Major League Baseball (MLB) has canceled opening day, with commissioner Rob Manfred announcing March 1 that the sport will scrap regular-season games over a labor dispute for the first time in 27 years after acrimonious lockout talks collapsed in the hours before management's deadline, ESPN reported.
With owners and players unable to agree on a contract to replace the collective bargaining agreement that expired Dec. 1, Manfred canceled the first two series for each of the 30 teams, cutting each club's schedule from 162 games to likely 156 at most.
A total of 91 games were erased.
"Rob Manfred and MLB's owners have canceled the start of the season," the Major League Baseball Players Association said. "Players and fans around the world who love baseball are disgusted, but sadly not surprised.
A minor-league player for the Boston Red Sox was released by the team after the discovery of a series of racist and homophobic tweets, out.com noted, citing The Athletic.
"I'm told the Red Sox have officially released former third-round pick Brett Netzer following a series of racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic posts on Twitter," The Athletic's Chad Jennings tweeted.
Netzer had posted, "ill go along with racist and homophobic, but anti-semitic? thats too far. [Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom] is a hypocrite and an embarrassment to any torah-following jew." Netzer also recently tweeted, "either everyone can say n-a or no one. do black people think they have a monopoly on words?"
In other tweets, he wrote that Black people should "go back to their roots and start to re-establish their true black culture" and equated closeted transgender people to being rapists, per CBS Sports.