BASEBALL

Boston Red Sox left-hander Chris Sale will continue his rehab assignment with a start Thursday night at Hadlock Field, pitching for the Portland Sea Dogs against the New Hampshire Fisher Cats.

Sale made two rehab starts for the Sea Dogs last season as he prepared to return from Tommy John surgery. He tossed 7 1/3 innings, allowing two runs on six hits while walking one and striking out 15.

Sale has yet to pitch for the Red Sox this season because of a stress fracture in his right rib cage.

• Tyler Dearden drove in three runs, and David Hamilton was 4 for 4 with three runs scored as the Sea Dogs earned a 6-5 win Wednesday night against the Fisher Cats.

Portland jumped out to an early with three runs in the second, then added a run in the third and two in the seventh.

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Josh Taylor, on a rehab assignment from the Red Sox, needed only 12 pitches to get through a perfect first inning. Brian Van Belle took over from Taylor and picked up the win, striking out 10 in five innings.

NECBL: Sanford erased a 4-2 deficit on RBI doubles by Quinn McDaniel and Matthew Polk in the ninth inning, and Grant Knipp led off the 10th with a two-run homer to give the Mainers a 6-4 win over the North Shore Navigators in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Calvin Hewitt was 3 for 5 for the Mainers. Knipp, Polk and David Bermudez each had two hits.

Brian Craven got the win, throwing two scoreless innings in relief.

HIGH SCHOOLS

TRACK AND FIELD: Standout sprinter Andrew Farr of Gorham has been chosen as Gatorade Maine boys’ track and field athlete of the year.

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Farr, a senior, was the New England 200-meter champion and finished second in both the 100 and 400. He won all three events at the Class A state championships.

BASKETBALL

WNBA: Candace Parker had a season-high 25 points, 11 rebounds and seven assists, Kahleah Copper scored 15 points and Chicago beat the visiting Connecticut Sun 91-83 for the Sky’s fourth straight victory.

Parker made a no-look pass to Kahleah Copper with 33.5 seconds left before halftime to become the eighth player in WNBA history to reach 1,500 career assists. Parker is the only player to eclipse 6,000 points, 3,000 rebounds and 1,500 assists in a career.

SOCCER

ITALY: Romelu Lukaku will again look to revive his career in Italy after completing a sensational return to Inter Milan on a one-year loan deal, just 10 months after joining Chelsea for $135 million as the seventh most expensive soccer player ever at the time.

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Inter is reportedly paying Chelsea 8 million euros ($8.4 million) – plus up to 2 million euros in team-related bonuses – for Lukaku. The 29-year-old forward will go down as one of the biggest transfer flops in Premier League history and reportedly took a pay cut to secure his return to Italy after a miserable second spell at Chelsea.

COLLEGES

FOOTBALL: Mississippi State Coach Mike Leach signed a two-year contract extension through 2025.

MSU football spokesman Brandon Langlois confirmed the extension, which was initially reported by several media outlets. The third-year coach’s base annual salary increases from $5 million to $5.5 million under the new deal.

Known for his high-octane Air Raid offensive scheme – and for being outspoken – Leach is 11-13 in two seasons at MSU and 150-103 over a 20-year head coaching career with stops at Washington State and Texas Tech.

AUTO RACING

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FORMULA ONE: Former Formula One champion Nelson Piquet apologized to Lewis Hamilton, saying the racial term he used about the Mercedes driver was “ill thought out” but was not meant to be offensive.

The 69-year-old Brazilian has faced heavy criticism this week over comments he made in Portuguese last November on a podcast where he referred to Hamilton as “neguinho,” which means “little Black guy.”

“What I said was ill thought out, and I make no defense for it, but I will clarify that the term used is one that has widely and historically been used colloquially in Brazilian Portuguese as a synonym for ‘guy’ or ‘person’ and was never intended to offend,” Piquet, who won three F1 titles in the 1980s, said in the statement. “I would never use the word I have been accused of in some translations. I strongly condemn any suggestion that the word was used by me with the aim of belittling a driver because of his skin color.”

HOCKEY

MEMORIAL CUP: Vincent Sevigny and Cam MacDonald scored early and the host Saint John Sea Dogs won the Memorial Cup – the championship of Canadian major junior hockey – beating the Hamilton Bulldogs, 6-3, in Saint John, New Brunswick.

Saint John won its second Memorial Cup title in four appearances.


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