Baseball

NFL Redskins' Kettani to celebrate promotion to Navy lieutenant Washington Redskins fullback Eric Kettani , a 2009 Navy graduate, will celebrate his promotion from lieutenant junior grade to lieutenant Monday at Redskins Park in Ashburn, Va. Kettani has asked head coach Mike Shanahan and assistant head coach/running backs coach Bobby Turner to do the honor of pinning insignia denoting his new officer rank on his uniform before...

After beating Florida Atlantic on Friday in the Chapel Hill regional of the NCAA baseball tournament, Towson's reward was a matchup with No. 1 overall seed North Carolina in front of the Tar Heels' fans at Boshamer Stadium. While starting pitcher Brandon Gonnella and the rest of the Tigers battled to stay in the game, they came up short in an 8-5 loss. Towson, in its first NCAA tournament since 1991, will take on Florida Atlantic again Sunday at 1 p.m. in an elimination game.

I have been watching Oriole games held in Camden Yards and on the road, and the baseballs have been flying out of the ballparks like they were shot out of a cannon. Home runs are regularly being hit as far as 450 feet. If there are 10 or 11 hits in a game, at least three of them are often home runs. In Toronto's ballpark, where the Orioles and the Blue Jays recently played each other, many of the home runs were hit so hard and so far that I thought I watching golf balls being hit off of a tee. What is this, Home Run Derby or a legitimate baseball game?

Orioles' right-hander Freddy Garcia isn't going to throw eight scoreless innings every time out like he did Thursday night against the Washington Nationals in the Orioles' 2-0 win. In fact, he hasn't done that since Sept. 19, 2006 when he was with the Chicago White Sox. That's nearly seven years ago. Orioles third baseman Manny Machado was 14 back then. So Garcia isn't going to make a habit of pitching that deep into games, we know that. But when he is mixing his pitches effectively and keeping them low in the strike zone, the 36-year-old can still be victorious.

Asked which he would have thought less likely in March -- that Towson would still have a baseball program after the season or that this season would still be going on in June -- Tigers coach Mike Gottlieb didn't hesitate with his answer. “This was less likely,” he said after Towson beat Florida Atlantic, 7-2, on Friday in the first game of the Chapel Hill NCAA baseball tournament regional. “Throughout the month of March, after we were told there would be no baseball in the future, the kids played hard.

The tattoo on Zach Fisher's left arm tells all. "One family," it reads - a nod to the synergy he feels with his brethren on Towson's unsinkable baseball team. "Me and couple of other guys got the tattoo in December, when the program was on the ropes," said Fisher, the Tigers' third baseman. "If baseball got cut [by school funding], I wanted something to remember these guys by. " Sure enough, in March, Towson baseball got axed. Then the state stepped in to save the program.

As they reflect on the scenes from their last seven months, the baseball players of Towson University feel almost as if they're looking in on someone else's life. President Maravene Loeschke, flanked by campus police officers, gathering them so she could pronounce the program dead. Their phones buzzing with texts, heralding a reprieve from the governor. Joyously collapsing on one another after winning their conference tournament and clinching their first NCAA bid in 22 years. "If you saw it on TV, you wouldn't believe it," said Patricia Johnson, one of the parents who fought to keep the program alive.

Steve Johnson pitched 2 1/3 innings of relief in the Orioles' come-from-behind 9-6 victory over the Washington Nationals on Wednesday night at Camden Yards, eight years after he stepped onto the field at Oriole Park for the first time as a participant in the Brooks Robinson High School All-Star Game. Participants in this year's game, which will be played at Camden Yards on Sunday following the Orioles' game against the Detroit Tigers, were introduced Thursday to the legendary Robinson in a banquet room on the sixth floor of the B&O Warehouse.

Melancholy fits the game of baseball like a batting glove. For every moment of heroic achievement, there is one of misery and despair; for each Bobby Thomson "shot heard 'round the world" to win the 1951 National League Pennant for the New York Giants, there's a Bill Buckner error to cost the Boston Red Sox the 1986 World Series. That doesn't make baseball a bad sport, it makes it a great one. Overcoming adversity is the nature of baseball, and if adversity didn't sometimes win, it wouldn't be much of a game.

I am in heaven. I know I am part of a minority, but I love college baseball the way most folks love NCAA basketball. Forget the Final Four, the Road to Omaha is what gets my adrenaline pumping. And ESPN started the journey for viewers like me with an outstanding tournament selection show Monday at noon and a "Road to Omaha" production at 6 p.m. Both aired on ESPNU, the collegiate sports channel that my TV always seems to be set to when I turn it on during baseball season. ESPN has long done right by college baseball while much of the rest of the media world ignored it. But this year, ESPN is upping the ante in promising to cover every game from here on out among the 64 contenders for the national championship that will be decided at the College World Series in Omaha next month.