Sports briefs
W&J to play Chapman
Washington & Jefferson will make its second appearance in three years at the NCAA Division III World Series and the Presidents will be playing in the opening game of the eight-team event on Friday.
W&J (36-10) will play Chapman (38-11) at 10 a.m. at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The series will use pool play with W&J, Chapman, Webster (37-11) and UMass Boston (35-12) in the same pool. The other four teams are Babson (38-8), Johns Hopkins (34-11), Birmingham-Southern (39-13) and Heidelberg (35-13).
Chapman, located in Orange, Calif., won a super regional over Concordia, Texas.
Legion baseball
Jeremy Saliba pitched a five-hitter and struck out 13 as Farmington defeated Waynesburg 4-1 Monday in a Fayette American Legion baseball game.
Logan Higgins hit a double for Waynesburg and Matt Ankrom had two singles.
Ex-batting champion
Buckner dead at 69
Bill Buckner was an All-Star and batting champion, a gritty gamer who was welcome on any team.
A reliable fielder, too.
But a little grounder forever changed his legacy.
Buckner, who made one of the biggest blunders in baseball history when he let Mookie Wilson’s trickler roll through his legs in the 1986 World Series, died Monday. He was 69.
“He deserved better,” former Dodgers teammate Bobby Valentine tweeted .
Buckner died after a long battle with Lewy body dementia, his family said in a statement. The disease causes Alzheimer’s-like symptoms along with movement and other problems.
Buckner made his major league debut as a teenager, played until he was 40 and amassed 2,715 hits in between. Yet for all he accomplished, it was his October error at first base that fans always remembered.
Trying for their first crown since 1918, the Boston Red Sox led the New York Mets 5-3 going into the bottom of the 10th inning in Game 6 at Shea Stadium. The Mets tied it with two outs, then Wilson hit a roller up the first base line that got past a gimpy Buckner, a misplay that let Ray Knight rush home from second base with the winning run.
The Red Sox lost 8-5 in Game 7, and their World Series drought continued until they won the championship in 2004.
In the aftermath of Boston’s near-miss, Buckner became a target of fans in New England and beyond, his mistake shown over and over on highlight reels.
“You can look at that Series and point fingers in a whole bunch of different directions,” Buckner said a decade ago. “We did the best we could to win there and it just didn’t happen and I didn’t feel like I deserved” so much blame.
A curious thing happened over time, too: He became pals with Wilson.
“I was saddened to hear about Bill’s death,” Wilson said in a statement. “We had developed a friendship that lasted well over 30 years. I felt badly for some of the things he went through. Bill was a great, great baseball player whose legacy should not be defined by one play.”
Caps investigating Kuznetsov video
The Washington Capitals say they have confirmed star Evgeny Kuznetsov is shown in a now-deleted video on social media that appears to show him in a hotel room with lines of white powder on a table in front of him.
In a statement sent to the Associated Press by spokesman Sergey Kocharov, the team says it is in the process of gathering facts and will have no further comment at this time.
The video posted on Twitter carried a message saying it was why Russia lost in the world hockey championship semifinals. It showed Kuznetsov talking to someone and lines of white powder and American dollar bills can be seen on the table. Kuznetsov does not touch anything on the table in the 22-second video.
The 27-year-old Kuznetsov was Washington’s leading scorer in the playoffs when it won the Stanley Cup a year ago. This season, the Russian center had 72 points in 76 games but just one goal during a first-round loss to Carolina.