Blue Jays shuffling back to Buffalo starting June 1

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The Toronto Blue Jays are returning to their home away from home, Buffalo, New York, starting in June. And this time, they’ll have a limited number of fans in attendance.

Forced from Canada by that government’s coronavirus travel restrictions, the Blue Jays posted a note on their Twitter account on Wednesday saying: “Buffalo, we’re BACK! We’ll see you June 1st.” The words were over a picture of Buffalo’s downtown Sahlen Field, the regular home of the Blue Jays’ Triple-A farm team.

Toronto played its first two homestands at its spring training

ballpark in Dunedin, Florida, and will play its third there from May 14-24. But the Blue Jays did not want to remain in Florida for the hotter, more humid portion of the year.

The Blue Jays return to Buffalo with a homestand that includes games against Miami on June 1-2 and Houston from June 4-6. They’ll travel to Buffalo after a five-game trip that ends in Cleveland.

Tickets in Buffalo will initially be available through the Blue Jays’ 10-game homestand concluding on July 4 before the team considers whether it can return to Toronto following the All-Star break, said Mike Buczkowski, president of Rich Baseball Operations, which owns the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons. The Blue Jays come out of the break opening a six-game homestand starting with Texas on July 16.

The price of tickets have yet to be determined, and scheduled to go on sale next week.

Toronto last played at 49,000-capacity Rogers Centre on Sept. 29, 2019, an 8-3 win over Tampa Bay.

The Blue Jays played home games during the shortened 2020 season in Buffalo and were 17-9 at Sahlen Field. They finished 32-28 to qualify for the playoffs for the first time since 2016 and were swept in losing twice at eventual AL champion Tampa Bay in the wild-card round.

The Jays are 7-4 in Dunedin this season and 7-10 on the road.

NCAA aims for less contact in preseason football practice

The NCAA football oversight committee is preparing to recommend changes to preseason camp that will include fewer fully padded practices and the elimination of some old-school collision drills.

The latest move to scale back contact in practice comes in response to a fiveyear study involving six major college football teams that found more head impact exposure and concussions happened in preseason practice than during games.

The committee’s initial proposal called for at least nine of a team’s 25 preseason practices to be run with players wearing helmets but no other pads, and no more than eight fully-padded, full-contact practices. That proposal went out to NCAA membership for feedback two weeks ago.

The committee is scheduled to meet again Thursday. West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons, the chairman of the committee, said the plan is to hand over a final recommendation for a new preseason model for the Division I Council to consider at its May 19 meeting.

If passed, the new model would go into effect this year.

Lyons refers to the model as 9-8-8: eight days of players practicing in helmets and shoulder pads with no live tackling to the ground, nine days in just helmets and no more than eight full-contact days. The current proposal would also limit full-contact practices to no more than two consecutive days.

New York Rangers abruptly dump team president, GM

The New York Rangers abruptly fired president John Davidson and general manager Jeff Gorton on Wednesday with three games left in the season, a shocking move in the aftermath of the latest controversy for the storied NHL organization.

Chris Drury was named president and GM. He previously served as associate GM under Davidson and Gorton.

”We want to thank JD and Jeff for their contributions to the organization,” owner James Dolan said in a statement. “They are both great hockey professionals who worked hard for the Rangers. However, in order for the team to succeed in the manner our fans deserve, there needs to be a change in leadership.”