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SAN DIEGO — Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber announced Thursday that the city of San Diego has been handed an expansion franchise, thereby increasing the league to 30 teams.

The news was revealed during an event at Snapdragon Stadium, which is set to be the 35,000-capacity home for the San Diego franchise when it debuts in 2025. MLS’ latest expansion team will be owned by Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation (now the first Native American tribe to co-own a U.S. professional soccer team) and San Diego Padres star Manny Machado.

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“We are thrilled to welcome San Diego to Major League Soccer as our 30th team,” Garber said in a Thursday news release. “For many years we have believed San Diego would be a terrific MLS market due to its youthful energy, great diversity, and the fact that soccer is an essential part of everyday life for so many people. Mohamed Mansour and the Sycuan Tribe have an incredible vision for building a club that will inspire and unite soccer fans throughout the city and region.”

“I am grateful for the opportunity to join the San Diego MLS ownership group,” added Machado in the press release. “I continue to plant roots in this amazing community that means so much to me and build upon my connection with the incredible fans.”

Additional owners include the Zephyr Partners’ Brad Termini and the Right to Dream’s Tom Vernon and Dan Dickinson. Controlled by Mansour’s London-based Man Capital firm, the Right to Dream is a Ghana-based academy that also owns the Danish top flight’s Nordsjaelland. MLS players including the New England Revolution’s Emmanuel Boateng and FC Dallas’ Ema Twumasi are products of the Right to Dream academy.

Additional Right to Dream locations have been built in Denmark and Egypt, with plans for a San Diego-based academy in the future.

“We look forward to introducing Right to Dream’s unique developmental approach and unparalleled soccer expertise to San Diego and MLS by delivering tangible benefits to the community as we look to open doors and identify and nurture talent from across the county and beyond,” said Mansour, who has stated that seven Right to Dream academy graduates took part in the 2022 World Cup.

Tom Penn, former president of LAFC, has been named as CEO for the new MLS franchise, with a name and crest to be revealed at a later date.

The San Diego project recently surpassed Las Vegas in the race for the league’s 30th team. In February, Garber stated that both cities were “the most likely opportunities for 30.” By last month, ESPN reported that San Diego’s group had gained more momentum. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, the expansion fee for the MLS franchise “is in the $500 million neighborhood.”

San Diego will begin playing in MLS nearly three decades after former league commissioner Doug Logan noted in 1996 that the city was a “prime candidate” for expansion. Since then, an increasingly long list of rumors and reports have emerged regarding interested groups that wanted to bring the top flight of the sport to the Southern California city.

In 2018, one year after the Chargers moved from San Diego to Los Angeles, San Diego State University won a local election to redevelop the Mission Valley space that the Chargers once occupied into an extension of its campus that included the soon-to-be developed Snapdragon Stadium. A competing “SoccerCity” measure, led by U.S. men’s national team icon Landon Donovan, aimed to lure the next MLS franchise but ultimately lost the local election.

Snapdragon Stadium was built and opened by August 2022, and it is currently home to SDSU’s football program, Major League Rugby’s San Diego Legion and the National Women’s Soccer League’s San Diego Wave. In September 2022, the Wave broke the NWSL’s single-game attendance record with 32,000 packing the stadium for a regular-season game against Angel City FC. A month later, the Wave set an NWSL playoff attendance record with 26,215 watching a 2-1 win over the Chicago Red Stars at the venue.

After recently hosting a soccer friendly between Liga MX’s Club America and Club Tijuana in March 2023, Snapdragon Stadium will continue to host the sport this summer through a men’s national team exhibition between Mexico and Cameroon on June 10 and a CONCACAF Gold Cup semifinal match on July 12. On July 25, Manchester United will face Wrexham A.F.C. (owned by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney) in a friendly at the Mission Valley venue.

The San Diego Loyal, a local professional side that plays in the de facto men’s second division of professional soccer in the U.S., are reportedly not involved in the MLS project. Led by Donovan as the executive vice president of soccer operations, the team released a statement earlier this month from chairman and owner Andrew Vassiliadis that stated, “We aren’t going anywhere.”

Regarding additional expansion franchises in MLS, Garber has previously hinted that the league could go beyond 30 teams. However, he told ESPN at the event on Thursday that there were no immediate plans for further growth.

“We never say never to anything because, you know, our plan evolves as the market evolves. We never thought we’d be at 24, we never thought we’d be at 26,” he said.

“[But] I don’t think sitting here today that we have any plan in the near future to go beyond 30 teams. We’ve got a lot of work to do to build the league to sort of capture the opportunity that we all see in front of us in the years to come, particularly through 2026, but who knows what the future looks like after that, but nothing in the immediate future for sure.”

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Rays’ 8-run comeback largest in MLB this season

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Rays' 8-run comeback largest in MLB this season

TAMPA, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Rays overcame an eight-run deficit to beat the Baltimore Orioles 12-8 on Wednesday night in the largest comeback in the majors this season.

Tampa Bay matched the biggest comeback in franchise history. The Rays also rallied from eight down in a 10-8 victory over the Los Angeles Angels on Aug. 18, 2012, and in a 10-9 win over the Toronto Blue Jays on July 25, 2009.

It tied the Orioles’ largest blown lead over the past 50 seasons. Baltimore last gave away an eight-run lead on April 28, 2017, against the New York Yankees. The Orioles led that game 9-1 entering the bottom of the sixth inning before losing 14-11 in 10 innings.

Baltimore had an eight-run second inning on Wednesday. Colton Cowser smacked a three-run home run, Cedric Mullins added a solo shot, Gunnar Henderson had an RBI single and Ramón Laureano hit a three-run homer.

Tampa Bay’s Christopher Morel hit an RBI double in the third, and Jake Mangum‘s two-run single cut it to 8-3. Curtis Mead hit a two-out triple in the fourth and scored on a Junior Caminero single. Brandon Lowe‘s two-run homer in the fifth made it 8-8. And Jonathan Aranda had a two-run single in the Rays’ four-run seventh.

Lowe has at least a hit and a run in seven consecutive games, the longest active streak of its kind in the majors. He is batting .464 (13-of-28) with two home runs, five RBIs and eight runs during that span.

Caminero had four hits and two RBIs for the Rays.

Entering Wednesday, teams were 0-134 when trailing by eight or more runs at any point this season.

“It’s a tough game,” Orioles manager Tony Mansolino said. “It really hurts. But tomorrow, we’ll have to bounce back and try to figure out how to win a game.”

Three teams came back from eight runs behind last season in the majors. Pittsburgh was the most recent team to rally from more than that, erasing a nine-run deficit in a 13-12 victory over the Cincinnati Reds on Nov. 23, 2023.

ESPN Research and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Yanks finally score, otherwise sputter in latest loss

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Yanks finally score, otherwise sputter in latest loss

NEW YORK — The good news for the Yankees on Wednesday was they scored a run after 30 consecutive scoreless innings. The bad news was they again didn’t score enough to win.

The Yankees fell to the Los Angeles Angels 3-2 to extend their season-high losing streak to six games. The Angels will look to complete a four-game sweep Thursday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees, whose lead in the AL East has shrunk to 1½ games, will look to emerge from an offensive funk that has produced seven runs in seven games.

“That’s baseball,” Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge said. “We know what we signed up for. You’re going to play 162. You’re going to hit a little rut like this, but you can’t give up. You can’t mope about it. You just got to show up the next day and you got to be ready to play.”

Jazz Chisholm Jr. ended the Yankees’ scoreless innings streak in the second inning with a moonshot solo home run down the right-field line, giving New York its first run since the ninth inning Saturday against the Boston Red Sox. Two innings later, Cody Bellinger launched another solo shot to give the Yankees their first lead since last Thursday when they defeated the Kansas City Royals 1-0.

But the Yankees mustered only one other hit — a ground ball from Bellinger in the sixth inning that was ruled a single after it bounced off Trent Grisham as he ran to second base for the inning’s second out. Yankees manager Aaron Boone said he believed his team’s at-bats Wednesday were better than they were Tuesday — when he said he noticed his players pressing — and pointed to four walks as progress.

But the Yankees went 0-for-3 with runners in scoring position and are 5-for-48 (.104) with 12 strikeouts, four walks and three RBIs in such situations over their past seven games.

“We just got to break through now like we’re capable of offensively,” Boone said.

Judge, the two-time AL MVP who is a heavy favorite to win a third this season, has gone 1-for-19 with 11 strikeouts, two intentional walks and a home run over the past five games. He went 0-for-4 on Wednesday with two strikeouts, a 94.7 mph groundout and 107.9 mph flyout.

“Guys are pitching, they’re doing their job,” Judge said. “Sometimes we’re faltering on doing our job. But it’s tough to say. I think it just comes down to us not executing, us not doing our job. Maybe a little passive in certain situations. But all we can do is show up tomorrow ready to go.”

The Angels broke through to retake the lead in the eighth inning Wednesday without a hit when, after three walks, shortstop Anthony Volpe mishandled a ground ball on what should’ve been a routine, inning-ending double play. Volpe, a Gold Glove winner in 2023, was charged with his ninth error of the season, the second most among shortstops across the majors.

“Right off the bat, I got to be aggressive, go get the ball, make the play,” Volpe said. “As far as that, that’s all it is. It’s the first read off the bat.”

The lack of execution trickled to the offensive side in the bottom of the inning. The Yankees appeared ready to mount a rally when Jasson Dominguez walked and Oswald Peraza was hit by a pitch to begin the inning. But they were left stranded as Grisham, who was given the green light to swing away with one strike after failing to drop down a bunt, popped out, before Judge flied out and Bellinger popped out to extinguish the threat.

“When we’re not scoring a lot of runs, we got to execute on the highest level on the little things,” Boone said. “And we haven’t done that this week a handful of times when we had some opportunities.”

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Singer defied Dodgers, belted anthem in Spanish

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Singer defied Dodgers, belted anthem in Spanish

Latin singer Nezza said that she is “super proud” of performing the national anthem in Spanish at Dodger Stadium on Saturday night and that she has “no regrets.”

Her surprising 90-second rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ game against the Giants — and a behind-the-scenes video she shared on social media of team representatives discouraging it beforehand — quickly went viral. It has become a flashpoint for Dodgers fans frustrated by the team’s lack of vocal support for immigrant communities impacted by the deportation raids across the U.S., including numerous neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.

“This is my moment to show everyone that I am with them, that we have a voice and with everything that’s happening it’s not OK,” Nezza, 30, told The Associated Press. “I’m super proud that I did it. No regrets.”

Nezza said she hadn’t yet decided whether to sing in English or Spanish until she walked out onto the field and saw the stands filled with Latino families in Dodger Blue. Before that, as shown in the singer’s TikTok video, a Dodgers employee had told Nezza, “We are going to do the song in English today, so I’m not sure if that wasn’t transferred or if that wasn’t relayed.”

The Spanish-language version Nezza sang, “El Pendón Estrellado,” is the official translation of the national anthem and was commissioned in 1945 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from Peruvian American composer Clotilde Arias.

Nezza says her manager immediately received a call from an unidentified Dodgers employee saying their clients were not welcome at the stadium again, but the team denied that in a statement to the AP.

“There were no consequences or hard feelings from the Dodgers regarding her performance,” the Dodgers said in the statement. “She was not asked to leave. We would be happy to have her back.”

Despite the Dodgers’ statement, Nezza said she does not think she will return to the stadium but said she hopes her performance will inspire others to use their voice and speak out.

“It’s just shown me, like, how much power there is in the Latin community,” Nezza said. “We’ve got to be the voice right now.”

The Dodgers have not gone on the record regarding the arrests and raids made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the areas just a short drive from Dodger Stadium, but player Enrique Hernández posted about it on Instagram over the weekend.

“I am saddened and infuriated by what’s happening in our country and our city,” Hernández posted in English and Spanish. “I cannot stand to see our community being violated, profiled, abused and ripped apart. ALL people deserve to be treated with respect, dignity and human rights.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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