BASEBALL
Portland Sea Dogs outfielder Izzy Wilson has been named the Eastern League Player of the Week for the week of July 4-10
Wilson hit .474 (9 for 19) with two doubles, a triple, a home run, seven runs scored and eight RBI in five games for Portland, which has won seven straight. In a 3-1 win Sunday against the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, Wilson was 3 for 4 with a double, two runs scored and an RBI.
Wilson, 24, is the second Sea Dogs’ player to earn Player of the Week honors this season, joining Pedro Castellanos for the week of June 13-19.
The Sea Dogs return to action Tuesday night when they kick off a six-game series with the Somerset Patriots at Hadlock Field.
SOCCER
PREMIER LEAGUE: Cristiano Ronaldo is “not for sale,” Manchester United Manager Erik ten Hag said.
The team is in Thailand for a preseason tour but the 37-year-old forward didn’t make the trip due to an unspecified family issue, amid doubts over his future at the club.
“He’s not with us and it’s due to personal issues,” Ten Hag said at a press conference. ”We are planning with Cristiano Ronaldo for this season so that’s it. I’m looking forward to working with him.”
The Portugal star has reportedly asked to leave United.
“He hasn’t told me this. I have read but what I say is Cristiano is not for sale,” Ten Hag said. “Cristiano is in our plans and we want to (have) success together.”
FOOTBALL
NFL: Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been added to the new Broncos’ ownership group.
Rob Walton announced the inclusion of Rice in a statement issued on behalf of the Walton-Penner family ownership group. The group agreed to buy the franchise from the Pat Bowlen Trust last month for a reported $4.65 billion. It’s pending approval by the NFL..
Rice has strong ties to the Denver community. She received her undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from the University of Denver.
The former provost at Stanford University, Rice served as Secretary of State under President George W. Bush from 2005-09. She’s also been on the College Football Playoff selection committee and chaired a commission on college basketball.
• The Pittsburgh Steelers announced that the organization has ended its longtime partnership with Heinz, the formerly Pittsburgh-based food company that had served as the title sponsor for the NFL franchise’s home stadium on the city’s North Shore since it opened in 2001.
The 68,400-seat venue will be known as Acrisure Stadium after the Steelers reached a 15-year sponsorship agreement with the Michigan-based financial tech company. Financial details were not disclosed.
Heinz initially signed a 20-year sponsorship agreement with the Steelers that was scheduled to end after the 2020 season. The two sides came to terms on a one-year extension that ran through 2021 but Heinz opted not to pursue a new deal.
Sports Business Journal reported in 2019 that Heinz’s time as the stadium’s sponsor was running out, primarily because the company – which dates back to Western Pennsylvania in the late 1860s – was acquired by Kraft in 2015 and moved most of its business offices to Chicago.
The Steelers moved from Three Rivers Stadium to Heinz Field in time for the 2001 season. The venue next to the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers also serves as the home of the University of Pittsburgh football team.
• The 49ers have two weeks of summer vacation left before they report to training camp. Whether Jimmy Garoppolo will be with the team on July 26 in Santa Clara remains to be seen.
General Manager John Lynch and Coach Kyle Shanahan have been clear since the end of San Francisco’s playoff run that their intention this offseason was to trade Garoppolo and install Trey Lance as the 49ers’ starting quarterback. Garoppolo’s spring shoulder surgery complicated that effort but with training camps fast approaching, the trade market is reportedly expected to heat up.
According to Tom Pelissero of NFL Network, the “expectation around the league” is that the 49ers will trade Garoppolo elsewhere before July ends.
• Former Dallas Cowboys running back Marion Barber III died of heat stroke, police said.
In a statement, police in the Dallas suburb of Frisco said the Collin County medical examiner had ruled Barber’s death an accident. A police spokesman provided no further elaboration on the circumstances of the 38-year-old’s death, and the medical examiner’s office did not immediately respond to a message from The Associated Press.
Police making a welfare check on June 1 found the 38-year-old Barber dead at a Frisco apartment that he was believed to have been leasing.
OLYMPICS
VOLLEYBALL: A former Olympic volleyball player was attacked Friday in downtown Los Angeles when a man threw a metal object at her face in an assault that fractured multiple bones in her face and left one of her eyes swollen shut, the athlete said in videos posted to social media.
Kim Glass, a silver medalist at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, had been leaving a lunch on Friday afternoon when she saw a man run up with something in his hand. He was on the other side of a car, in the street, when he threw the object – what Glass believes might have been a metal pipe or bolt — at her face.
“He just like looked at me with some pretty hateful eyes,” she said in videos posted to Instagram. “It happened so fast, he literally flung it from the street, he was not even close to me at all.”
Bystanders restrained the man — identified by police as Semeon Tesfamariam, 51 – until officers arrived to take him into custody.
TRACK AND FIELD
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS: Francine Niyonsaba withdrew from the world championships with a foot injury, just when she looked to be a good bet for her first major medal in the 5,000 meters after being forced to switch to long-distance events by the contentious testosterone rules.
Niyonsaba said on Instagram she had signs of a stress fracture a month ago and, although she was almost fully recovered, she missed to much training. She said she was “extremely sorry” to withdraw.
Burundi’s Niyonsaba is a former Olympic and worlds silver medalist in the 800 meters but was barred from that event by regulations governing athletes with intersex conditions known as 46,XY differences in sex development.
Those are the same rules that have kept South Africa’s two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya out of the 800 for the last three years.
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