Baseball

Rupert Cornwell reports on the Japanese import who is taking America by storm

The outfielder Darryl Strawberry, serving a drug suspension and under house arrest for income tax evasion, has agreed to sign for the New York Yankees and will report to them when his suspension ends on 24 June. After reaching the agreement, Strawberry yesterday dropped a scheduled grievance hearing that was to determine whether the San Francisco Giants improperly released him in February after he failed a drug test.

BASEBALL

BASEBALL: The Boys of Summer today begin a season they may already have ruined. Rupert Cornwell reports from Washington

Rupert Cornwell reports from Miami on the turmoil engulfing baseball as minor-league players begin training for the new major-league season

Representatives of striking Major League players and owners resumed negotiations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, yesterday with no progress made toward ending the six-month old strike other than to hold a "civilised" meeting.

'LET it rain, let it rain,' Rafael Palmeiro implored to no one in particular as he strolled out to take batting practice. The wish of the Baltimore Orioles' dollars 5m-a-year hitter would be granted. It did not just rain. It poured. On what might well prove to be the last night of the 1994 baseball season, the Almighty had signalled he, too, disapproved of The Strike.

(First Edition)

The number of votes - a record - that Ken Griffey Jnr of the Seattle Mariners received in the annual poll for baseball's All-Star game.

WHERE have all the baseball poets gone, now that we need them at the opening of another season? They are the ones who write about the game as though it were a pastoral frolic in the summer haze, an earthly manifestation of some heavenly process miraculously bestowed on America and played by fine, upstanding citizens, all of whom are worthy of a place in somebody or other's Hall of Fame.

MICHAEL JORDAN leaves his locker at the far end of the room and pulls up a chair to trash-talk over the pre-game buffet with some of the brothers in the Chicago White Sox's spring training clubhouse in Sarasota, Florida.

MICHAEL JORDAN, the former Chicago Bulls basketball player, yesterday joined Birmingham Barons baseball team, a Third Division development team of the Chicago White Sox.

THEY had the coldest Boxing Day in Ontario for 75 years. I wouldn't have minded so much, except that I was there at the time. Yes, for the past two weeks, throughout the Christmas period, I have been staying with relatives in the countryside near Toronto, and I can confirm that everything they say about Canada is true.