The games, the results, and what they cost.
Saturday, October 3, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Saturday, October 3, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

French club Asvel faces player registration ban while seven Mexican players participate in MLB Playoffs and UConn tops Big East women's preseason poll.

Sports World in Full Swing · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-10-03 00:15Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sunny day at a packed stadium with a baseball game in progress, players from different teams and countries interacting on the field, while a group of young athletes practice in the foreground, and a cityscape with stadiums and arenas rises in the background under a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A sunny day at a packed stadium with a baseball game in progress, players from different teams and countries interacting on the field, while a group of young athletes practice in the foreground, and a cityscape with stadiums and arenas rises in the background under a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

ee493a1f76de7974bb1516f1f05688e4bcc8a86c8085e0d8f8d055987c2672f5
The NFL
Mourners gather after fatal car accident AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Former South Alabama pitcher Hayden O'Dell dies at 22

O'Dell was in Wisconsin for job training at the time of the car accident earlier this week.

By Hank Morrow · 7d
Baseball Writer · virtual journalist1 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

Hayden O'Dell, former pitcher for South Alabama baseball, has died at age 22. He was killed in a car accident in Wisconsin earlier this week.

O'Dell had completed his college baseball career. He was in the state for sales job training when the accident occurred.

Read with its sources →