Joe Mack doubled with two outs and scored the winning run on a walk-off throwing error as the Miami Marlins claimed a 4-3 victory against the Baltimore Orioles on Thursday night, dodging a series sweep.

Mack’s hit brought Javier Sanoja to the plate, and his grounder was fielded by third baseman Coby Mayo but bounced in front of first base and ricocheted off Pete Alonso’s glove to allow Mack to score. It was the only error of the game.

Liam Hicks hit a two-run home run in the first inning for the Marlins, his ninth of the season which more than doubles any of his teammates.

Calvin Faucher (3-2), the fourth Miami reliever of the game, allowed one hit and struck out one in a scoreless ninth inning.

Mayo and Dylan Beavers each provided two hits for Baltimore, but the Orioles had a two-game win streak halted and have lost six of their last eight games. Andrew Kittredge (0-1) struck out one and allowed one unearned run in two-thirds of an inning.

Miami starter Max Meyer worked five innings, holding the Orioles to two runs on six hits and two walks. He recorded five strikeouts. Andrew Nardi and Michael Petersen both worked a shutout inning before Josh Ekness yielded the tying run in the eighth.

Orioles starter Cade Povich was done after three innings, exiting with left forearm discomfort. He allowed three runs on three hits and two walks.

Gunnar Henderson’s single in the third inning put the Orioles on the board with a single run, but they left the bases loaded.

Miami had three hits through seven innings, two of them singles in the third. Connor Norby extended the lead for the Marlins with an RBI single which scored Sanoja after his leadoff walk.

Tyler O’Neill’s run-scoring single in the fourth pulled the Orioles to within 3-2. Baltimore tied the score on Pete Alonso’s single before an out was recorded in the eighth. However, they again squandered a chance for a big inning and finished the game 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position.

The Marlins put their first two batters in the bottom of the eighth on base but Orioles left-hander Keegan Akin worked out of the jam.

–Field Level Media

The NHL’s salary cap will reach a record of $104 million per team in 2026-27, the league and the NHL Players Association announced Thursday.

That figure is an increase of $8.5 million (8.9%) from the 2025-26 cap.

The salary cap floor will be $76.9 million, making the midpoint $90.4 million. To demonstrate the rapid growth of the league, the minimum is higher than the ceiling was in 2018.

Per PuckPedia, seven teams exceeded the cap in 2025-26, led by the Vegas Golden Knights, who spent $107.49 million. Teams may use players’ salaries that have been placed on long-term injured reserve and exceed the cap without penalty.

The youthful Chicago Blackhawks spent $82.35 million, which was still comfortably over the salary cap floor.

Moreover, television and streaming deals with ESPN and TNT Sports will help the league exceed $7 billion in mixed currency revenue this season. The NHL just enjoyed record viewership milestones for the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

“It’s a really good time, and we don’t even have the biggest markets (involved in the playoffs),” league commissioner Gary Bettman said recently in an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show. “This is about how good the hockey is.”

The individual player maximum will also increase to $20.8 million for 2026-27.

Current projections indicate an even larger increase in 2027-28, with a $9.5 million jump to $113.5 million.

–Field Level Media

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not be seen at World Cup matches this summer, according to the co-chair of the Miami host committee.

Rodney Barreto told The Athletic on Thursday that he received reassurances from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that ICE would steer clear of the world soccer showcase.

“ICE is not going to be at the stadium,” Barreto told The Athletic. “This is not going to turn into some ‘round them up’ type of thing. That’s not the purpose of this.

“It’ll be a great experience for everybody. I think that we’re lucky that we do have a president who loves sports and has given us the resources to reimburse the cities for their police protection.”

Barreto added, “I spoke to Marco and, first of all, he’s going to make sure that the passports get processed and people can get here and there is an orderly process so people won’t be held up. It’s going to be a major undertaking by the federal government to do that. We feel very comfortable that we’re going to be in good hands.”

The deployment of ICE for immigration-enforcement raids has increased since Donald Trump began his second stint as president last year, igniting a significant political debate in the U.S.

South Florida’s role as a World Cup host market also comes against the backdrop of scenes from the 2024 Copa America championship game, when fans stormed the gates at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., causing a number of injuries and delaying the start of the Argentina-Colombia match.

“(The Miami World Cup organizing committee) took the position that we didn’t want to be critical of the planners of that event,” Barreto told The Athletic. “It wasn’t our event. But now that time has passed, I would tell you that where the failure was, which was that there were no perimeters.

“People without tickets should have been nowhere near the entrance ways of that stadium. It didn’t take much to overrun an entrance. But listen, you learn from all these events, and you learn to do it better and come up with different scenarios which mitigate this from happening in the future. So that’s where we’re at.”

–Field Level Media