Sports briefs 6/23/05

Baseball

• Detroit's Alan Trammell and Oakland's Ken Macha were selected as coaches Wednesday for the American League in next month's All-Star game by Boston manager Terry Francona.

San Francisco's Felipe Alou and Milwaukee's Ned Yost were picked as the NL coaches by St. Louis manager Tony La Russa.

Boston's manager also asked his Red Sox coaches to be on his All-Star staff: Brad Mills, Dave Wallace, Ron Jackson, Dale Sveum, Lynn Jones, and Bill Haselman. The AL trainers will be Detroit's Kevin Rand and Steve Carter.

La Russa's All-Star staff will include Cardinals coaches Dave Duncan, Marty Mason, Jose Oquendo, Joe Pettini, George Kissell and Dave Lackey. The NL trainers will be St. Louis' Barry Weinberg and Cincinnati's Mark Mann.

Basketball

* The Milwaukee Bucks fired head coach Terry Porter on Wednesday, two months after finishing their worst season in almost a decade.

The Bucks have the first pick in next week's NBA draft, and general manager Larry Harris said the team needs to take a new direction.

Plagued with injuries and a revolving roster, the Bucks went 30-52 last season and failed to make the playoffs in Porter's second year with the team. The decision came more than a month after the team announced Porter would return for his third season. The Bucks said they would honor the terms of the last year of his contract.

Cycling

* Lance Armstrong will have most of last year's team back when he goes for his seventh straight Tour De France victory.

Armstrong's Discovery Channel team features six returning cyclists, including American George Hincapie, and two new ones, Italy's Paolo Savoldelli and Ukrainian Yaroslav Popovych, it was announced Wednesday.

Armstrong's other teammates from last year are Spain's Jose Luis Rubiera, Manuel Beltran and Benjamin Noval, Czech Republic's Pavel Padrnos and Portugal's Jose Azevedo. Savoldelli has won the Tour of Italy twice and Popovych finished third in the 2003 edition. The team is missing Viatcheslav Ekimov, who rode with Armstrong to five Tour victories but injured his back in a training accident in April.

-- From wire reports