Baseball Players Association

Cardinals: St. Louis has been successful on 15 straight stolen base attempts.Padres: San Diego hasn't won a season series against the Astros since 1992, when it had an 11-7 edge. Tony Gwynn, in an 11-for-60 slide, didn't start for the second time in five games.Phillies: Darren Daulton received the Major League Baseball Players Association 1997 NL Comeback Player award before the game.Pub Date: 7/27/98

News item: Severna Park's Gavin Floyd (Mount St. Joseph) took a no-hit bid into the eighth inning against the struggling Detroit Tigers yesterday on the way to his second victory of the young season. My take: Great to see him getting off to a good start. It'll also be good to see him make his first appearance as a pro at Camden Yards on Thursday, barring a weather disruption in the Chicago White Sox rotation. News item: An unidentified construction worker told the New York Post he cursed the Yankees by burying a Red Sox jersey under the visitors clubhouse at the new Yankee Stadium.

VERO BEACH, Fla. -- The Major League Baseball Players Association is considering filing grievances against the Los Angeles Dodgers and California Angels on behalf of Brett Butler and Chili Davis, union chief Donald Fehr said yesterday.The Dodgers offered Butler a one-year, $3.5 million contract in January, then told him a week before the strike ended that the offer was off the table.Agents Tom Reich and Adam Katz negotiated a three-year contract for about $11.25 million for Davis, but the Angels announced last week that the offer no longer existed.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- In the wake of the latest revelations in baseball's performance-enhancement scandal comes the news that Sammy Sosa already has hit two home runs in his comeback bid with the Texas Rangers. Could that possibly be the same Swingin' Sammy who looked so old during his 2005 season with the Orioles that I had run out of AARP jokes by the All-Star break? The answer is, unfortunately, yes. Sosa took a year off and dropped largely out of sight, only to re-emerge looking re-energized during another major surge of steroid-related suspicion.

Former Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger was an early arrival at Camden Yards yesterday, listening in as his son stood near home plate rehearsing the national anthem. Robert Belanger, 28, of Lutherville, sang the anthem before last night's game, as he had done here four years earlier."He's the singer in the family," said the elder Belanger, a Major League Baseball Players Association official. "He didn't get it from me."Belanger enjoys whatever success is achieved by Davey Johnson, his former Orioles roommate.

Exhibition scores Yesterday's results Philadelphia 5, Boston 0 Rochester (AAA) 15, Minnesota 3 L.A. (AL) 4, L.A. (NL) 2 Oakland 5, San Francisco 3 This date in history 1923 -- Expelled "Black Sox" players Happy Felsch and Swede Risberg sued their former club for back salary and $400,000 in damages. They were among eight members of the Chicago White Sox team charged with fixing the 1919 World Series. 1966 -- The New York Mets won the right to sign Southern California pitcher Tom Seaver when commissioner William Eckert pulled their name out of a hat. Eckert had voided Seaver's contract with Atlanta, when the Braves signed him during his college season.

Jerome F. "Jake" Bounds, a Baltimore native who quit high school in 1928 to take a job as a messenger for Union Trust Co. and retired 46 years later as an assistant vice president, died of heart failure early Wednesday at Howard County General Hospital.The Ellicott City resident was 86.Mr. Bounds left Mount St. Joseph High School at 17 to earn money and help his family during the Depression. He continued working for Union Trust without a salary when it was unable to pay employees during the Depression.

A report that the Montreal Expos will likely be relocated to the Washington area for the 2005 season was met with surprise yesterday from officials of the two groups seeking to bring the club to the capital region. ESPN.com, citing sources familiar with the relocation process, said that Major League Baseball Players Association leaders Donald Fehr and Gene Orza met Wednesday with two Montreal player representatives and told them that there is an overwhelming probability that they will wind up in either Washington or Northern Virginia.

Cuba won't be allowed to send a team to next year's inaugural World Baseball Classic, the U.S. government told event organizers yesterday. The decision by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control was conveyed to Major League Baseball yesterday, according to Pat Courtney, a spokesman for the commissioner's office. A permit from OFAC is necessary because of U.S. laws governing commercial transactions with the communist island nation. Paul Archey, the senior vice president of Major League Baseball International, and Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the Major League Baseball Players Association, issued a joint statement saying the organizers would try to reverse the decision.

NEW YORK -- One of George Steinbrenner's proposals for Darryl Strawberry's contract that kept the slugger from joining the New York Yankees, as scheduled, on Sunday would have subjected Strawberry's children to drug tests as beneficiaries of a trust created with his Yankee salary.Another would have given the club the right to release Strawberry if he violated a deal the owner wanted him to make with the Internal Revenue Service.Strawberry's agent rejected those proposals and others, people familiar with the dispute said.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- It doesn't seem like yesterday, but it doesn't seem that long ago, either. It was 1984, to be exact, and Major League Baseball was faced with its biggest public embarrassment since the Black Sox threw the World Series. The great Pittsburgh cocaine scandal, which really wasn't confined to Pittsburgh, shocked the nation and sparked the first serious call for strict measures to assure that the national pastime was protected against a national epidemic of drug abuse.

Welcome to the worst nightmare of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Former Orioles relief pitcher Jason Grimsley might have created a portal to a new era of enforcement in baseball's battle to eradicate illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Call it a loophole if you want. Major League Baseball recently embarked on a wide-ranging investigation to determine the true extent of the sport's steroid problem, but it appeared powerless to punish past offenders because the collectively bargained anti-steroid program requires a positive urine test to trigger specific disciplinary action.

This isn't 20/20 hindsight. I predicted at the outset that Major League Baseball would regret embarking on the wide-ranging steroid investigation that was ordered by commissioner Bud Selig and undertaken by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell last month. Now, I'm sure of it. The probe already has created new friction between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association, which has labeled the investigation a "substantial disruption" to the sport's labor relationship in an e-mail that was sent to agents and obtained by Newsday and the New York Post.

Exhibition scores Yesterday's results Philadelphia 5, Boston 0 Rochester (AAA) 15, Minnesota 3 L.A. (AL) 4, L.A. (NL) 2 Oakland 5, San Francisco 3 This date in history 1923 -- Expelled "Black Sox" players Happy Felsch and Swede Risberg sued their former club for back salary and $400,000 in damages. They were among eight members of the Chicago White Sox team charged with fixing the 1919 World Series. 1966 -- The New York Mets won the right to sign Southern California pitcher Tom Seaver when commissioner William Eckert pulled their name out of a hat. Eckert had voided Seaver's contract with Atlanta, when the Braves signed him during his college season.

Cuba won't be allowed to send a team to next year's inaugural World Baseball Classic, the U.S. government told event organizers yesterday. The decision by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control was conveyed to Major League Baseball yesterday, according to Pat Courtney, a spokesman for the commissioner's office. A permit from OFAC is necessary because of U.S. laws governing commercial transactions with the communist island nation. Paul Archey, the senior vice president of Major League Baseball International, and Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the Major League Baseball Players Association, issued a joint statement saying the organizers would try to reverse the decision.

ONCE AGAIN, I find myself in the strange position of being disappointed that big-name major league players do not know how to lie effectively. Isn't that something they practice on the backfields during spring training? Rafael Palmeiro barely got his accidental ingestion theory out of his mouth last week before somebody - presumably inside Major League Baseball's central authority - leaked the identity of the offending steroid (stanozolol, and try to pronounce that after a couple of Zimas)

As Major League Baseball tries to find ploys to attract more fans, Sega Sports has discovered a way to regain the interest of baseball fans.World Series Baseball 1995 is an updated version of Sega's best-selling sports game with a focus on increasing action."

CLEVELAND -- Major League Baseball's schedule/format committee is scheduled to meet here today for further discussion on the proposed realignment of the two leagues, but no final decision is expected on the format for next season.The owners have set a Sept. 30 deadline for completing a realignment plan and solving the scheduling problems that have hurt the first year of their two-year experiment with interleague play.Interim commissioner Bud Selig said recently that the move to an imbalanced schedule is almost inevitable, but the owners must move the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays into the American League East to facilitate a regionalized schedule that is weighted heavily toward divisional competition.

THE NEW brickwork at Camden Yards looks terrific. The waist-high walls erected in front of the outfield box seats last month add a little more class to one of the most beautiful ballparks in America and leave you to wonder just who is responsible for this aesthetic triumph. When we find out, somebody ought to tie him up in the batting cage and let the corner infielders and outfielders hit fungoes at him. Apparently, no one consulted the baseball operations department to find out if it really was such a good idea to put up a brick wall where Melvin Mora or Larry Bigbie might have to crash the fence to make a big out. "I think we might have to put some padding on that," said Bigbie.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - In an effort to restore fans' confidence in the game, Major League Baseball announced yesterday a tougher policy on steroids and performance-enhancing drugs that calls for every player to be tested at least once a year and for punishment of first-time offenders. "I've been saying for some time that my goal for this industry is zero tolerance regarding steroids," said baseball commissioner Bud Selig. "The agreement [with the players union] ... is an important step toward achieving that goal.