I said that I have ... It just hasn’t.”

Maybe after being recognized again by the Texas Rangers, the last team in his 21 big league seasons and the one the third baseman played with the longest.

Four weeks after his induction in Cooperstown, the Rangers honored Beltré with a series of events, including a ceremony before their game against Minnesota on Saturday night, when his actual Hall of Fame plaque was on display in the ballpark.

“This was my last thing on the calendar, this weekend,” Beltré said. “After that, go home and be a dad and a husband again, and try to figure out when we can find a space for a little vacation. Because I need to just lay down on the beach a little bit.”

On his way from California to Cooperstown last month, Beltré stopped in Texas for several days while serving as an ambassador for MLB’s All-Star Game hosted by his former team.

Beltré managed the American League team in the Futures Game, appeared with Commissioner Rob Manfred at MLB’s amateur draft and then at the All-Star Game, five days before his own induction, he was part of the first-pitch ceremony with a trio of other former Rangers who were already in the Hall of Fame: pitchers Fergie Jenkins and Nolan Ryan, and catcher Iván Rodríguez.

While the Hall of Fame festivities were surreal and a bit of a blur for Beltré, he said special moments from that weekend included having his family there and conversations with a couple of Hall of Famers that he had always looked up to: Dominican pitcher and fellow countryman Juan Marichal and third baseman Mike Schmidt.

Beltré described the 86-year-old Marichal as “being the pinnacle of baseball in my country, the first Hall of Famer that we had.”

He had a picture taken with other Hall of Fame third basemen Schmidt, George Brett, Chipper Jones and Scott Rolen.

After leaving Cooperstown and spending a couple of nights in New York City, Beltré went home and got so busy with his three kids, two of them in college along with a teenage daughter, that they ended up not going on a planned vacation to Hawaii.

This weekend in Texas began with him as the featured guest at the team's annual Hall of Fame luncheon on Friday. The Rangers then unveiled two public display cases filled with memorabilia from his eight seasons with team, including his 3,000th career hit, his 400th homer and even a dirt-stained jersey he wore 12 years ago during the second of his three career cycles.

"Special player, special talent," said Josh Jung, the current Rangers third baseman.

“You knew it was a special career going on in front of you as you were watching it," said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, a big league player from 2003-10. “It wasn’t one of those, I wonder if this guy’s a special player or a unique guy in the clubhouse or a leader, anything like that. You just knew.”

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Stock market today: Wall Street shakes off a morning wipeout to end higher

2024-09-12 04:06 Last Updated At：04:10

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stock indexes stormed back from big early drops to finish higher, led by a handful of highly influential Big Tech companies. The S&P 500 gained 1.1% Wednesday after erasing a morning wipeout of 1.6%. A majority of the index’s stocks still finished lower for the day, but gains for Nvidia and other tech stocks were enough to drive it to a third straight gain and back within 2% of its all-time high set in July. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 124 points, or 0.3%, after rallying back from a drop of 743 points. The Nasdaq composite jumped 2.2%.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

NEW YORK (AP) — Most U.S. stocks are falling Wednesday as traders scale back their expectations for how much relief the Federal Reserve will deliver next week when it begins cutting interest rates.

Seven out of every 10 stocks were sinking within the S&P 500, but the index was nevertheless 0.4% higher in afternoon trading after erasing a sharp slide from earlier in the morning. The gain was due almost entirely to the performance of just one highly influential stock: Nvidia.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 76 points, or 0.2%, as of 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, after erasing almost all of an earlier drop of 743 points. The Nasdaq composite, meanwhile, was up 1.4% thanks to Nvidia and a handful of other Big Tech stocks.

The sharp see-saw trading, where the Nasdaq composite roared back from an earlier 1.4% slide, followed the government's latest update on inflation at the consumer level, which came in close to expectations. Overall inflation slowed to 2.5% in August from 2.9% in July, a touch better than expected. But prices rose more than expected from July into August when ignoring food and energy, and economists say that can be a better predictor of where inflation is heading.

All together, the data seemed to confirm that the Fed will indeed cut its main interest rate at its meeting next week, which would be the first such cut in more than four years. But it bolstered expectations that the Fed will begin with only a traditional-sized move of a quarter of a percentage point instead of the more severe half-point that some had been expecting.

“This isn’t the CPI report the market wanted to see,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management.

Investors have a long history of being overly optimistic about how much and when the Fed will cut interest rates, only to send stock prices lower after being confronted with reality. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can goose the economy by making it cheaper for U.S. companies and households to borrow. Cuts also give boosts to investment prices.

The downside of lower rates is that they can give inflation more fuel.

“We believe the market is pricing in more rate cuts than what will occur this year,” said Gargi Chaudhuri, chief investment and portfolio strategist, Americas at BlackRock.

This time, the Fed at least has already indicated it’s about to begin lowering interest rates as it shifts from fighting high inflation toward protecting the job market and keeping the economy out of a recession. With inflation down from its peak of 9.1% two summers ago, the Fed is hoping to ease the brakes off the already slowing economy.

A worry on Wall Street is that the cuts may prove to be too late, with many U.S. shoppers already struggling under the weight of high prices and stretched ability to spend more.

Vera Bradley’s stock dropped 5.9% after the designer of handbags and the parent company of the Pura Vida brand reported weaker profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It pointed to “stubbornly persistent macro consumer headwinds.”

Elsewhere on Wall Street, Trump Media & Technology Group sank 11.3% to worsen its rough run since March. The company behind former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform has often risen and fallen with expectations for Trump’s re-election chances, and he’s coming off a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since closing above $66 in early March, the stock has tumbled to $16.53. That affects Trump particularly because he is the company’s largest shareholder.

On the winning side of the U.S. stock market were solar-energy companies, which are seen as doing better under a Democratic White House than a Republican one. First Solar jumped 14.4%.

Big Tech also once again lifted the market. A handful of these behemoths have pulled away from the rest of the stock market, accounting for most of the S&P 500's return through the early part of this year, in large part on hopes about profits coming from the artificial-intelligence boom.

They faltered during the summer on worries that investors had carried the stock prices too high, including a 27% drop for Nvidia at one point, but they've been firming in the last couple weeks.

Beside the 6.8% rise for Nvidia, gains of 1.5% for Amazon and 1.5% for Microsoft were also big forces lifting the S&P 500. Because these companies are among Wall Street's largest by market value, their movements pack more punch on the index than almost every other stock.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 3.66% from 3.64% late Tuesday. The two-year yield, which more closely follows expectations for Fed action, rose more, to 3.65% from 3.59%.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across much of Europe and Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.5% after a Japanese central bank official was quoted by Japanese media as indicating the Bank of Japan was getting ready to raise interest rates. The comments also pushed the value of the Japanese yen higher against the U.S. dollar, a move that earlier in the summer helped send financial markets around the world reeling.

AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.