Towson Professional Athletes

Towson in the Majors | Sept. 20–26, 2026

Richie Palacios gave Towson alumni something to cheer about twice in one week — and the two performances couldn't have been more different in feel.

The Walk-Off Hero

The week opened with Palacios already in the highlight reel. His RBI single in the bottom of the ninth inning lifted the Tampa Bay Rays over the Boston Red Sox 2-1, capping a game in which the Red Sox had squandered their own late chances. Jonathan Aranda had staked the Rays to an early lead with a solo home run, but it was the Towson product who closed it out. Walk-off hits have a way of defining a player's week — and Palacios had barely gotten started.

The Blowout Statement

Fast-forward to Saturday, September 26, and Palacios turned in his most productive outing of the period. In a 12-1 rout of the Philadelphia Phillies, he went 2-for-the-day with 4 RBI and drew a walk, turning what could have been a routine lopsided win into a personal showcase. The performance bumped his average to .238 on the season.

Between those two bookend moments, the week was quieter for Palacios. He added single hits in back-to-back games against the Yankees on Wednesday and Thursday — the Rays dropped both — but the volume was secondary to what he'd already accomplished at either end of the stretch.

Pecko Struggles in a Spot Role

The other Towson name in the bigs, Astros right-hander Ethan Pecko, had a rougher outing. Starting against the Seattle Mariners on September 23 — the second game of a two-game road series — Pecko lasted just 2.2 innings, allowing 3 earned runs while striking out 2. Houston lost 5-6, and the appearance nudged Pecko's ERA up to 4.31. He carries a 1-0 record on the season, reflecting how thin his sample size remains, but the Mariners outing wasn't the kind of audition that builds a case heading into the offseason.

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The week belonged to Palacios, no debate required. A walk-off RBI and a 4-RBI blowout performance in the same seven-day stretch is the kind of output that earns a second look from front offices heading into the offseason. For a Rays team navigating the final weeks of a long season, having a Towson Tiger deliver in the clutch is at least one bright spot worth noting.

Richie Palacios is not supposed to be doing this. The scouting report said so — and then he shredded it.

The Towson product has been one of the more quietly compelling stories of the Rays' late-season push, and the week of Sept. 13–19 put his emergence on full display. Palacios went deep and drove in three runs in a 14-4 blowout of the Houston Astros on Sunday, Sept. 13 — a game in which Jonathan Aranda hit two home runs and Tampa Bay made a statement. Palacios wasn't a footnote; he was a headline, going 2-for-the-day with two runs scored.

The big inning wasn't a fluke. Four days later on Sept. 17, Palacios drove in two more runs and walked twice in a 10-1 dismantling of Oakland, crossing the plate himself and raising his average to .234 on the season. Then on Saturday, Sept. 19, he added another hit and an RBI in a 2-1 win over Boston — quiet production, but exactly the kind of low-chaos reliability that Tampa Bay has leaned on.

The broader context arrived courtesy of Sports Illustrated, which published a feature-length piece this week on how Palacios has functionally rewritten his own player profile. The premise: evaluators once had him pegged as a bench piece with limited offensive upside, and he has spent 2026 proving that ceiling was wrong. For a Rays organization that has made a cottage industry of player development alchemy, Palacios fits a familiar archetype — the guy nobody fully believed in who becomes indispensable down the stretch.

The Other Towson Tiger

Ethan Pecko, the Towson-to-Houston pipeline's other data point, had a week of his own — just on the wrong side of the Rays series. The Astros right-hander took the mound Sept. 17 against Kansas City, working 5.2 innings with four strikeouts and one earned run in a 6-2 Houston win. His ERA sits at 3.77. He wasn't involved in the Rays-Astros series, but the broader irony isn't lost: two Towson alumni spent a chunk of September on opposing sides of a division rivalry.

The Bigger Picture

Tampa Bay entered this stretch fighting for positioning, and Palacios has been a legitimate contributor to that push — not a role player logging innings, but a guy delivering in multi-run games and earning national editorial attention for it. For Towson fans, the week offers a clean story: their guy is playing meaningful baseball in September, getting ink from Sports Illustrated, and doing it the hard way, by outrunning a scouting report that had already written the ending for him.

The Rays have a history of making believers out of skeptics. Palacios, it appears, is now making believers out of everyone else.

Towson hasn't produced a long line of big leaguers, but right now, two Tigers alumni are turning heads in MLB — one anchoring a playoff-contending rotation, the other providing pop for a Rays team that needed every run it could get.

Ethan Pecko, Houston Astros

The rookie right-hander is earning his roster spot the hard way. Pecko made his third start of the season on August 30 in New York, delivering five solid innings against the Mets, striking out four and allowing two earned runs. It was the kind of outing a young starter needs — competent, competitive, and enough to keep the leash long.

His fourth career start came Saturday, September 5, in a nationally televised showdown against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Daikin Park. Pecko went 4.1 innings, giving up one earned run and punching out two, dropping his ERA to 5.19. The Astros, sitting at 73-69 and clinging to first place in their division, handed him a marquee assignment — and he didn't buckle.

Oddsmakers weren't exactly backing him heading in, with predictors targeting his relative inexperience against Arizona's lineup. But the fact that Houston keeps handing him the ball in meaningful September games — in a tight pennant race, on national television — says more about the organization's confidence than any ERA figure does. Pecko has gone from prospect to rotation piece in the span of a month.

Richie Palacios, Tampa Bay Rays

Palacios has quietly put together one of his better stretches of the season heading into September. The second baseman went deep twice in a four-day span, homering in the Rays' series against the Mets on September 2 and then again in Tampa Bay's 7-6 win over the Texas Rangers on Saturday, September 5 — a game in which Jonathan Aranda also went yard as the Rays edged out a one-run thriller.

In that Rangers win, Palacios went 1-for-the-day with a home run, an RBI, and a run scored, pushing his average to .225. He also appeared on base in a tight Mets loss earlier in the week, with Tampa Bay falling 3-2 in a game that came down to the final at-bat in the ninth.

The Rays' season hasn't gone according to plan, but Palacios has been a reliable presence in the lineup — showing up in clutch spots and delivering the kind of multi-faceted game (contact, pop, on-base presence) that keeps a second baseman in the lineup card even on a team in transition.

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Two Towson alumni. Two very different roles. One trying to prove he belongs at the top of a contender's rotation, the other quietly padding a résumé for next year. Both gave their respective fanbases something to cheer about this week.