Red Sox interview Beattie for general manager job
Jim Beattie, a former executive with the Seattle Mariners and Baltimore Orioles, met Friday at Fenway Park with Red Sox president Larry Lucchino about the team’s vacant general manager position.
He’s the fourth candidate interviewed since the departure of Theo Epstein last month.
Beattie said if chosen for the Red Sox job, he’d try to carry on some of the success the team has had in the past rather than make wholesale changes.
Washington general manager Jim Bowden, Minnesota assistant GM Wayne Krivsky and Atlanta assistant GM Dayton Moore interviewed with Lucchino and Red Sox chairman Tom Warner on Wednesday at a hotel near the general managers’ meetings in California.
Boston wants to hire a replacement by the winter meetings, scheduled for Dec. 5-8.
•John Shelby was hired by the Pirates as a first base and outfield coach, the third member of Jim Tracy’s staff with the Los Angeles Dodgers to join him in Pittsburgh.
•Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Javier Vazquez filed a formal trade demand, giving the team until March 15 to deal him.
BOXING
Judge orders Tyson to trial
Mike Tyson was ordered by a judge to return to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in March to face trial for allegedly assaulting a cameraman in a nightclub.
If found guilty, the former heavyweight champion could be fined or sentenced to community service in Brazil, the Globo Online news service reported.
Tyson did not speak to reporters at the courthouse.
COLLEGE ATHLETICS
Illinois loses mascot appeal
Illinois lost its appeal of the ban on the university mascot and will remain on a list of schools prohibited from hosting NCAA postseason events after February.
The NCAA will allow Illinois to keep its “Illini” and “Fighting Illini” nicknames. The university contended those nicknames derived from the name of the state.
The governing body, however, said Chief Illiniwek remains a “hostile and abusive” image of American Indians. The mascot is a student dressed in buckskins and headdress who dances at halftimes of home football, basketball and volleyball games. The tradition began in 1926.
MISCELLANY
Ohno wins 1,500-meter race
Olympic champion Apolo Anton Ohno won the 1,500-meter race at a World Cup short track speedskating meet at Bormio, Italy, a key competition leading to next year’s Winter Games.
American Ohno, the gold medalist at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, won in 2 minutes, 27.716 seconds.
Results from the competitions will be combined with those from next week’s World Cup meet in The Hague, Netherlands, to determine how many skaters from each country will qualify for the Turin Games in February. Each nation can win up to three spots in each event.
•Weightlifter Shannon Hartnett was suspended for two years for testing positive for byproducts of a steroid, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
Hartnett, 40, of Sausalito, Calif., tested positive for metabolites of stanozolol during a May 7 test at the U.S. Weightlifting National Championships in Cleveland.
•The Western Athletic Conference approved New Mexico State, in Las Cruces, N.M., to host the 2007 and 2008 men’s and women’s basketball tournament.