Union Rejects Replacements

Replacement baseball players who made it back to the major leagues after the strike ended were told Friday that the players’ association intends to deny them membership.

The 17 players began receiving letters Friday, advising them of that decision.

If they don’t become members of the union, they will lose out on yearly licensing money, which has been as much as $88,000 a player.

Players receiving the letters were told they were being given the opportunity to show cause why they should be admitted to the union.

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Deion Sanders, in his baseball life, was designated for assignment by the San Francisco Giants, which means that if he wants to continue in baseball as well as football, it won’t be with the Giants. He is playing football this season with the Dallas Cowboys, who signed him to a seven-year deal worth $35 million.

Sanders, who joined the Giants in July as part of an eight-player deal with Cincinnati, batted .285 with five home runs and 18 RBIs in 52 games.

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Relief pitcher Jeff Montgomery and the Kansas City Royals agreed to a two-year, $4.75- million contract. . . . Catcher Charlie O’Brien agreed to two-year contract with the Toronto Blue Jays worth $1,125,000.

Gymnastics

The Los Angeles Sports Council submitted a bid Friday to bring the 1999 World Gymnastics Championships to The Pond of Anaheim in October of that year.

College Basketball

A Louisville assistant coach made nearly 100 calls in the last two years to a sports agent with a history of making improper payments to players and coaches, The Louisville Courier-Journal reported.

The newspaper researched telephone records and found that coach Larry Gay maintained frequent contact with San Antonio lawyer Lance Jay Luchnick.

Luchnick is an agent who was decertified by the NBA players’ union for 18 months in the early 1990s and permanently prohibited from assisting clients in financial management.

Soccer

Soccer’s restrictions on player transfers and foreign players were declared illegal by the European Union’s highest court in a ruling that probably will start an era of free agency.

Dismissing objections from soccer authorities, the European Court of Justice ruled in favor of Belgian player Jean-Marc Bosman, who sued after he was denied a transfer from Liege to Dunkirk in France.

The court ruled that players can change teams when their contracts expire without having the new team pay a fee to the old.

Germany and South Africa played a scoreless tie in an exhibition game at Johannesburg, South Africa, marking the first soccer visit by a European national team since the fall of apartheid.

Golf

The teams of Hale Irwin-Julius Erving and George Archer-Glenn Fry each shot a 10-under-par 62 in a best-ball format and shared the first-round lead of the Lexus Challenge at La Quinta’s Citrus Course.

Hockey

The NHL’s Board of Governors, on the final day of meetings in Florida, began working on a plan through which the league would give financial assistance to Canadian clubs whose revenues rank in the bottom half of the league.

Miscellany

Bakersfield Superior Court Judge Arthur Wallace denied an appeal by Rosamond High School boosters, meaning the Division X CIF Southern Section title game between Orange Lutheran and Cerritos Valley Christian will go on tonight as scheduled.

Rosamond was to have played Orange Lutheran last weekend but was ejected from the playoffs after its coaches were found to have altered the game videotapes it sent to Orange Lutheran before defeating that school in the semifinals. Orange Lutheran then replaced Rosamond in the title game.

The date of horse racing’s 1996 Breeders’ Cup at Toronto has been changed from Nov. 2 to Oct. 26, so that the races can be run while during Daylight Saving Time.

Names in the News

British swimmer Mark Foster broke his own world short-course, 50-meter butterfly record, clocking a 23.45. . . . George J. Johnsen, longtime California Athletic Commission inspector, died recently at 65. . . . A house fire Wednesday in River Vale, N.J., partially destroyed the home and most of the trophies of driver John Campbell, harness racing’s earnings leader.