For years, Roy Halladay stood not only atop the pitcher’s mound but atop Major League Baseball, too. Over the course of his career, the pitcher racked up two Cy Young awards and earned All-Star honors eight times. Even after retirement, he also achieved great heights — albeit in a different way, getting his pilot’s license and posting often on social media about his beloved new plane.

On Tuesday, that new avocation ended in tragedy. The Pasco County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Department confirmed that Halladay’s small aircraft crashed in the waters off Florida, killing him at age 40.

“Many know Roy as a Cy Young winner, a future Hall of Famer, one of the best pitchers to ever pitch in the game of baseball. We know Roy as a person, as a caring husband who loved his wife, Brandy, and loved his two boys tremendously,” Sheriff Chris Nocco said at a news conference Tuesday.

Nocco said Halladay even donated a dog to the sheriff’s office to serve as a K-9 officer.

“He was probably one of the most humble human beings you’ll ever meet,” Nocco continued, later adding:. “You wouldn’t know what Roy did because Roy would never tell you what he did. And that’s the legacy of a great man.”

“We are numb over the very tragic news about Roy Halladay’s untimely death,” one of his former teams, the Philadelphia Phillies, said in a statement. “There are no words to describe the sadness that the entire Phillies family is feeling over the loss of one of the most respected human beings to ever play the game.”

During Halladay’s 16 years in the league, he recorded a staggering 67 complete games — the most by any one player since he made his professional debut in 1998, according to MLB network columnist Jon Morosi. In 2010, he also pitched what was then only the 20th perfect game in MLB history.

He retired in 2013.

Lately, as discussion of his career turned to when he would be inducted into the Hall of Fame, Halladay himself turned to another passion: flight. Just last month, ICON Aircraft delivered one of its aircraft — the first of its kind — to Halladay, prompting a meditation on his love for flying.

“I’ve been dreaming about flying since I was a boy but was only able to become a pilot once I retired from baseball,” said Halladay, before going on to praise the plane he received, an A5.

Authorities say they found him after a private resident reported a crash at about midday and officials launched an hours-long search-and-rescue effort. Law enforcement ultimately found Halladay’s plane in shallow water, with only Halladay onboard.

Nocco asked that people give the late pitcher’s family privacy.

On social media, his loss drew an outpouring of support from friends, teammates, rivals and even some admirers, whom Halladay inspired to pursue baseball themselves.

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Officials in Alaska says they have investigated conditions at the kennel of four-time Iditarod winner Dallas Seavey, and found no signs of cruelty, as had been reported by an anonymous complaint.

Seavey made headlines last month when his dogs tested positive for a banned substance; Seavey has denied that he was doping and has withdrawn from the 2018 Iditarod dog sled race in protest.

After that story broke, PETA issued a statement asserting a “whistleblower” had sent the group evidence that a Seavey-owned kennel “allowed severely injured and ailing dogs to suffer—sometimes fatally—without veterinary care.”

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough investigated the allegations. In a press statement reported by KTUU, a borough spokesman says authorities “closed the investigation after finding no evidence of any violation—no evidence of failure to provide humane animal care and no evidence of cruelty to animals.”

“Alaska State Troopers also are separately investigating complaints against a kennel, but won’t identify the musher,” The Associated Press reports. “Borough officials and Seavey didn’t immediately return messages Thursday.”

Seavey came in second in this year’s Iditarod (behind his father, Mitch Seavey).

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Updated 12:01 a.m. ET

The Houston Astros beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1 in Game 7 of the World Series, winning their first championship crown in the franchise’s 56-year history.

The Astros jumped out to a 5-0 lead after two innings and held on for the rest of the game watching the Dodgers squander multiple opportunities to score.

“We held down a really tough lineup,” said Astros pitcher Charlie Morton who pitched four innings in relief, giving up the Dodgers only run. He struck out, walked one batter and earned the win.

The losing pitcher was the Dodgers Yu Darvish who lasted only 1 2/3 innings, giving up four runs.

Unlike other games in this best-of-seven series which featured dramatic home runs and multiple lead changes, Game 7 was a relative sleeper.

The Astros got off to a fast start in the top of the first inning taking a 2-0 lead on a leadoff double by center fielder George Springer. He scored when third baseman Alex Bregman was safe at second on a throwing error by Dodgers first baseman Cody Bellinger. Bregman then scored on second baseman Jose Altuve’s RBI ground out.

The Dodgers responded immediately in the bottom of the first with their own leadoff double by center fielder Chris Taylor. An out later, third baseman Justin Turner was hit by a pitch from Astros starter Lance McCullers. With two runners on and two out, McCullers then hit right fielder Yasiel Puig, loading the bases. But L.A. didn’t score.

In the top of the second, the Astros increased their lead, starting with a lead-off walk by catcher Brian McCann and a double by left fielder Marwin Gonzalez. McCann scored on McCullers’ RBI ground out and then Springer homered to center. It was the fourth straight game in which he hit a homerun. The Astros led 5-0.

The Dodgers put their leadoff hitter, second baseman Logan Forsythe, on base with a single. And when pinchhitter Enrique Hernandez was hit by yet another McCullers pitch it looked like the Dodgers could strike. But Chris Taylor hit into a double play, killing another opportunity to score.

In the bottom of the third, the Dodgers had two runners on and no outs after a single by shortstop Corey Seager and McCullers hit Turner for the second time. But for the third consecutive inning, the Dodgers came up empty.

In the Dodgers fifth inning, the Angelenos threatened yet again with a leadoff walk by Seager and a single by Turner. But, Astros relievers Francisco Liriano and Chris Devenski snuffed out the Dodgers chances.

Los Angeles finally got on the scoreboard in the bottom of the sixth inning. The Dodgers had runners on first and second with no outs, on a single by left fielder Joc Pederson and a walk by second baseman Logan Forsythe. But they managed to get only one run on pinch-hit single by Andre Ethier Pederson.

By game’s end, the Dodgers had left 10 runners on base.

The champion Astros never scored after the second inning, in part because Dodger ace Clayton Kershawn was brought in as a reliever in the third inning and pitched four frames, giving up only two hits.

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Updated at 1:10 a.m. ET

The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Houston Astros 3-1 in Game 6 of the World Series, evening the best-of-seven series at three games each and guaranteeing a Game 7 on Wednesday at Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers had trailed 1-0 until the bottom of the sixth inning when catcher Austin Barnes singled and Houston starter Justin Verlander hit L.A.’s second baseman Chase Utley. Center fielder Chris Taylor doubled to score Barnes. Shortstop Corey Seager’s sacrifice fly scored Utley.

Until then Verlander appeared to be in control of the game, holding the Dodgers to just one hit in five innings.

The Dodgers added another run on a home run by left fielder Joc Pederson in the bottom of the seventh inning.

For Houston, Game 6 was about their failure to capitalize on opportunities to get on the board. They scored their only run when Astros center fielder George Springer hit a home run off of Dodgers starter Rich Hill in the top of the third inning.

The Astros threatened to score in their half of the fifth, sixth and seventh innings, but each time they came up with nothing.

In the top of the fifth inning, they had runners at second and third base with no outs after a single by catcher Brian McCann and a double by left fielder Marwin Gonzalez. Two outs later, and with an intentional walk to Springer loading the bases, third baseman Alex Bregman grounded out to short.

In their half of the sixth, the Astros got two runners on a two-out single by first baseman Yuli Gurriel. Then McCann was hit by a pitch from Dodgers reliever Brandon Morrow. But again, Houston failed to score.

Houston put two more runners on base in the seventh inning on a walk by right fielder Josh Reddick and an infield single by Springer. But the Astros couldn’t get a timely hit after that, leaving a total of eight runners on base.

Each of those scoring threats were stymied by the Dodgers relievers who combined for 4 1/3 scoreless innings after starter Rich Hill went 4 2/3 innings. Reliever Tony Watson was the game winner and Houston’s Verlander took the loss, his first since being traded to the Astros in late August.

The Dodgers colorful right fielder, Yasiel Puig, had guaranteed that the Dodgers would win Game 6 and force a winner-take-all Game 7.

The starting pitchers for Game 7 Wednesday night are Yu Darvish for the Dodgers and Lance McCullers for the Astros. Darvish pitched poorly in Game 3, lasting only 1 2/3 innings. McCullers was the victor as Houston won that game 5-3.

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How do you make people understand the odd forms created by gerrymandering? Make them feel it in their toes.

That’s the idea behind the Gerrymander 5K happening Saturday in Asheville, N.C., which will trace the boundary between North Carolina’s 10th and 11th Congressional districts.

That line splits the left-leaning city into two districts that, when combined with more conservative rural voters, both end up represented by Republicans.

As the Asheville Citizen-Timesexplains, the route is not exactly a straight shot:

“Roughly speaking, they’ll begin at The Admiral at 400 Haywood Road, go west on Haywood Road, north on Martin Avenue, west on Balm Grove Place, north on Balm Grove Avenue, southwest on Florida Avenue, south on Dorchester Avenue, west on Haywood Road, north on Louisiana Avenue, east on Majestic Avenue, north on Brucemont Circle, west on Brucemont Road and north on Louisiana Avenue to the turnaround point near Patton Avenue. The return trip ends at West Asheville Lounge and Kitchen, 401 Haywood Road.

“For any poor souls following this on a map, runners and walkers will have the 10th District, represented by Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-Lincoln, on their right on the outbound leg and the 11th District of Rep. Mark Meadows, R-Buncombe, on their left.”

Good luck, runners.

The course creates “a visceral experience of how gerrymandering divides our communities and doesn’t make sense. Why include this house but not another?” Alana Pierce, president of the League of Women Voters of Asheville-Buncombe County, toldRunner’s World. The league is sponsoring the run/walk.

Gerrymandering is the drawing of districts in a way that gives one party an electoral advantage, generally by spreading the opposition across districts or packing its voters into as few districts as possible.

North Carolina’s congressional districts have been repeatedly challenged in court. The League of Women Voters has filed five lawsuits since the state was redistricted in 2011; the group wants a nonpartisan committee to redraw the districts.

Federal judges ruled in 2016 that two of North Carolina’s congressional districts were racially gerrymandered, spurring Republican legislators to hastily redraw the state’s district map. Now those districts are being challenged (including by the League of Women Voters), and a panel of federal judges will rule on their legality in the coming weeks or months.

“North Carolina has some of the worst partisan bias in the country, both under the 2011 and 2016 maps,” says Michael Li, senior redistricting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.

He tells NPR that the state’s congressional districts consistently favor Republicans “to an unnatural degree.”

“We did a study and we found that North Carolina is among the top three states for bias. It gives Republicans a 10-3 bias in a state that votes 50-50,” Li says. “When it comes to the congressional map, Republicans have had a safe 10-3 majority for most of a decade.”

Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise, chairman of the state Senate’s redistricting committee, has called a nonpartisan redistricting commission “mythical.”

Back in western North Carolina, the Gerrymander 5K has been more than a year in the making. J.P. Kennedy, an artist, musician and documentarian, was angered by the adoption last year of HB2, known as “the bathroom bill.”

“I was so outraged that we were treating our transgender community this way,” Kennedy told the Raleigh News & Observer. “I was like, ‘Who’s my representative?’ That’s when I started seeing how crazy our North Carolina maps were.”

Kennedy and his family and friends used a bucket of sidewalk chalk to draw the sinuous district boundary through the community. Then his wife, Cinnamon, also an artist and musician, had a different idea to demonstrate the line’s strange shape.

“My wife said, ‘People in this community love 5Ks. … Why not make the district line a racecourse and have people out there on it so they can see and experience the problem?’ ” Kennedy told Runner’s World. “I thought that was brilliant.”

Though the district’s boundary will make for a notably strange racecourse, the Brennan Center’s Li says that funny-shape districts are a symptom of a problem — not the problem itself.

After all, North Carolina’s 10th and 11th don’t look especially strange by the standards of American congressional districts.

“You have to look behind the map,” Li says. “The real problem isn’t that the districts are ugly. The problem is that they lock in a 10-3 vote in a state that is 50-50.”

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After five hours and 17 minutes and more than 400 pitches, the Houston Astros won Game 5 of the World Series and took the series lead 3-2 over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Both teams kept the score close throughout the game and hit a combined total of seven home runs. With the score tied 12-12 at the end of the ninth, the game headed into extra innings. A line drive to left field by 23-year-old Alex Bregman ended the game with pinch runner Derek Fisher scoring the winning run in the bottom of the tenth. With a final score of 13-12, Houston won its last home game of the 2017 season.

The teams will head to Los Angeles for Game 6 on Tuesday.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers evened the stakes Saturday night, outlasting the Houston Astros in a drawn-out rally that quickly escalated into a 6-2 victory in the final inning.

The Dodgers’ Joc Pederson sealed the late comeback with a three-run homer off of Astros pitcher Joe Musgrove in the top of the ninth inning.

Remarkably, Game 4 remained scoreless all the way through the fifth inning, as Alex Wood completed a historic outing as the first Dodgers pitcher to carry his team through five World Series innings without allowing a hit. Meanwhile, the Astros’ Charlie Morton, who let in three hits, wasn’t far behind the starting pitcher. But Astros’ George Springer broke both the no-hit bid and the tie in the bottom of the sixth inning with a left-field homer.

The Dodgers evened things up in the seventh inning as Cody Bellinger scored off of a single from teammate Logan Forsythe.

But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth that the Dodgers blasted ahead with five runs. The Astros took one run in the bottom but it wasn’t enough to recover.

Chatter leading up to Game 4 focused on Astros’ Yuli Gurriel who, just hours before Saturday’s game, escaped a World Series suspension for making a racist gesture toward Dodgers’ Yu Darvish in Game 3. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred did pull him out of a handful of games next season, but tonight, the first baseman received a standing ovation from a noticeable amount of Astros fans.

Game 5 is scheduled for Sunday night in Houston.

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Updated 12:40 a.m. ET

The Houston Astros defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of the World Series at Minute Maid Park in Houston, taking the series lead with two wins over the Dodgers.

The Astros relied on early scoring and a gutsy relief effort by right-hander Brad Peacock who came in for starter Lance McCullers with one out in the sixth inning and held the Dodgers without a hit for 3 2/3 innings. He struck out four and surrendered a walk.

McCullers went 5 1/3 innings, giving up three runs and four hits for the win.

With their victory tonight, the Astros are 7-0 in their home park in this postseason.

Houston got on the score board first by opening the bottom of the second inning with a solo home run by first baseman Yuli Gurriel, followed by a double by right fielder Josh Reddick. Designated hitter Evan Gattis walked. A hard-hit single by left fielder Marwin Gonzalez scored Reddick. Catcher Brian McCann followed with another single, scoring Gattis and making the score 3-0. The Astros added a fourth run when third baseman Alex Bregman hit a sacrifice fly to center, scoring Gonzalez.

Dodgers starter Yu Darvish was pulled for reliever Kenta Maeda after Astros second baseman Jose Altuve smoked a double to center field. Maeda managed to get the final out without further damage.

The Dodgers threatened to come back immediately in the top of the third after their first three batters earned walks. But they scored only one run when shortstop Corey Seager grounded into a double play.

The Astros added their fifth run in the bottom of the fifth inning after a single by Reddick, his second hit of the night. Gattis reached first base on an infield bouncer to Dodgers pitcher Tony Watson, whose wild throw to first allowed Reddick to score.

In their half of the sixth inning, the Dodgers scratched back by scoring two runs. Seager walked, followed by a double by third baseman Justin Turner. Seager scored on right fielder Yasiel Puig’s ground out. Turner scored from third base on Peacock’s wild pitch, making the score 5-3.

The Astros threatened to blow the game wide open in the bottom of the seventh inning. Gurriel lead off with a double to left field. An out later, Gattis was intentionally walked. Houston loaded the bases when McCann hit an infield single. But Dodger reliever Ross Stripling retired center fielder George Springer on a deep drive to center that left Houston fans holding their heads in dismay.

However, by the eighth inning, Peacock looked confident as he retired the last six Dodger batters in a row.

As ESPN’s David Schoenfield reports, when the World Series is tied, the Game 3 winner goes on to win the whole thing 69 percent of the time.

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Updated at 4:15 p.m. ET.

Emily Nash was allowed to play. She just wasn’t allowed to win.

Nash, a junior at Lunenburg High School in Lunenburg, Mass., had the lowest score in the Central Mass Division 3 Boys’ Golf Tournament. But the first-place trophy was awarded to a boy who was four strokes behind her, because of the rules of the tournament.

According to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, girls can play in the boys’ golf tournament as part of a team, but they aren’t allowed to be entered as individuals.

That means Nash doesn’t get a trophy, or a spot in the boys state championship.

That was a surprise to her, although her coach was aware of the rule.

“I wasn’t aware that if I won I wouldn’t get the title or the trophy,” she told local TV station WPBF. “I feel like it’s a bit unfair.”

T.J. Auclair, a writer for the PGA, agreed. He called her 3-over-par score “impressive” and wrote that the rule that denied her a trophy is “so bad it makes a shank look good”:

“So, let’s get this straight. Nash’s score which was the best in the field by four strokes, was OK to count toward the team effort, but not OK to count individually?

“And for those wondering, yes, Nash did play from the same tees as the boys, which makes this situation all the more perplexing.

“It’s 2017. This rule sounds like it was created in 1917.”

One volunteer rules official who helped with the tournament told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette the situation is a “real injustice.”

Lunenberg High School doesn’t have a girls’ golf team, WPBF reports. And the boys’ team, despite the boost from Nash’s performance, didn’t qualify for a spot at states.

Nash does qualify to compete in the individual girls’ championship, which will be held in the spring, MIAA says in a statement.

“Female golfers have been welcomed to participate on a boys team in the fall if their school did not sponsor a girls golf team in the spring,” MIAA writes. “It has been clear to participants that female golfers playing in the fall boys team tournament are not participating in an individual capacity. “

“The individual tournament opportunity for female golfers takes place during the spring season,” the group said.

Nash’s father told the TV station, “It is what it is. Those are the rules of golf, and she plays by the rules.”

But pro golfer Brittany Altomare — who is from central Massachusetts, and played in the boys’ state tournament when she was in high school — said the rules should be changed, in this case.

And David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, says the rule raises Title IX concerns. The law does does allow contact or skill-based sports to be separated by gender, he says — so MIAA could have kept girls out of the boys’ tournament completely.

“But … once they say, ‘We’re going to let girls participate,’ they’re required by Title IX to treat them equally,” he says. “And denying someone the trophy and the championship is far from treating them equally.”

He cited the case of a female Duke student who was allowed to try out for the football team. The courts ruled that once she joined the team, she had to be treated the same as the men.

Meanwhile, the male athlete who was awarded first place offered to give his trophy to Nash, saying she had earned it.

She declined but said she appreciated the gesture.

“He came over and said he didn’t win the tournament, that I did,” she told WPBF. “It was really nice of him and respectful.”

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