Play Ball

THE OWNER of a Bethesda marketing firm - a dyed-in-the-wool baseball fan from way back - has cut back on his tickets to Baltimore Orioles games for this season so that he can buy some Washington Nationals tickets. Even as the Nats open their first season on the road in Philadelphia today and the O's open their season at home, a newly reborn rivalry has been joined. We opposed the decision of Major League Baseball to move the former Montreal Expos franchise just 35 miles from Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

Orioles infielder Ryan Flaherty, coming off a strong rookie season, is expected to join Leones de Escogido of the Dominican Winter League this weekend to get some extra at-bats. The former Rule 5 pick will have the chance to earn more playing time this spring, primarily at second base. That offers us a good time to see how other players with Orioles connections are doing on the winter ball circuit. New Orioles second baseman Alexi Casilla has been playing in the Dominican for the Gigantes del Cibao and is hitting .290/.329/.449 in 16 games there.

Hardly anyone came out of major league baseball's ugly 234-day labor conflict with an unsmirched reputation.The owners look more than ever like the gang that can't shoot straight. Leaders of the players union managed to lose public sympathy, too. Both sides now appear equally greedy and unconcerned about the fans and baseball's increasingly thread-bare claim as the national pastime.Baltimoreans, however, have the consolation of embracing two of the exceptions. Peter Angelos, the Orioles' owner, proved a lonely voice of reason in management ranks.

Et cetera Damion Rashford , a 6-foot-5, 200-pound guard from Pickering, Ontario, who played his senior year of high school at Westwind Prep in Phoenix, has joined the Loyola men's basketball program for the 2012-13 season. Rashford averaged 18.8 points and 6.5 rebounds in 2011-12. He played Amateur Athletic Union ball in the Toronto area for Shane James , a 2007 Loyola graduate. More men's college basketball: Coppin State is one of 12 teams selected to participate in the EA Sports Maui Invitational.

And here we are for "Sports Yak-Yak," your favorite round-the-clock sports radio call-in show. This is your host, Billy Babble, and our first call is from Joe in Cicero."

Carroll County Democrats repelled a last-minute Republican rally last week and won by one, the narrowest of margins. That would be a run, not a vote. Area business leaders and officials organized a spirited softball competition to put the political parties on friendly terms. The bipartisan game, rescheduled three times, finally was played Thursday evening in downtown Westminster. "We wanted to prove to everybody in the county that people can just agree to disagree and not let politics polarize us," said Josh Kohn, a Westminster business owner.

In the spring of 1995, a handful of parents in Aptos, Calif., a small town south of San Francisco, entrusted their 5-year-old boys to the tutelage of a baseball coach named Dave Anderson. Seven years later, those kids had matured into one of America's finest Little League teams. In a new PBS documentary, Small Ball: A Little League Story, (tonight at 8 on MPT), filmmakers Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker do more than follow the Aptos All-Stars through their 2002 season, a nail-biting campaign that took them to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. They remind viewers of the national pastime's almost endless capacity to bring out the best in those who play it, teach it and treat it with respect.

It seems the simplest of props: footprints are painted on the floor, a baseball bat is suspended by wires, home plate is just below. On the wall looms a life-size photograph of Jackie Robinson.You, the visitor, put your feet in Robinson's footsteps and step up to the plate. You grasp the bat. Suddenly, the roar of the crowd materializes all around you, surging in intensity.The noise becomes impossible, and you are somehow awesomely alone in front of thousands. Soon a pitcher will hurl a rock-hard sphere toward you at 90 miles an hour.

SPRINGDALE, Ark. - For nearly two decades, John Moody made his living killing, gutting and packing poultry on the line at Tyson Foods, the nation's largest meat producer and processor. It was unpleasant work - smelly, repetitive and dangerous. He severed the tip of his index finger on a factory saw. Moody was paid $3.25 an hour when he started there in the early 1980s, and made $7.99 when he left in 1995. But for someone who grew up in the poverty-ridden Marshall Islands, coming to America and working in even a menial job opened "a door of opportunity," he said.

Mark Turgeon said Tuesday that he expects to tinker with a "small ball" lineup of four guards this season, and may blend the group with a raw 7-footer who the Maryland men's basketball coach believes possesses as much potential as he does length. Olexiy ("Alex") Len, a center from Antratsit, Ukraine, only recently turned 18-years-old, "so the kid's still growing, still getting his coordination, but he's got a chance," Turgeon said the day before the team assembled for Media Day. "He's one of those guys at the end of the year I think you'll look and say he's our most improved player because it's all so new to him and God gave him so much ability that he should improve at a pretty high rate.

During last week's Cal Ripken Major/70 World Series at the Ripken Academy in Aberdeen, a few dozen disabled children were afforded the opportunity to play ball, a chance that might not have been there were it not for the League of Dreams program. Convening on the turf practice field on Saturday afternoon, the local children were treated to a baseball clinic, during which they were instructed on the hitting, fielding and throwing aspects of the game, and were supposed to take part in a scrimmage game, but that was canceled when a heavy rainstorm cut short the proceedings.

At Western High School in Baltimore, few students had heard of bocce when coach Mary Hain was putting together a team of players, with and without disabilities, in anticipation of Maryland's first Unified Indoor Bocce State High School Invitational. Senior Thea Chase said she came out for the team thinking that "it was hibachi, some kind of eating contest. " In fact, bocce is a sport that resembles bowling. Ultimately, three freshmen and several seniors, including Chase, joined the team and trained for the interscholastic competition, which pairs students with intellectual and other disabilities with their high school peers.

With his contract signed and the realization that he's indeed a professional baseball player, Orioles' 2010 first round draft pick Manny Machado is now looking forward to doing what he loves to do — play baseball. Machado, A Miami high school shortstop who agreed to a $ 5.25 millon deal moments before Monday's midnight deadline, will report to the club's minor league complex in Sarasota , Fla. — joining the Gulf Coast League Orioles. He'll work out with the team on Sunday and likely play in Monday's game.

WASHINGTON -- A stadium with a rich and unusual history closed its turnstiles to baseball yesterday, 45 years after opening the 1962 season with President John F. Kennedy throwing out the first pitch. Ted Williams once managed at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, Vince Lombardi coached the NFL's Redskins there, the Beatles performed there and a long line of presidents threw out the first pitch in what was traditionally the opening game of the major league season. RFK, which is being retired because the Washington Nationals will move into a new stadium next year, was home to the 1962 and 1969 All-Star Games and hosted the longest errorless game in major league history (22 innings)

Last Saturday, I got an urge to see college basketball. The Maryland Terrapins were playing North Carolina State in College Park that afternoon. I did not have a ticket. Given my connections, I knew where to turn. I turned to the scalpers - the entrepreneurs who hang around the edges of sold-out sporting events and concerts. They perform the "service" of relieving fans of excess tickets, then reselling them at often-inflated prices. I was about to become a scalpee. I prepared by gathering data and enlisting a compadre, Al Nuzzi, a veteran of such transactions.

The survival of my fantasy football season depends on a showdown with LaDainian Tomlinson this weekend. And he's playing against the Chiefs, who have been allowing 100-yard rushing days like clockwork. So I figure that should bring a snappy end to a fantasy season that never seemed destined to end in glory. But such gloomy thoughts are easy to push aside, because fantasy Christmas busted out on Monday. That's right, my 2007 Baseball Forecaster showed up in the mailbox. This early present from fantasy guru Ron Shandler is always the official signal that my thoughts should turn from pigskin to cowhide.

The latest effort to bring baseball back to life in America's blighted urban neighborhoods and their residents couldn't have picked a better city to start. There's no concrete evidence that Baltimore needs help in this area more than anyplace else. Nor was that specifically why Bank of America's fundraising campaign for the 7-year-old Little League Urban Initiative kicked off at Camden Yards on Thursday, with Hall of Famer Dave Winfield doing five hours' worth of print and broadcast interviews next to the Orioles dugout.