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Ken Griffey Jr. was baseball’s last pop culture icon.(Photo: Marc Serota, Getty Images) CINCINNATI — Kevin Falls is a Giants fan, so when he was writing the movie ‘’Summer Catch’’ and (spoiler alert) it came to the end when his main character, Ryan Dunne, makes the big leagues and is facing his first big test, Falls wanted that player to be Barry Bonds. He got Ken Griffey Jr. instead. In…

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Vladimir Putin says officials named in the McLaren report will be suspended, pending a thorough investigation Russian President Vladimir Putin said “there can be no place for doping in sport” after his country’s athletes were told their ban from this summer’s Olympics remained in place. Russian track and field athletes are banned from Rio 2016 after claims of a state-sponsored doping programme. Putin said: “Sport must be clean and the…

Updated July 23, 2016 14:26:03 Photo: Stephen Dank climbs into an ambulance after the shooting. (ABC News) Stephen Dank, the sports scientist at the centre of the Essendon doping scandal, has told of being shot at through the window of his house while he slept in the early hours of the morning. ABC News Radio contacted Dank, who said he was advised by police not to do…

Image copyright DAVID MARIUZ Image caption There has been a big increase in the number of people playing cricket in Scotland in recent years The number of people participating in sport in Scotland has increased in recent years, according to new figures. The SportScotland statistics showed the overall number of people registered to sports clubs had risen from 706,764 to 768,212 since 2013/14. The rise applied to almost all sports…

RELATED: Pictures of ‘Smoke’ through the years   Tony Stewart said Friday that he’s completely content with Jeff Gordon ‘s return taking away some of the spotlight on his final scheduled start at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In fact, he said if the situation arose, he’d be open to a similar substitute role for his Stewart-Haas Racing team after his full-time career ends.   Stewart, 45, is set for what should…

ENLARGE Amid all the drama about how to punish the Russians for doping, here’s an uncomfortable truth—the Olympics are a far less entertaining event without them in Rio. We can all agree that it’s better to have a competition in which all the athletes are clean. As this week’s investigative report from the World Anti-Doping Agency showed, the Sochi Games certainly were not. Russian officials managed to swap out dirty…

Ken Griffey Jr. was baseball’s last pop culture icon.(Photo: Marc Serota, Getty Images) CINCINNATI — Kevin Falls is a Giants fan, so when he was writing the movie ‘’Summer Catch’’ and (spoiler alert) it came to the end when his main character, Ryan Dunne, makes the big leagues and is facing his first big test, Falls wanted that player to be Barry Bonds. He got Ken Griffey Jr. instead. In…

For those who are unfamiliar with my thought process, I aim to add as many home run hitters as possible to my daily fantasy baseball lineups. One way of doing that is to look at a player’s isolated power numbers (ISO). The ISO statistic removes singles and provides a larger weight for each extra-base hit. I also use the weighted on-base average (wOBA) metric. This stat takes every positive outcome into consideration. Last year,…

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Holding power to account is a core responsibility of being an MP. It is all the more important when so often ordinary men and women in an insecure world have few other ways of protecting their interests, above all at work. So to see Mike Ashley, founder and chief executive of Sports Direct, blustering out his astonishment at the experiences of his workers must have been some slight compensation for…

Vladimir Putin says officials named in the McLaren report will be suspended, pending a thorough investigation Russian President Vladimir Putin said “there can be no place for doping in sport” after his country’s athletes were told their ban from this summer’s Olympics remained in place. Russian track and field athletes are banned from Rio 2016 after claims of a state-sponsored doping programme. Putin said: “Sport must be clean and the…

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Moscow — At first glance, the divide between Russia and international athletic bodies over how to deal with the country’s allegedly state-backed doping – and the harsh punishments that are looming for Russia and hundreds of its athletes – looks insurmountable. Western experts argue that only the “nuclear option” of a total ban on Russian participation for at least one Olympic cycle will help to focus minds in Moscow. That,…

Ken Griffey Jr. was baseball’s last pop culture icon.(Photo: Marc Serota, Getty Images) CINCINNATI — Kevin Falls is a Giants fan, so when he was writing the movie ‘’Summer Catch’’ and (spoiler alert) it came to the end when his main character, Ryan Dunne, makes the big leagues and is facing his first big test, Falls wanted that player to be Barry Bonds. He got Ken Griffey Jr. instead. In…

COMMENTARY They sounded a little silly, those suggestions way back in spring training that Red Sox right fielder Mookie Betts might become an MVP candidate during what would amount to only his second full season in the major leagues. The 23-year-old came into the 2016 season, after all, having played in 197 games, and putting up a .291 batting average, 23 home runs, 95 runs batted in, and an .818…

AUGUSTA, Maine — A recent national mandate obligating most states to develop pitch-count standards for high school baseball beginning with the 2017 season came as no surprise to organizers of the sport in Maine. “We’ve been planning for this,” Maine Principals’ Association baseball committee chair Phil St. Onge, assistant principal at Nokomis Regional High School of Newport, said recently. “We’ve been talking about this for about a year.” The revised…

RJ Sales, 13, leads stretches for the USA-NC Patriots Baseball Team. SAM KRUYER/The Pilot

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The billionaire retailer Mike Ashley has been running Sports Direct like a Victorian workhouse, building his success on a business model that treats workers “without dignity or respect”, a scathing parliamentary inquiry has found. Related: Sports Direct boss had plenty of warning a crisis was looming The report by the business, innovation and skills (BIS) select committee, which was triggered by a Guardian investigation last year, said Ashley had used…