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One of Spain’s most famous athletes, the basketball player Pau Gasol, has said he is considering skipping this summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro due to fears over the Zika virus. Gasol said he has spoken to other athletes who were considering whether to compete at the Games. “It wouldn’t surprise me to see some athletes deciding not to participate in the games to avoid putting their health and the…

About 24 hours after he was kidnapped, Mexican soccer star Alan Pulido found himself alone with one of his captors and saw his chance. He wrestled away the man’s pistol and his cellphone and dialed Mexico’s emergency number. Within minutes, he was free. An official summary report of three calls to an emergency operator obtained by The Associated Press shows the 25-year-old forward for Olympiakos in the Greek league threatened…

As the selections announcement dragged on Monday morning, someone on the Long Beach State baseball team mustered a question: Hey, how many regionals are left? The team, which thought it would be comfortably in the 64-team NCAA regional field, started running through which matchups had been revealed.  “We’re like, ‘God, I don’t think there’s many left,’ ” Coach Troy Buckley said. “And next thing you know there isn’t. There’s one…

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Bracket (PDF) SAN FRANCISCO – Four Pac-12 baseball teams earned berths to the 2016 NCAA Baseball Championship, the Division I Baseball Committee announced today. UTAH earned the Pac-12’s automatic bid while ARIZONA, ARIZONA STATE, and WASHINGTON earned at-large selections. Regional action begins on Friday, June 3. All games will be broadcast live on the ESPN Networks. The Pac-12 currently holds an all-time record of 784-474 (.623) in the NCAA Baseball…

If you hadn’t been following college baseball this season and happened to take a cursory glance at the recently released NCAA Tourney field of 64, your first question would probably be some version of “what the hell happened to the West Coast?” Not a single one of the 16 regional host sites is West of Texas, a surprising development for one of the sport’s most talent-saturated areas. It’s a credit…

print AUSTIN, Texas — Augie Garrido, the winningest coach in college baseball history, is out after 20 seasons at Texas. The decision Monday comes after the Longhorns’ first losing season since 1998. Texas will miss the NCAA postseason for the third time in five years. The university said in a statement Monday the 77-year-old Garrido was “relinquishing his duties” as coach and will become special assistant to athletic director Mike…

Mitch Gaspard has resigned as Alabama’s head baseball coach after seven seasons. The Crimson Tide went 234-193 in Gaspard’s tenure, but missed the NCAA Tournament in three of those seasons. He took over for Jim Wells prior to the 2010 season and Alabama reached the Super Regional round, but had not reached that point since then. Alabama also made NCAA regionals in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Alabama was not selected as…

Western Michigan is headed to Louisville to start the NCAA baseball tournament. The Broncos are the only in-state program to make the tournament, as both Michigan and Michigan State were left out of the field of 64 teams announced Monday. Western Michigan (22-32) was the surprise winner of the Mid-American Conference tournament, earning a bid to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1989. The No. 4 seed Broncos…

Kidnapped Mexican soccer star Alan Pulido was found and rescued safely by police, according to authorities in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Pulido, 25, was kidnapped over the weekend by armed men after he left a party in his hometown of Ciudad Victoria in northern Mexico, officials said. The rescue happened shortly before midnight involving federal and state forces, the Tamaulipas Coordination Group said in a statement released early this…

Mixed Leagues Adam Lind, 1B, Seattle Mariners Aaron Hill, 2B/3B, Milwaukee Brewers Brad Miller, 2B/SS, Tampa Bay Rays Jurickson Profar, 2B/SS, Texas Rangers Coco Crisp, OF, Oakland Athletics Hyun-Jin Ryu, SP, Los Angeles Dodgers Danny Duffy, SP/RP, Kansas City Royals Archie Bradley, SP, Arizona Diamondbacks   AL-Only Paulo Orlando, OF, Kansas City Royals Whit Merrifield, OF, Kansas City Royals Matt Boyd, SP, Detroit Tigers Pat Dean, SP, Minnesota Twins Tim…

Lost in an offseason slog, dreaming of those fall afternoons spent arguing online about the existence of an SEC bias? Don’t worry, the NCAA baseball tourney has your fix! No conference in tournament history has ever earned more than three of the available eight national seeds (which means you get to host the first two rounds at your home park), but the SEC looks poised to do so when…

Monday’s MLB schedule is packed with games starting at different times, so those in daily fantasy baseball contests will have to double-check every entry to make sure the players they want are available in that specific FanDuel or DraftKings tournament. The late-afternoon contests have the most interesting splits (at least on FanDuel, where the Dodgers-Cubs and Rangers-Indians are included on that slate), with the Twins, Reds, Astros, Cubs, Indians and Rangers all…

I was a horrible lacrosse player in high school: bad at catching the ball, slow, and not very aggressive. Yet I’d spend hours at a handball wall with my stick: throwing, catching, repeating. I played on winter leagues, and woke up early for 6 am pickup games. Freshman and sophomore years, I made it on to the junior varsity team — a miracle. By 11th grade, it was time to…

Beginning this fall, low-income student-athletes will not be able to get grants to offset the cost of playing sports, because legislators did not reauthorize a sales tax exemption on tickets for high school sporting events. Legislators did not include the comparatively minuscule measure in the chaotic final days of the legislative session, where it got lost amid proposals for billions of dollars in spending and borrowing. Gov. Mark Dayton said…

Time and history have long since confirmed Maxim Gorky’s dim view of the Soviet Union. So perhaps we ought to pay a little more attention to something the Russian novelist said about sports. “Sport,” Gorky wrote in 1928, “has a single clear purpose: to make people even more stupid than they are.” (Before anyone asks,…

WBC cruiserweight champion Bellew comforts Makabu after his third-round knockout win at Goodison Park The inside of Tony Bellew’s head must have been a wild place on Monday morning. What’s real? What’s fantasy? Did that actually happen? Certainly did. Ask any one of 17,000 fellow Everton fans who screamed you to victory. Or ask Ilunga Makabu, the poor bloke whose head you almost took off. Come to think of it,…

Marcus Rashford and Cameron Borthwick-Jackson (right) both made their first-team debuts this season Manchester United’s 18-year-old striker Marcus Rashford has signed a new deal which will keep him at Old Trafford until June 2020. He scored twice on his first-team debut against Midtjylland in February and finished the season with eight goals in 18 appearances. Rashford was selected in England’s 26-man squad for Euro 2016 and scored on his debut…

(Photo: The Associated Press) CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico (AP) — Mexican authorities say soccer player Alan Pulido, a forward with Olympiacos in the Greek league, has been rescued safe and sound after an hours-long kidnapping in the northeast border state of Tamaulipas. The Tamaulipas security coordination group for Mexico’s security forces says in a statement early Monday that the rescue occurred shortly before midnight. The statement says Pulido is being medically…

As soccer powerhouses like Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay gear up for the prestigious Copa America tournament this weekend and England, France, Germany and Spain prepare to compete at Euro 2016 just a few days later, a World Cup is already under way — albeit with slightly lesser known “national” sides like Kurdistan, Somaliland and Northern Cyprus — in the autonomous region of Abkhazia in eastern Europe. A total of 12…