Baseball | featured news

Six-figure bids are expected when a rare 148-year-old baseball card discovered at a rural Maine yard sale is auctioned. Saco River Auction Co. in Biddeford is holding an auction Wednesday evening that includes a card depicting the Brooklyn Atlantics amateur baseball club. The card isn't the same as a modern-day baseball card, which became common in the 1880s. Rather, it's an original photograph from 1865 mounted on a card, showing nine players and a manager.

Major League Baseball, which has been investigating the link of performance-enhancing drugs to players with South Florida ties for much of the last year, may be faced with its most significant doping case since the BALCO scandal rocked the sport one decade ago. All-Stars Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, pitcher Gio Gonzalez of the Washington Nationals, Nelson Cruz of the Texas Rangers and Melky Cabrera of the Toronto Blue Jays, along with other MLB players and athletes in other sports, were strongly connected to performance-enhancing drug use in an investigative report by the Miami New Times.

Earl Weaver, the fiery Hall of Fame manager who won 1,480 games with the Baltimore Orioles seemingly was engaged in nearly as many arguments with umpires, has died. He was 82.

Atlanta's new BP caps are an ugly version of retro... Atlanta's new batting practice cap features the team's old "screaming savage" logo -- a Mohawked Native American with a feather in his head engaged in a tribal yell. The logo was part of the team's uniform from 1967 to 1989. The team got rid of mascot Chief Noc-A-Homa (wait for it ...) two years earlier.

Click to view the best sports pictures from the past year.

Outfielder Josh Hamilton and the Los Angeles Angels have finalized their $125 million, five-year contract.

Kevin Youkilis and the Yankees have finalized their $12 million, one-year contract, giving New York a third baseman for the first half of next season while Alex Rodriguez recovers from hip surgery....

The New York Mets, saddled by bad contracts, poor performance and financial woes in recent years, apparently never wavered in identifying David Wright as the player to help lead them out of this dark period. Early Friday, that notion became official when the club finalized a $138 million contract extension with their third baseman and all-time hits leader that will keep him in Flushing for the next eight years.

Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa are listed on the baseball Hall of Fame ballot for the first time, setting up an election sure to become a referendum on the Steroids Era.

Marvin Miller headed the union effort that allowed players to choose new teams when their contracts ended, ushering in an era of multimillion-dollar free-agent deals. Miller, who ran the Major League Baseball Players Assn. from 1966 to 1983, was 95.