Saturday would have been baseball great Ottis Johnson's 91st birthday

Ottis Johnson

After the dust settled from this past weekend’s slate of NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games, we saw that this year’s slate of Final Four teams would include the Florida Gators, the Connecticut Huskies, the Wisconsin Badgers and the Kentucky Wildcats. Those four teams will meet in AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas this coming Saturday to determine which teams will move on to the national title game on Monday night.

Florida, a No. 1 seed, will play Connecticut, a No. 7 seed, Saturday at 5:09 p.m., and Wisconsin, a No. 2 seed, will play Kentucky, a No. 8 seed, starting at 7:49 p.m. Those two games will be televised on TBS.

The winners of those two games will meet in the title game on Monday, starting at 8:10 p.m. The championship game will be televised by CBS.

I look for the two semi-final round games to be very close, and I expect Florida and Kentucky to both win. If that comes to pass, it’ll be interesting because it’ll set up an All-SEC national title game. In a match up between Florida and Kentucky in the national title game, I’d look for Florida to come out ahead.

Florida and Kentucky have played three times already this season, and Florida won all three of those games. On Feb. 15, Florida beat Kentucky in Lexington by double digits, 69-59, and on March 8, Florida blasted Kentucky by 19 points, winning 84-65. On March 16, the two teams met in the SEC tournament finals in Atlanta, and Florida won, 61-60.

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The Major League Baseball season officially started this past Sunday, and those of you who enjoy listening to the Braves on the radio will have ample opportunity to do so again this year. The Braves have the largest radio affiliate network of any major league team, and more than a few of the stations that carry Braves games are in southwest Alabama.

Those stations include WKNU-FM 106.3 in Brewton, WHEP-FM 92.5 in Foley, WHEP-AM 1310 in Foley, WJDB-FM 95.5 in Thomasville and WJDB-AM 630 in Thomasville. Two AM stations out of Montgomery also carry the Braves – WMSP-AM 740 and WNZZ-AM 950.

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Speaking of baseball, this coming Saturday would have been the 91st birthday of arguably Evergreen’s greatest baseball player ever, John Ottis Johnson. Born on April 5, 1923, Johnson was the last professional baseball player to die after getting hit in the head by a pitch.

Johnson, who played two seasons of minor league professional baseball for the Dothan Browns, died in June 1951 after getting hit in the temple by a pitch delivered by Headland Dixie Runners pitcher Jack Clifton. Johnson, age 25, died eight days later from the resulting skull fracture. He ended his career with a .336 lifetime batting average and with 17 career home runs.

Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians is the only major league player in history to be killed by beaning, and that incident occurred in 1920.