YAKIMA, Wash. — From Larry Stone’s blog (which is generally awesome) on the Seattle Times Web site:

Now the news is coming from the best source of all: Erik Bedard himself, who told Marc Brassard of Le Droit, a French-language newspaper in Ontario, that he has indeed agreed to terms with the Mariners.

Lookout Landing astutely found the article and provided a rough translation. I got Kristin Jackson from the Seattle Times travel section to kindly provide her own translation of the key paragraphs:

If he successfully passes a physical exam today in Arizona, Erik Bedard will be back with the Mariners of Seattle in 2010.

The left-handed pitcher of Navan has confirmed that he accepted a contract of one year for $1.5 million with the club that acquired his services from Baltimore in exchange for five players.

And this quote from Bedard:

“I am truly happy. It was my first choice to return to Seattle,” he confided yesterday when he was en route to Peoria, Arizona. “I think the team will be really good this season. I very much like the direction the team is going.”

Photos from Thursday’s practice for Saturday’s ARCA Lucas Oil Slick Mist 250 at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Fla. All photos by The Associated Press.

Photos from Thursday, the first day of practice for Saturday’s Budweiser Shootout at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach Fla. All photos by the Associated Press.

SEATTLE (AP) — Arizona first-year coach Sean Miller said late Thursday his school will impose its own sanctions on the basketball program for violations by former coach Lute Olson related to an offseason AAU tournament in 2008.

Miller confirmed the action after his Pac-10 co-leading Wildcats lost at Washington.

He did not confirm or deny a Foxsports.com report that the Wildcats are going to sacrifice a scholarship, recruiting days in the summer and on-campus visits by recruits.

“I’m aware of it. It doesn’t come as a surprise to me,” Miller said. “I’m very confident that our university and our athletic department is handling it the way it should be handled.”

Miller, whose young, surprising team (11-10, 6-4 Pac-10) next plays Saturday night at Washington State, said he’s been aware of the situation since well before the former coach at Xavier took the Arizona job in April.

Olson returned to lead the Wildcats in the spring of 2008, after missing the previous season while on personal leave. A few months later, Arizona athletic director Jim Livengood announced Olson had sent a letter to a basketball boosters group asking for a donation to Jim Storey’s Arizona Cactus Classic basketball tournament, held in May 2008 at the university’s McKale Center.

NCAA rules prohibit institutional representatives or boosters from arranging financial assistance for potential recruits.

Olson denied any knowledge of the letter, sent over his electronic signature, or of the request for donations. He called it a “clear-cut violation of NCAA rules.”

The NCAA began an investigation.

Arizona would be the second Pac-10 men’s basketball team to impose its own sanctions in the last month, though the Wildcats appear destined for far more minor penalties than Southern California received from its own university.

A USC investigation found rules were violated during current NBA player O.J. Mayo’s lone season with the Trojans in 2007-08 under former coach Tim Floyd. On Jan. 3, USC announced a one-year ban on postseason play following the current regular season, including the Pac-10 tournament; a loss of one scholarship for this season and the 2010-2011 season; a loss of one coach permitted to engage in off-campus recruiting during the summer of 2010; and the loss of 20 recruiting days (from 130 to 110) for the 2010-2011 academic year.

USC is also vacating 21 victories during the 2007-08 season, when Mayo competed while ineligible.

YAKIMA, Wash. — NASCAR, and especially its Sprint Cup Series, gets things fired up this week in preparation for next weekend’s season openers at Daytona International Speedway.

Things get started Thursday with two practices and the selection show for the non-points-paying Budweiser Shootout.

On Friday there will be more Sprint Cup practices.

Saturday is pole qualifying day, the front row will be decided by a round of traditional qualifying. The rest of the field will be set after the Gatorade Duels on Feb. 11.

The main event on Saturday — at least on paper — is the Bud Shootout. The exhibition race is a 75-lapper with 25- and 50-lap segments and a 10-minute break between.

The Shootout and qualifying might be overshadowed by another Saturday event this year.

The ARCA Re/Max Series’ Lucas Oil Slick Mist 200 will be the competitive stock-car debut for IndyCar star and general auto racing celebrity Danica Patrick.

Here is the TV schedule leading up to the Daytona 500:

YAKIMA, Wash. — Two more Formula One teams launched their 2010 cars this weekend: BMW Sauber (which is planning to run Ferrari engines despite the BMW in the name) and Renault (which isn’t controlled by the Renault company anymore, but is running Renault engines). It’s confusing, I know, as with all things Formula One, there are politics and backstories galore.

Here’s the new Renault with drivers Robert Kubica of Poland and Vitaly Petrov of Russia:

And the new BMW Sauber with drivers Pedro De La Rosa of Spain and Kamui Kobayashi of Japan:

A quick note about the earlier launches, the Mercedes pictured was not a new car (it was last year’s Brawn GP car) but it was the launch of the new paint and advertising scheme.

YAKIMA, Wash. — If it’s January (and it is), it’s time for Formula One teams to debut the cars built to contest the 2010 world driver and constructor championships.

This week, it was Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren. All photos from the Associated Press.

Mercedes GP with drivers Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg (click for larger images):

Ferrari with drivers Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso:

McLaren Mercedes with drivers Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton:

FAENZA, Italy — Toro Rosso will stick with the same lineup for the 2010 Formula One season after confirming that Spanish driver Jaime Alguersuari will partner Sebastian Buemi.

The 19-year-old Alguersuari became the youngest driver to take part in an F1 race when he replaced the fired Sebastien Bourdais at the Hungarian Grand Prix midway through last season.

He finished just three of his eight races but team principal Franz Tost says that “with no prior testing, he did a good job, making steady progress throughout the second half of the year.”

The Barcelona native came up through Red Bull’s young driver program and will race alongside the 21-year-old Buemi.

By JENNA FRYER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CONCORD, N.C. — Have at it, boys.

NASCAR is relaxing some of its rules this season, and encouraging drivers to show more aggression and emotion, in large part to answer a growing fan sentiment that the sport had gone stale.

“There’s an age old saying that NASCAR, ’If you ain’t rubbing, you ain’t racing,”’ NASCAR president Mike Helton said Thursday. “I think that’s what the NASCAR fan, the NASCAR stakeholders all bought into, and all expect.”

The first change will be evident when the season opens next month at Daytona International Speedway, where restrictions on bump-drafting will be lifted and horsepower will be increased by the use of the largest restrictor plate since 1989.

NASCAR had been slowly tightening its tolerance on bumping at Daytona and Talladega — the two biggest and fastest tracks in the series, where the horsepower-sapping restrictor plates are used to control speeds — and it graduated into an outright ban issued the morning of the November race at Talladega. The edict sucked the drama out of what’s typically one of the most exciting races of the year, and was the final straw for many race fans who had grown tired of watered-down racing.

Even some drivers publicly complained, criticism that is usually frowned upon in NASCAR.

“Let us RACE,” Denny Hamlin tweeted after the Talladega drivers meeting, later adding, “We signed up to drive our cars. Not be told how to.”

He’s getting his wish.

“We will put it back in the hands of drivers, and we will say ’Boys, have at it and have a good time,”’ vice president of competition Robin Pemberton said Thursday.

The yellow out-of-bounds line that circles the bottom of those two tracks will remain, and Pemberton said the majority of drivers did not want that removed.

Another change coming this year will be an eventual switch from the rear wing to a spoiler on the back of the car, a design change that should both positively affect downforce and the aesthetic look that race fans prefer.

Also on tap is an organizational restructuring. The most prominent shuffle is the promotion of longtime Sprint Cup Series director John Darby into an oversight position, and NASCAR is actively looking for his replacement in a role that is effectively the top cop of the garage.

Darby’s successor could be in for a busy year, particularly if drivers answer NASCAR chairman Brian France’s call “to mix it up a little bit differently” going forward.

As NASCAR exploded over the 1990s past its small Southern roots into a billion-dollar, corporate-fueled sport, its participants seemed to morph into robotic sponsor shills too frightened to make waves. NASCAR wasn’t immune, either, and started policing on-track aggression and off-track emotion.

Intentional on-track retaliation was met with immediate punishment, while transgressions such as shoving a competitor or cursing in a television interview were met with monetary fines and/or points deductions.

Fans were incensed that the rough and tumble sport they once loved had been molded into boring, follow-the-leader racing, and their favorite drivers had become too vanilla. It wasn’t until last fall — when Hamlin waged a monthslong feud with up-and-comer Brad Keselowski, and Tony Stewart and Juan Pablo Montoya intentionally wrecked each other in the season finale — that NASCAR finally saw the lift the emotions and personalities can deliver to the sport.

So France, who in the past has been accused of being out of touch with stock car racing’s participants, began a series of offseason meetings with individual teams and drivers to poll opinion on how to re-energize the sport.

All the changes announced Thursday, as well as the promise by France that NASCAR will “loosen it up,” came from those meetings.

Still, Helton cautioned it won’t be the Wild West.

“It doesn’t mean that you get a free pass-out-of-jail card,” he said. “But it certainly means that what we are encouraging the competitors … for their character and their personality, within reason, to be unfolded.”

By JOHN LEICESTER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PARIS — It hasn’t been pretty watching tennis’ top players gang up against the venerable Davis Cup.

Too outdated, too taxing, too inconvenient, they are saying of the 110-year-old competition that has given fans some of their dearest tennis memories. Who can forget a shirt-sleeved Boris Yeltsin abandoning his VIP seat to hug the Russian team that beat the French on home clay in 2002?

If they all line up behind wacky proposals for a soccer-style World Cup of tennis, an idea that could send the Davis Cup the way of the dodo, the sport’s big guns risk being selfish. Because for small tennis nations and for players without wealthy sponsors and bulging bank accounts, competing for the trophy that Dwight Davis commissioned more than a century ago is often the highlight of their year, even their whole careers.

Says Des Allen, the CEO of Irish tennis: “For a country like Ireland, big-time tennis is Davis Cup.”

That’s not to say that the World Cup concept being hawked by an Australian sports marketing firm should be dismissed out of hand. Some of its proposals — like cutting down on the dead time in matches by forcing players to take no longer than 25 seconds between points — are funky and refreshing and should please television executives who like tennis in bite-sized, easily scheduled chunks.

Bringing 32 national teams together for a 10-day competition could, as the World Cup does for soccer, also attract fans by appealing to their fly-the-flag instincts. And more fans could mean more money.

But a World Cup would have to be good for everyone in tennis, not just those at the top of the game who say that it’s a struggle to fit Davis Cup into their hectic globe-trotting and lucrative schedules.

Like Davis Cup, a World Cup would have to spread money around, helping to finance the sport’s survival and growth in places like Africa. Like Davis Cup, a World Cup should take tennis to far-flung outposts that otherwise don’t get to see top-level players in action. Like Davis Cup, it must be all-inclusive, accommodating not only the Roger Federers of this world but also tennis minnows like Domenico Vicini.

When he’s not running a campsite in northern Italy, where he also doubles as a tennis instructor, Vicini plays Davis Cup for the micro-state of San Marino, population 30,000. Vicini has played in more ties — 78 and counting — than anyone in Davis Cup history, and has won the majority of his singles matches.

“The emotions one feels in the Davis Cup are unmatched by any other tournament,” Vicini told The Associated Press this week. “If you care about your nation, your flag, then it’s the best.

“It’s what kept me going.”

Asked what he thought of the proposals for a World Cup, he added simply: “It would be good if all could take part.”

Exactly.

World Cup promoters say it’s not their intention to kill off the Davis Cup. But that could be the result if top players abandon the tournament in favor of the new concept.

Already, the top-ranked Federer says he won’t play in the Davis Cup against defending champion Spain in March because it doesn’t fit with his other commitments. Fourth-ranked Andy Murray is skipping Britain’s matchup against Lithuania. The United States will be without No. 7 Andy Roddick this year because he wants to spare his gimpy left knee.

“Maybe (Davis Cup) was perfect 20 or 30 years ago but now it is really too much for us,” said Croatian player Ivan Ljubicic, ranked 24th. “It takes a lot of your time.”

Thankfully, the International Tennis Federation, which runs Davis Cup, won’t let it die without a fight.

ITF vice president Juan Margets, who chairs the Davis Cup committee, notes that the vast majority of top 20 players agreed as recently as two years ago to the competition’s current schedule and format. He is deeply skeptical that room could be made in the already packed tennis calendar for a World Cup held every two years.

“We don’t believe in events that are not annual,” Margets told the AP. “We have to go out and defend the Davis Cup.”

The players, the ITF and the ATP tour are going to have to sit down and work this one out. But for a World Cup to make any sense, it will need to be at least as good for tennis as the Davis Cup has been — and that is a pretty tall order.

Most importantly, it must not cut out those lower down the tennis food chain.

Said Allen: “In all of these issues, it’s the small guy that often has to make the sacrifice.”

• John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester@ap.org.