Randy Jones, the left-hander who won the Cy Young Award with the San Diego Padres in 1976 during a 10-year major league career, has died. He was 75.

The Padres announced Wednesday that Jones died Tuesday, without disclosing a location or cause.

Jones pitched eight seasons for San Diego and two for the New York Mets, going 100-123 with a 3.42 ERA. He still holds the Padres franchise records with 253 starts, 71 complete games, 18 shutouts and 1,766 innings pitched.

Jones was one of the majors’ best pitchers in 1975 and 1976, earning two All-Star selections and becoming the first player to win the Cy Young for the Padres, who began play as an expansion team in 1969.

He finished second in Cy Young voting behind Tom Seaver in 1975 after going 20-12 with an NL-leading 2.24 ERA for a San Diego team that won just 71 games.

Jones won the award one year later, winning 22 games for a 73-win team while pitching 315 1/3 innings over 40 starts, including 25 complete games — all tops in the majors. When he pitched, the still-young Padres experienced a surge in attendance from fans who appreciated his everyman stature and resourceful pitching skills. And he made the cover of Sports Illustrated.

He earned the save in the 1975 All-Star Game, and he got the victory for the NL in 1976. He never regained his top form after injuring his arm during his final start of 1976, but he remained a major league starter until 1982 with the Mets.

Jones was a ground ball specialist who relied on deception and control instead of velocity, leading to his “Junkman” nickname. His career statistics reflect a bygone era of baseball: He started 285 games and pitched 1,933 career innings in his 10-year career but recorded only 735 career strikeouts, including just 93 in his Cy Young season.

“Randy was a cornerstone of our franchise for over five decades,” the Padres said in a statement. “His impact and popularity only grew in his post-playing career, becoming a tremendous ambassador for the team and a true fan favorite. Crossing paths with RJ and talking baseball or life was a joy for everyone fortunate enough to spend time with him. Randy was committed to San Diego, the Padres and his family. He was a giant in our lives and our franchise history.”

Born in Orange County, Jones returned to San Diego County after his playing career ended and became a face of the Padres franchise at games and in the community. A barbecue restaurant bearing his name was established at the Padres’ former home, Qualcomm Stadium, and later moved to Petco Park along with the team.

Jones announced in 2017 that he had throat cancer, likely a result of his career-long use of chewing tobacco. He announced he was cancer-free in 2018.

Jones’ No. 35 was retired by the Padres in 1997, and he joined the team’s Hall of Fame in 1999.

ESPN and Major League Baseball have a reworked deal that includes out-of-market streaming rights while NBC and Netflix will air games as part of a new three-year media rights agreement announced Wednesday.

Commissioner Rob Manfred also was able to maximize rights for the Home Run Derby and Wild Card Series.

NBC/Peacock will become the new home of “Sunday Night Baseball” and the Wild Card round while Netflix will have the Home Run Derby and two additional games.

The three deals will average nearly $800 million per year. ESPN will still pay $550 million while the NBC deal is worth $200 million and Netflix $50 million.

ESPN, which has carried baseball since 1990, loses postseason games and the Home Run Derby, but becomes the rights holder for MLB.TV, which will be available on the ESPN app.

“This new agreement with ESPN marks a significant evolution in our more than 30-year relationship,” Manfred said in a statement. “Bringing MLB.TV to ESPN’s new app while maintaining a presence on linear television reflects a balanced approach to the shifts taking place in the way that fans watch baseball and gives MLB a meaningful presence on an important destination for fans of all sports.”

ESPN also gets the in-market streaming rights for the six teams whose games are produced by MLB — the San Diego Padres, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Guardians, Minnesota Twins and Seattle Mariners.

“This fan-friendly agreement allows us to showcase the great sport of baseball on both a local and national level, while prioritizing our streaming future,” ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in a statement. “MLB.TV is a coveted, must-have companion for passionate MLB fans all over the country, and it will be strongly complemented by our national game package and in-market team rights — all within the ESPN App.”

Even though ESPN no longer has “Sunday Night Baseball,” it will have 30 games, primarily on weeknights and in the summer months.

MLB is the second league that has its out-of-market digital package available in the U.S. on ESPN’s platform. The NHL moved its package to ESPN in 2021.

NBC, which celebrates its 100th anniversary next year, has a long history with baseball, albeit not much recently. The network carried games from 1939 through 1989. It was part of the short-lived Baseball Network with ABC in 1994 and ’95 and then aired playoff games from 1996 through 2000.

Its first game will be on March 26 when the defending two-time champion Los Angeles Dodgers host the Diamondbacks.

The 25 Sunday night games will air mostly on NBC with the rest on the new NBC Sports Network. All will stream on Peacock.

The first “Sunday Night Baseball” game on NBC will be April 12 with the next one in May after the NBA playoffs.

The addition of baseball games gives NBC a year-around night of sports on Sunday nights. It has had NFL games on Sunday night since 2006 and will debut an NBA Sunday night slate in February.

NBC will also have a prime-time game on Labor Day night.

The Sunday early-afternoon games also return to Peacock, which had them in 2022 and ’23. The early-afternoon games will lead into a studio Whip-Around Show before the Sunday night game.

NBC/Peacock will also do the Major League Futures game during All-Star week and coverage of the first round of the MLB amateur draft.

Netflix’s baseball deals are in alignment with its strategy of going for big events in a major sport. The streamer will have an NFL Christmas doubleheader this season for the second straight year.

Besides the Home Run Derby, Netflix will have the first game of the season on March 25 when three-time AL MVP Aaron Judge and the New York Yankees visit the San Francisco Giants. It also has the Home Run Derby and MLB at Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, on Aug. 13 when Minnesota faces Philadelphia. Netflix will stream an MLB special event game each year.

The negotiations around the other deals were complicated due to the fact that MLB was also trying not to slight two of its other rights holders. MLB receives an average of $729 million from Fox and $470 million from Turner Sports per year under deals which expire after the 2028 season.

Fox’s Saturday nights have been mainly sports the past couple years with a mix of baseball, college football, college basketball and motorsports.

Apple TV has had “Friday Night Baseball” since 2022.

The deals also set up Manfred for future negotiations. He would like to see MLB take a more national approach to its rights instead of a large percentage of its games being on regional sports networks.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

BLACKSBURG, Va. — A year before Virginia Tech came as close as it ever has to winning a national championship, it installed an empty trophy case in its football facility. The idea, the program’s leadership believed, was that the case would eventually be filled. Frank Beamer had built the Hokies into a power, Michael Vick turned the program into a national brand, and championships were sure to follow.

As the years passed, the empty case instead became something of a punchline to mark Virginia Tech’s slow fall from the upper echelon of college football to a middle-tier ACC team to an afterthought. The case was removed in 2014, and things have gotten only worse, culminating with this year’s 3-7 campaign in which the school fired coach Brent Pry after three games.

On Wednesday, Virginia Tech took what athletic director Whit Babcock and others said is the first major step back up the mountain, announcing the hiring of James Franklin as the Hokies’ new coach.

“Does it look, feel, smell and operate like a big-time program?” Franklin said of his plans for Virginia Tech. “All those things need to be in place. … I think the previous coaches here were in some challenging situations. That’s the truth of it. There’s some things that we’re going to have to look at, and it’s not just James Franklin. It’s the marketing office, the ticketing office. Everybody’s got to take some time and look in the mirror and say, ‘Are we operating like a big-time program?'”

A year ago, Franklin had Penn State on the doorstep of the national championship game. By October, after a three-game losing streak, he had been fired. He largely avoided discussion of his 12-year stint at Penn State aside from acknowledging his dismissal came as a surprise, but he said the lessons taken from building the Nittany Lions into a consistent power will inform his approach at Virginia Tech.

That’s part of what led him here, he said.

Former Virginia Tech defensive coordinator Bud Foster had reached out to Franklin the day after he was fired at Penn State to offer consolation but also, Foster said, “to remind him we had a job opening.”

Foster and other Virginia Tech personnel gave Franklin a hard sell that included a detailed vision for the future of the program, including a plan approved in September by the school’s board of visitors that would add $229 million to athletics funding.

“They already had a really good plan put together of what it looks like to be successful in today’s college football,” Franklin said. “Not only in the ACC. That’s a mistake people make. Sometimes they benchmark only on their conference. The reality is we should benchmark nationally. If we truly have the expectations and the standards of where we want to go, then our commitment must match those expectations.”

Franklin’s inability to win a national championship at Penn State is ultimately what cost him the job. He won 104 games with the Nittany Lions and went to six New Year’s Six bowls or playoff games since 2016, but he was 4-21 against top-10 opponents and 1-18 against top-five foes as a head coach.

For Virginia Tech, the long-term goal might be to topple those powers, but the immediate need is to rebuild a program that has gone from a perennial 10-win team to one that has played for just one ACC title in the past 15 years and is 30-33 in conference games since 2018.

In the early days after Pry was fired, Hokies alum Bruce Arians and others involved in the coaching search had preached a plan to “modernize” the athletic department, including hiring a strong general manager in the mold of Andrew Luck at Stanford. But on Wednesday, Babcock appeared to acknowledge the road map for the program’s future was entirely in the hands of Franklin.

“A lot will depend on who Coach Franklin brings with him,” said Babcock, whose own future at Virginia Tech appeared on shakier ground before the Franklin hire. “If he has in mind someone who he’d like to be the general manager, that’s up to him. If he brings in a number of people who are great at player evaluation, and maybe we add some data analytics or rev share people. It’s really taking what we already do as a football staff and enhancing it.”

Franklin repeatedly said he appreciated the school’s commitment to football and gushed over a close relationship he had developed with Babcock over the past month as the two discussed the job opening.

He also said he arrives clear-eyed about the challenge ahead. Pry, who went 16-24 in parts of four years at Virginia Tech, was a Franklin protégé who worked as an assistant coach on Franklin’s staffs at Vanderbilt and Penn State before coming to Blacksburg. Franklin was emotional discussing his relationship with Pry but said he had frank conversations with him about the job.

“I didn’t really want anybody to sugarcoat it because none of these places are perfect,” Franklin said. “I’m not perfect. Let’s just talk about what are the strengths, what are the advantages, what are the challenges. And Brent was very, very transparent.”

Still, the ultimate vision for the program is in Franklin’s hands, a point he emphasized Wednesday.

“My job is to hold the standard for everybody,” Franklin said. “The players, the coaches, the administration, and be willing to have some tough conversations when necessary.”