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With Friday’s announcement that Richard Petty Motorsports has named Brian Scott the driver of the organization’s No. 9 Ford next season, David Ragan has one less potential option available in his pursuit of a ride for 2016. Ragan, who spent time with three different teams this past season, was left looking for work after the closure of Michael Waltrip Racing, where he drove the final 26 races of 2015 in…

Aloha Stadium officials have opened their doors to the media to show the condition of the Honolulu playing field that became the center of a dispute when the U.S. women’s soccer team abruptly canceled a game citing poor turf conditions. The exhibition game was part of a 10-city tour following the team’s victory in the Women’s World Cup this past summer and was scheduled to be played last Sunday. But…

Stormtroopers invaded a soccer stadium in Bulgaria this week. It wasn’t an incursion by the Galactic Empire, but a Star Wars-themed display of support by fans of the Bulgarian soccer team, CSKA Sofia. It was an impressive showing of both Star Wars fandom and soccer support as the stands were filled with Sofia fans wearing stormtrooper masks and singing along to Darth Vader’s Theme. They even held up a homemade…

With all of the names flying about at the Winter Meetings and throughout the Hot Stove League, one name that hasn’t gotten much run is Yasiel Puig. And this despite the facts that (1) the Dodgers seem as willing as ever to deal for a pitcher, and (2) Puig’s name came up so often in trade discussions at last year’s deadline. And many of those rumors stemmed from reports of…

Caption Close Jim Fregosi Jr. signed Ryan Madson to his first pro contract with Philadelphia in 1998. Then 15 years later, he gave the ex-Phillies closer another lifeline. Madson, officially announced as a member of the A’s bullpen Friday along with John Axford, was out of baseball for three years because of elbow trouble, and he retired in 2014. That’s when Fregosi called and asked Madson to work with a…

Westfield High School graduate Mike Murray Jr. (right), shown during his tenure at Wake Forest, gave up his dream of playing professional baseball after a few seasons with the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes of the Northwest League.(Photo: ~file photo) Mike Murray Jr., a former San Francisco Giants farmhand and All-State catcher from Westfield, will be officially introduced on Monday as St. Joseph High School’s new head baseball coach. A 2010 graduate of…

You probably have know idea who Lenny Randle is, even if you’re a diehard baseball fan like I am. Randle played 12 seasons in the majors for six organizations, making a total of zero All-Star Teams and receiving MVP votes in just one season (1974 with the Texas Rangers). He’s the definition of a journeyman. Yet, Randle was once called the most interesting man in baseball and is the focus of the…

Many people know the 6-foot-6 inch former right fielder Darryl Strawberry for a series of blunders outside his usual role as a standout Major League Baseball player. For a time, Strawberry was in the public eye for all the wrong reasons, dogged by a well-chronicled struggle with drugs. Fast forward 10 years and Strawberry, who now resides in the Orlando area, has channeled those experiences into an enterprise focused…

NEW YORK Leading daily fantasy sports companies FanDuel and DraftKings won a temporary reprieve allowing them to keep operating in New York through the New Year, reversing for now an order by a state judge to close the businesses in the state. New York State Appeals Court Judge Paul Feinman temporarily suspended an injunction granted earlier in the day by New York Supreme Court Justice Manuel Mendez. Mendez had stopped…

With all of the names flying about at the Winter Meetings and throughout the Hot Stove League, one name that hasn’t gotten much run is Yasiel Puig. And this despite the facts that (1) the Dodgers seem as willing as ever to deal for a pitcher, and (2) Puig’s name came up so often in trade discussions at last year’s deadline. And many of those rumors stemmed from reports of…

Westfield High School graduate Mike Murray Jr. (right), shown during his tenure at Wake Forest, gave up his dream of playing professional baseball after a few seasons with the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes of the Northwest League.(Photo: ~file photo) Mike Murray Jr., a former San Francisco Giants farmhand and All-State catcher from Westfield, will be officially introduced on Monday as St. Joseph High School’s new head baseball coach. A 2010 graduate of…

Related Coverage KINSTON, NC (WCNT)- Kinston hit a minor road block in the process of bringing professional baseball back to Grainger Stadium. A contract between the Texas Rangers ownership group and the city allows a minor league team to call Grainger Stadium home in 2017. What the contract does not specify is which team it will be. The original plan was to bring the Wilmington-Delaware blue rocks to Kinston because…

A coroner says autopsy results show the death of former Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles pitcher Tommy Hanson was caused by cocaine and alcohol use. Coweta County coroner Richard Hawk said Friday the combined effects of cocaine and alcohol ultimately caused the death of 29-year-old Hanson, who died Nov. 9. Hanson wasn’t breathing as rescue crews tried to help him at a friend’s home in Newnan, south of Atlanta. It’s…

Ron Zook was fired as the football coach at Illinois after the 2011 season but, as in many cases, continued to collect money from the school. (Mark Gail/The Washington Post) The University of Illinois paid fired football coach Ron Zook $1.3 million while he spent a year trying a new career in banking and working on his water-skiing in Florida. The University of California paid Jeff Tedford $1.8 million while…

Daily fantasy sports giants DraftKings and FanDuel can’t do business in New York for now, a judge said Friday, cutting off one of their biggest customer bases at least temporarily as the state attorney general and the sites face off over whether their business amounts to illegal gambling. FanDuel, which already had suspended play from New York because of the court fight, and DraftKings said they would immediately appeal the…

While cheerleading injury rates are lower than for many other high school sports, the accidents that do happen may be more severe and more likely to result in concussions, a U.S. study suggests. On average, cheerleading typically has less than one injury for every 1,000 minutes of participation time, meaning there’s no more than one accident every 17 hours, the study found. That’s far less dangerous than most…

Sports Direct, the FTSE 100 retailing giant controlled by the billionaire Mike Ashley, stripped prime assets out of its stricken USC fashion subsidiary in the weeks before the chain collapsed, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal. Related: Revealed: how Sports Direct effectively pays below minimum wage The demise of USC, which was controversially bought straight out of administration by another arm of Sports Direct in January, led to about…

View photo . Jason Heyward (AP Photo) Free-agent outfielder Jason Heyward reportedly has become a Chicago Cub, just as Ben Zobrist and John Lackey have, just as Jon Lester had a year ago. It’ll be called a culture change, which it surely is, that rising from the momentum of a plan that is working, from the new man on the top step, and from the notion that anybody can have…

You probably have know idea who Lenny Randle is, even if you’re a diehard baseball fan like I am. Randle played 12 seasons in the majors for six organizations, making a total of zero All-Star Teams and receiving MVP votes in just one season (1974 with the Texas Rangers). He’s the definition of a journeyman. Yet, Randle was once called the most interesting man in baseball and is the focus of the…