Sports Desk
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

BASEBALL
RED SOX GO WITH TWO-HEADED GM The Boston Red Sox promoted two of Theo Epstein’s former assistants to be co-general managers yesterday while offering to “keep the light on” if the most successful GM in team history wants to lend a hand.
“The door has been really ajar for some time, and until Theo goes to work for another baseball organization we’ll keep the light on in the window with the possibility of him coming back and helping us,” team president Larry Lucchino said after splitting the general manager’s job between farm director Ben Cherington and assistant GM Jed Hoyer.
Both Hoyer and Cherington acknowledged that they weren’t fully prepared for the GM job on their own. “I wanted to experience a little bit more in baseball before taking on that job by myself,” Cherington, who gave Hoyer his first job with the Red Sox, said. The 32-year-old Hoyer has been working mostly with major league transactions; Cherington, 31, has focused on the minor leaguers. They’ll maintain that division, though overlap is inevitable when the team, for example, wants to trade prospects for a major leaguer.
MORRIS AGREES TO THREE-YEAR DEAL WITH GIANTS Right-hander Matt Morris agreed to a three-year contract with the San Francisco Giants yesterday, leaving the St. Louis Cardinals after nine seasons.The deal has been in the works for weeks and became official after Morris passed a physical yesterday morning.
Morris went 14-10 with a 4.11 ERA last season and won his first eight decisions for the Cardinals, who cruised to the NL Central division crown. But St. Louis didn’t pursue Morris with the same fervor as the Giants, who were desperate to add a top starter to what had become a patchwork rotation the past two seasons.
Morris’s contract contains a club option for a fourth season. He is 101-62 with a 3.62 ERA in his career.
RANGERS ACQUIRE PADILLA FROM PHILADELPHIA Spurned in their pursuit of Matt Morris and Josh Beckett, the Texas Rangers got former All-Star right-hander Vicente Padilla from the Phillies yesterday for a player to be named.
Padilla was 9-12 with a 4.71 ERA in 27 starts last season in Philadelphia. He was traded July 26, 2000, from Arizona to the Phillies along with three other players for pitcher Curt Schilling. Padilla made $3.2 million last year, and is eligible for salary arbitration. Padilla was an All-Star in 2002, when he was 14-11 with a 3.28 ERA, and he followed that by going 14-12 with a 3.62 ERA in 2003. He is just 16-19 over the last two seasons.
BASKETBALL
PACERS TO SEEK TRADE FOR ARTEST Ron Artest wants to be traded, and the Indiana Pacers will try to accommodate their unhappy star. Artest, suspended most of last season for his role in one of the worst brawls in American sports, said over the weekend that he wants out, his past haunts him in Indianapolis, and the team would be better off without him.
Pacers president and chief executive Donnie Walsh said yesterday he didn’t like Artest speaking to the media first, but would try to trade him. He added Artest’s desire to move on wasn’t the only factor involved. “This is kind of the last straw of a lot of issues,”Walsh said,”and it’s at the point where we should look for a trade.”
Artest leads the NBA in steals and is scoring 19.4 points a game.
COLLEGE BASKETBALL
DUKE STAYS ON TOP WHILE HOUSTON RETURNS TO TOP 25 Duke’s runaway win over Texas kept the Blue Devils a runaway no. 1 in the Associated Press’s men’s college basketball poll yesterday. The next three places in the Top 25 were Big East schools Connecticut, Villanova, and Louisville. The only newcomer to the poll was Houston, ranked for the first time in almost 13 years.
Houston moved into the rankings at no. 25 a week after the Cougars beat then-no. 25 LSU 84-83 and thenno. 15 Arizona 69-65. Houston was ranked 25th in the January 18, 1993 poll. The last time the Cougars were ranked for more than one week was the 1983-84 season, when they were in the top eight all season and climbed as high as no. 2.
This is the 172nd consecutive time Duke has been ranked, tied for the secondlongest run in the history of the AP poll which started in the 1948-49 season. UCLA holds the record at 221 consecutive polls, from the preseason of 1966-67 through January 8, 1980. North Carolina also was also in 172 consecutive polls, from the preseason voting of 1990-91 through January 17, 2000.
Connecticut,Villanova, and Louisville moved up one place apiece with Texas’s drop to sixth. It’s the first time one league had teams ranked that high since last season, when the Atlantic Coast Conference had Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, and North Carolina in those same positions in the preseason poll and the first Top 25 of the regular season.
– Associated Press