Deion Sanders won’t have a hard time making Colorado‘s rivalry game this week against Colorado State feel “personal.”
Rams coach Jay Norvell took a shot at Sanders’ habit of wearing a hat and/or sunglasses during news conferences, saying Wednesday during his weekly radio show: “I don’t care if they hear this in Boulder. I told them [ESPN] — I took my hat off, and I took my glasses off. I said, ‘When I talk to grown-ups, I take my hat and my glasses off. That’s what my mother taught me.'”
The comments drew applause from the live audience and the show’s host, Colorado State football radio voice Brian Roth, and it didn’t take long for the remarks to make their way to Sanders.
In a video titled “Coach Prime & The CU Buffs Responds to Lil Bro,” posted Thursday to YouTube by Well Off Media, which is run by Deion Sanders Jr., the Colorado coach is shown addressing his team at practice.
“I’m minding my own business watching some film, trying to get ready, trying to get out here and be the best coach that I could be, and I look up and I read some bull junk that they had said about us, once again,” Sanders told the team. “Why would you want to talk about us when we don’t talk about nobody? All we do is go out here, work our butts off and do our job on Saturday. But when they give us ammunition, they done messed around and made it [personal].
“It was just gonna be a good game and they done messed around and made it personal. It was gonna be a great task — a battle of Colorado — but they done messed around and made it [personal].”
Later in the video, Sanders is shown on a golf cart at practice, saying, “Now he’s messing with my mama,” referring to Norvell’s comment about how he was raised.
In his weekly show, Norvell initially said he did not “really want to talk about [Sanders] right now.” But as the interview progressed, Norvell opened up about the attention this week’s rivalry matchup has generated, including a visit from ESPN’s “College GameDay.”
As part of GameDay’s visit, Norvell and multiple Rams players did on-camera interviews.
“It was great. I loved it,” Norvell said of the added attention. “But our kids came out of those [interviews] really with a chip on their shoulder. They’re tired of all that stuff. They really are tired of it.
“They’re [Colorado] not gonna like us no matter what we say or do. It doesn’t matter. So, let’s go up there and play. That’s just how I feel about it.”
Sanders, who is in his first season as Colorado’s coach, has made it clear over the past two weeks that the Buffaloes have been keeping tabs on what has been said about the former NFL star and his program.
“I keep the receipts,” Sanders said after the Buffaloes’ season-opening victory against TCU.
Sanders told his team last week that their game against Nebraska was “personal.” Shedeur Sanders, the Buffaloes’ quarterback and son of Deion Sanders, said after Colorado’s 36-14 victory that he didn’t respect Nebraska coach Matt Rhule because, in part, “[Rhule] said a lot of things about my pops, about the program.”
The commentary about the Buffaloes was not all negative from Norvell, who was complimentary of the job Sanders has done turning Colorado around so quickly. Norvell also highlighted Shedeur Sanders’ play.
“They got a good football team, and their quarterback has been the difference,” Norvell said. “He’s playing at a very high level. We’re gonna have to slow him down.”
Norvell was even more complimentary of Coach Sanders earlier in the week during his weekly news conference.
“Deion Sanders has had a lot of public critics. I’m not one of them,” Norvell told reporters, according to The Coloradoan. “I really respect all head coaches and the sacrifices they’ve had to make to become head coaches, and I appreciate the path they have to go through to get there — especially African American coaches. I was happy to see Deion get his opportunity. I had to wait a long time to get mine.”
Colorado (2-0) already has doubled its win total from last season and enters Saturday’s Rocky Mountain Showdown game ranked No. 18 in the Associated Press poll. Colorado State (0-1) lost its season opener, 50-24, to Washington State.
The Buffaloes and Rams last played Aug. 30, 2019, and Colorado has won five straight in the series. The Rams’ last victory over the Buffaloes was in 2014, and they have lost 23 straight games against AP Top 25 teams. Their last road win over a ranked team was in 1998.
Colorado was a 23-point favorite over Colorado State at Caesars Sportsbook on Thursday afternoon.
MILWAUKEE — Milwaukee’s Joey Ortiz went on the 10-day injured list with a strained left hamstring Friday, leaving the NL Central-leading Brewers without their starting shortstop.
The Brewers also reinstated first baseman/outfielder Jake Bauers from the injured list and sent outfielder Jackson Chourio to a rehabilitation assignment with Triple-A Nashville.
Ortiz left a 4-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs on Thursday after hurting himself while grounding out in the fifth inning. Manager Pat Murphy said he has been told it’s a low-grade strain, an indication that Ortiz’s stay on the IL might not be too long.
Ortiz, 27, is hitting .233 with seven homers, 43 RBIs and 11 steals in 125 games. He has batted .343 with an .830 OPS in August.
“I felt like I was finally kind of getting a groove going, especially offensively, that I was starting to swing the bat as I feel I can,” Ortiz said. “Things happen. It’s baseball. It’s going to happen. I’ve just got to do what I can to get back.”
Murphy said Andruw Monasterio will be the Brewers’ primary shortstop while Ortiz is out. Monasterio, 28, has hit .254 with two homers and 11 RBIs in 43 games.
Bauers, 29, was dealing with a left shoulder impingement and last played in the majors on July 18. Bauers is hitting .197 with five homers and 18 RBIs in 59 games. He had gone just 2-for-23 in July while dealing with the shoulder issue before finally going on the injured list.
“Since April, May, I’ve been dealing with it,” Bauers said.
Chourio, 21, hasn’t played since straining his right hamstring while running out a triple in a 9-3 victory over the Cubs on July 29.
“He’s got to be able to get comfortable standing on the diamond back-to-back days,” Murphy said. “He’s got to be comfortable playing all nine (innings) in the outfield back-to-back days, because you can’t bring him back here and then just [go] zero to 100.”
Chourio is hitting .276 with 17 homers, 67 RBIs and 18 steals in 106 games.
NEW YORK — The Boston Red Sox are pulling Walker Buehler from their rotation and sending the struggling right-hander to the bullpen.
“It’s going to be his new role,” manager Alex Cora said Friday before the Red Sox continued a four-game series with the Yankees. “We’ll figure out how it goes, maybe one inning, multiple innings. Whatever it is, we don’t know yet.”
Buehler’s next scheduled start would have been the opener of a four-game series in Baltimore on Monday. The Red Sox did not immediately announce who would take his turn. Right-hander Richard Fitts, currently with the Red Sox, and left-hander Kyle Harrison, who is at Triple A after being acquired in the Rafael Devers trade, are options.
“It’s obviously disappointing,” Buehler said. “It’s the first time in my career that I’ve been in a situation like that, but at the end of the day, the organization and, to a lesser extent, myself, kind of think it’s probably the right thing for our group and it gives me an opportunity to kind of reset in some ways.”
In his first season with the Red Sox after seven seasons with the Dodgers, Buehler is 7-7 with a 5.40 ERA in 22 starts and has allowed a career-worst 21 homers. He was 4-1 with a 4.28 ERA in his first six starts but is 3-6 with a 6.37 ERA over his past 16 outings. He also missed two weeks in May because of bursitis in his pitching shoulder.
“He’s been very frustrated with the way he has pitched,” Cora said. “I still believe in him. He’s a big part of what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Buehler last started in Wednesday’s 11-inning loss to the Orioles and allowed two runs in four innings while throwing 75 pitches. It was the ninth time this season he did not complete five innings.
After the game, he didn’t fault Cora for the quick hook.
“At some point, the leash I’m given has been earned,” he told reporters. “I think they did the right thing in coming to get me before the [Gunnar] Henderson at-bat. Our bullpen has been great. For me, personally, I think everything went according to plan until the fifth. You go double, four-pitch walk. The way I’ve been throwing it, it all kind of makes sense.”
Buehler also issued 54 walks in 110 innings this season for a career-high 4.4 walks per nine innings.
The Red Sox signed Buehler to a one-year, $21.05 million contract in December. The deal contains an additional $2.5 million in performance bonuses. The Red Sox also gave Buehler a $3.05 million signing bonus and includes a $25 million mutual option for 2026 with a $3 million buyout.
Buehler was 1-6 with a 5.38 ERA and pitched 75⅓ innings in the 2024 regular season for the Dodgers after missing all of 2023 recovering from Tommy John surgery. He helped the Dodgers win their second championship since 1988 by going 1-1 with a 3.60 ERA and pitched a perfect ninth for the save in Game 5 of the World Series against the Yankees.
Buehler’s only previous relief experience was eight appearances as a rookie in 2017. His last relief appearance was June 28, 2018, when he allowed a run in five innings after missing time because of a rib injury.
A two-time All Star in 2019 and 2021, Buehler is 54-29 in 153 appearances. He finished fourth in voting for the National League Cy Young Award in 2021 after going 16-4 with a 2.47 ERA in 33 starts when he threw 207⅔ innings.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
ARLINGTON, Texas — Hall of Fame third baseman Adrian Beltré now has a statue in Arlington to go with his bust in Cooperstown.
The Texas Rangers unveiled a life-sized bronze statue of the first-ballot Hall of Famer on Friday, one with him posed hitting a home run with his knee on the ground like he did so often in his career. Beltré is the third player to have a statue outside the team’s stadium, joining two other Hall of Famers, strikeout king Nolan Ryan and 14-time All-Star catcher Iván “Pudge” Rodríguez.
Beltré spent the last eight of his 21 big league seasons with Texas, the team he played with the longest. He retired after the 2018 season, had his No. 29 jersey retired by the Rangers the following year and was enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame last summer.
The statue is situated where it appears that Beltré is glancing toward the old ballpark that still stands across the street. It was there that he became the first player from the Dominican Republic to reach 3,000 career hits on July 30, 2017, two years after hitting his 400th homer. That is also where he had all three of his MLB record-tying three career cycles, one as a visitor with Seattle in 2008, and two more with the Rangers, on Aug. 24, 2012, and Aug. 3, 2015.
The dedication came before the opener of a three-game series against the Cleveland Guardians. The Rangers on Saturday will present Beltré with a smaller version of his bronze statue and he will catch a ceremonial first pitch thrown by Mike Tabor, the Texas artist who sculpted it, and the first 20,000 fans entering the ballpark before that game will get replica versions.