Injured Alex Cobb dropped from Guardians' ALCS roster, replaced by Ben Lively

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Injured Alex Cobb dropped from Guardians' ALCS roster, replaced by Ben Lively

2024-10-16 13:22 Last Updated At：13:30

NEW YORK (AP) — Pitcher Alex Cobb was dropped from Cleveland's American League Championship Series roster on Tuesday after he got hurt yet again in the opener, leaving the Guardians in search of a Game 5 starter against the New York Yankees.

“It’s been a challenging year. Timing of this one coming in the postseason makes it extra difficult," Cobb said. "It’s a moment I’ve been waiting for my whole career and to not be able to contribute — to put the team in a hole yesterday was challenging.”

Cobb left Monday's 5-2 loss after 2 2/3 innings. The 37-year-old right-hander is ineligible to pitch for the remainder of the postseason.

“He was diagnosed with a lower back strain,” manager Stephen Vogt said before Cleveland dropped to 0-2 in the best-of-seven series on Wednesday with a 6-3 loss. “This type of injury would be a full blown IL stint, and with the timing of the year, the chances of him pitching again were very, very, very slim.”

Cobb was replaced on the roster by Ben Lively, a 32-year-old right-hander who was Cleveland’s winningest pitcher this season at 13-10 with a 3.81 ERA in 29 starts.

“We don’t know what we’re going to have,” Vogt said. “Alex was going to start Game 5. Now we have to figure out today knowing that we have six more games to cover.”

Lively and left-hander Gavin Williams are candidates to start Game 3 on Thursday in Cleveland.

Cobb pitched just 22 innings over five games this year, including the regular season and playoffs.

A 2023 All-Star, Cobb had hip surgery on Oct. 31 and hadn’t yet returned to the mound when he was acquired by Cleveland from San Francisco at the July 30 trade deadline.

He made his season debut Aug. 9 and was sidelined after two games by a torn nail on his right index finger. He didn’t allow an earned run over six innings in his Sept. 1 return against Pittsburgh, then went back on the injured list with a blister on his right middle finger that ended his regular season.

Cobb went 0-2 with a 7.94 ERA in the playoffs. He received a $10 million salary this year under a club option that was exercised and can become a free agent after the World Series.

Lively last pitched Sept. 28 against Houston on the next-to-last day of the regular season.

“I’m just staying on the same workout program as I was when I was starting: workout day, heavy bullpen day mixed in between and just try to stay built up,” Lively said.

He has faced the Yankees once, on May 19 last year for Cincinnati, when he allowed a home run to Aaron Judge in the first inning and issued a sixth-inning walk to Judge, who scored on Anthony Rizzo's homer off reliever Ian Gibaut in a 6-2 New York win.

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Death toll in attack on Christmas market in Germany rises to 5 and more than 200 injured

2024-12-21 20:17 Last Updated At：20:21

MAGDEBURG, Germany (AP) — Germans on Saturday mourned both the victims and their shaken sense of security after a Saudi doctor intentionally drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers, killing at least five people, including a small child, and wounding at least 200 others.

Authorities arrested a 50-year-old man at the site of the attack in Magdeburg on Friday evening and took him into custody for questioning. He has lived in Germany since 2006, practicing medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Magdeburg. officials said.

The state governor, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters that the death toll rose to five from a previous figure of two and that more than 200 people in total were injured.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that nearly 40 of them "are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”

Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Mourners lit candles and placed flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and gloomy day. Several people stopped and cried. A Berlin church choir whose members witnessed a previous Christmas market attack in 2016 sang Amazing Grace, a hymn about God's mercy, offering their prayers and solidarity with the victims.

There were still no answers Saturday as to what motivated the man to drive his black BMW into a crowd in the eastern German city.

Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who left the faith.

He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he said was the “Islamism of Europe.” Some described him as an activist who helped Saudi women flee their homeland. He has also voiced support for the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Haseloff said Friday that authorities believed the man acted alone.

The violence shocked Germany and the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that’s part of a centuries-old German tradition. It prompted several other German towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg’s loss. Berlin kept its markets open but has increased its police presence at them.

Germany has suffered a string of extremist attacks in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen in August.

Magdeburg is a city of about 240,000 people, west of Berlin, that serves as Saxony-Anhalt’s capital. Friday’s attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg on Saturday, and a memorial service is to take place in the city cathedral in the evening. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings across the country.

Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency dpa showed the suspect’s arrest at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone, his head arched up slightly. Other officers swarmed around the suspect and took him into custody.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is located in a mall across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs and thought at first they were fireworks. She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.

Shaking as she described the horror of what she witnessed, she recalled seeing the car bursting out of the market and turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee street and then coming to a standstill at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.

The number of injured people was overwhelming.

“My husband and I helped them for two hours. He ran back home and grabbed as many blankets as he could find because they didn’t have enough to cover the injured people. And it was so cold," she said.

The market itself was still cordoned off Saturday with red-and-white tape and police vans every 50 meters (yards). Police with machine pistols guarded every entry to the market. Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.

Christmas markets are a German holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages, now successfully exported to much of the Western world.

Aboubakr reported from Cairo and Gera from Warsaw, Poland. Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin.