NASCAR’s Championship Weekend is headed back to the racetrack it called home for nearly two decades, but it won’t stay long, as the sanctioning body moves to a new rotation scheduling model for its season finale.

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced that Homestead-Miami Speedway, which hosted the conclusion of the NASCAR postseason from 2002 to 2019, will do so once again in 2026, as NASCAR’s three national series – Craftsman Trucks, Xfinity and Cup — crown champions over a three-day weekend, Nov. 6-8.

But the return to South Florida will only be the first year of the annual rotation of NASCAR Championship Weekend, to be held at to-be-determined locations each fall. The move is inspired by so-called “stick-and-ball” title games such as the Super Bowl, College Football Playoff National Championship and NCAA Final Fours.

In recent years, NASCAR has experimented with moving around its two exhibition events, as the preseason Clash went from Daytona International Speedway, its home 1979-2021, to a short track constructed inside the Los Angeles Coliseum in 2022-23 and Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Feb. 2 of this year. Since 2020, the NASCAR All-Star Race has also rotated, leaving its birthplace and longtime home track Charlotte Motor Speedway to race at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Texas Motor Speedway and the resurrected North Wilkesboro Speedway in North Carolina.

Adding that to NASCAR’s frequent shuffling of its first nine playoff races, it all feels as if it were one big test session for this, an overhaul of the biggest weekend of NASCAR’s year, when its three national champions are crowned.

“Yes, mixing it up, and I think you are going to see different teams and different drivers as we move this championship around,” said Ben Kennedy in a phone conversation with ESPN. He is NASCAR EVP, chief venue & racing innovation officer, great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France, and a former racer in Trucks and Xfinity. “Some are going to rise to the occasion, and others aren’t. It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out. We still want to keep the playoff schedule. We want to keep a lot of that intact. But you’ve seen over the past few years some small nuances and changes we’ve met, we’ve created in it, just to keep that level of unpredictability high.”

This marks a significant departure from NASCAR’s long-established regular-season stock car racing scheduling model. In 2020, the finale weekend was moved from 1.5-mile Homestead-Miami Speedway to the flat, quirky 1-mile Phoenix Raceway amid NASCAR’s fan-driven push toward shorter tracks. It has resided there ever since, slated for this year’s Championship Weekend Oct. 31-Nov. 2.

But before Homestead-Miami’s 18-year stint as Championship Weekend host, Atlanta Motor Speedway was home to the season’s last race for 14 years, the only exception being 2001, when New Hampshire Motor Speedway had its fall date pushed to the end of the Cup Series calendar due to the attacks of 9/11. From 1974 to 1986, the season always ended in Southern California, either on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway clone of Ontario or on the road course of Riverside two racetracks that no longer exist.

Kennedy explained that the details of how tracks will be selected to host Championship Weekend in the post-2026 rotation are being sorted out by a NASCAR industry working group. But he also listed criteria that included a warm weather climate in late fall, adjacency to a large metro area, updated facilities prepared to handle the sport’s crowning events and established racetracks instead of unfamiliar wild cards where teams don’t have at least some history. He also said he did not foresee the roulette wheel-style “plate racing” of Daytona International Speedway or Talladega Superspeedway having a place in the finale, even after they have had previous turns in the postseason, including crucial cutoff races.

There are 28 tracks that host Cup Series events. NASCAR wholly owns 11, including Homestead-Miami and Phoenix. Speedway Motorsports Incorporated owns a dozen facilities. The remaining five are independently owned or are operated by NASCAR in conjunction with other entities. Based on Kennedy’s description of what constitutes warm weather climate (“You could draw a line just a little bit north of the Rockingham [North Carolina] Speedway”) then roughly a quarter of those tracks would seem to be in play for a future Championship Weekend.

“A big part of this is also hearing feedback from the industry, be it teams, drivers, broadcast partners, industry partners and, importantly, the fans,” Kennedy said. “It was the fans who ranked Homestead-Miami Speedway as the No. 1 track that they would like to see the championship at.”

As for Phoenix Raceway, which Kennedy says received $100 million in capital improvements to bolster its role as the championship anchor, will continue to host two Cup Series events, as it has since 2005. It will be included in the Round of 8, essentially the semifinals, of the 2026 NASCAR playoffs, the specific date to be announced with the remainder of next year’s schedule at a later date.

“Phoenix set the bar really high since that weekend moved from here to there,” Homestead-Miami Speedway president Guillermo Santa Cruz said. “But now to kick off this rotation, to be the first one up in this in this new format and, you know, set the pace for it. It’s an honor for us to have it back and to kick it off.”

ARLINGTON, Texas — The Rangers recalled utility man Ezequiel Duran from Triple-A Round Rock on Thursday to fill the 26-man roster spot vacated by outfielder Kevin Pillar.

Pillar was placed on the 10-day injured list with lower back inflammation, retroactive to Sunday, before Wednesday’s game at Boston.

Duran will be in his third stint with the Rangers this season. He hit .345 with four home runs, six doubles, four RBIs and 13 runs scored in 14 games with Round Rock since being optioned by Texas on April 20. He has made 10 starts at shortstop and four starts at third base with Round Rock.

Duran was on Texas’ Opening Day roster for the third straight season and has played all four infield positions over seven games for the Rangers this year. He was 0-for-14 with one RBI. Duran is a .253 career hitter with 22 home runs and 92 RBIs in 279 games across four major league seasons, all with Texas.

The Pirates have fired manager Derek Shelton following a rocky opening month to the season that saw Pittsburgh quickly slip into last place in the National League Central.

General manager Ben Cherington made the announcement Thursday. Bench coach Don Kelly will take over for Shelton, who is the first manager fired across Major League Baseball this season.

The decision comes with Pittsburgh riding a seven-game losing streak that saw its record fall to 12-26 and the team drop 10 games back of the Chicago Cubs in the NL Central. Shelton, hired by Cherington in November 2019 as part of a franchise-wide reset by owner Bob Nutting, went 306-440 in five-plus seasons with the Pirates.

“Derek worked incredibly hard and sacrificed a lot over five-plus years,” Cherington said in a statement. “His family became a big part of the Pirates family, and we will miss that. He’s an incredibly smart, curious, and driven baseball leader. I believe he was the right person for the job when he was hired. I also believe that a change is now necessary. I wish Derek and his family all the best in their next chapter.”

Noting there is “a lot of baseball left to be played,” Nutting said the team needed to “act with a sense of urgency and take the steps necessary to fix this now to get back on track as a team and organization.” He said the first quarter of the season had been “frustrating and painful for all of us.”

The Pirates, ranked 26th out of 30 MLB teams in Opening Day payroll, began the season hoping to contend behind reigning NL Rookie of the Year Paul Skenes. Though the 22-year-old Skenes has been solid and the starting rotation in general has been steady, Pittsburgh’s offense has languished near the bottom of the NL all season, sitting ahead of only the Colorado Rockies in batting average and runs scored.

Pittsburgh is in the middle of a difficult stretch that began with the team getting swept by both San Diego and St. Louis. Pittsburgh’s next nine games are against NL powers Atlanta, the New York Mets and Philadelphia.

Kelly, a former major league player who entered the big leagues with Pittsburgh and is a native of the city, had served in his previous role with the Pirates since 2020.

“Donnie is as respected as any person in our clubhouse and throughout our organization,” Nutting said. “He is a Pirate. He bleeds black and gold. No one is more committed, and no one loves this team or city more than Donnie. He is the right person to manage our team and help get us back on track.”

The Pirates haven’t made the postseason since 2015. That is the second-longest active postseason drought in baseball, ahead of only the Los Angeles Angels, who haven’t reached the playoffs since 2014.

The Pirates gave Shelton, a former minor league catcher, his first major league managing job after he served as a coach in various capacities in Tampa Bay, Toronto and Minnesota.

Cherington tasked him with setting a new foundation for a club that has been an also-ran for the past three decades, save for a brief three-year stretch from 2013 to 2015 in which the Pirates returned to prominence.

The consistently upbeat Shelton oversaw a clubhouse with an incredible amount of churn during his first four seasons as Cherington traded away most of the established major leaguers on the roster — Joe Musgrove, Josh Bell, Jameson Taillon to name a few — to restock the club’s prospect pool.

Pittsburgh won less than 40% of its games in Shelton’s first three seasons before taking a step forward in 2023 when it won 76 games. Skenes’ arrival last May gave the franchise another jolt, and the Pirates were in playoff contention until an August swoon.

The club’s lack of offense in 2024 was its biggest issue. Rather than invest in proven major league talent — the team’s biggest offseason pickups were acquiring first baseman Spencer Horwitz (who is still rehabbing from wrist surgery over the winter) and signing Tommy Pham and Adam Frazier — Cherington instead retooled parts of the coaching staff and scouting department, including firing hitting coach Andy Haines and replacing him with Matt Hague.

Results have not followed. Pittsburgh is near the bottom of the majors in runs (29th), OPS (29th), home runs (28th) and average (27th) with no signs of improvement. The Pirates have scored a total of five runs in their past five games while getting shut out twice.

They are even struggling when Skenes is on the hill. The top pick in the 2023 first-year player draft has a respectable 2.77 ERA in eight starts in 2025, but the Pirates are 3-5 in those games, including a 2-1 loss to St. Louis on Tuesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.