BASEBALL / DAILY REPORT : AROUND THE MAJOR LEAGUES : Season Will March In Early Next Year

The baseball season will begin in March next year, the earliest start ever.

The season will start March 31, a Sunday night, with the Chicago White Sox playing the Seattle Mariners in the Kingdome, a game to be telecast by ESPN. Most other teams will start play the following day.

Baseball officials moved up the start by a week in order to avoid playing World Series games in November next year.

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New York Yankee ace Jimmy Key, already on the disabled list with an injury to his left shoulder, failed to complete a pitching session for the second time in four days.

Key, who finished second in the voting for the Cy Young Award last season, briefly threw a ball off flat ground Friday at the team’s minor league complex in Tampa, Fla., before stopping. He is sidelined with inflammation and rotator tendinitis in his shoulder.

“I wouldn’t close the door yet,” Manager Buck Showalter said in today’s editions of The New York Times. “Certainly it’s not encouraging that the last two times he hasn’t been able to throw. We’ll see what they can do. It was never any given he would be back.”

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One day after he signed a minor league contract and 12 weeks after he left Cuba, Ariel Prieto became a member of the Oakland Athletics. Prieto, a right-handed pitcher who was the Athletics’ first pick in the June 1 amateur draft, was called up to replace right-hander Jim Corsi on the 15-day disabled list with tendinitis in his shoulder.