He Didn’t Pitch Way Out of Trouble

The Detroit Tigers, off to one of the worst starts in baseball history, seemingly find new ways to lose all the time.

What they didn’t need was an opponent finding a new way to win.

On Thursday, the Baltimore Orioles swept a doubleheader from the Tigers, with B.J. Ryan earning the victory in Game 1 -- without throwing a pitch.

Detroit was ahead, 2-1, Ryan came on in relief of Pat Hentgen with two out in the seventh and promptly picked off Omar Infante from first base.

The Orioles then scored three times in the top of the eighth on their way to a 5-2 victory.

“It’s an odd game,” Baltimore’s Gary Matthews Jr. said.

Trivia question: Speaking of the Tigers, who said, “You can learn a little from victory. You can learn everything from defeat”?

Crossing over: Brooks Kieschnick was college baseball’s player of the year in 1993 when, as a junior at Texas, he batted .374, belted 19 home runs, drove in 81 runs and, as a pitcher, went 16-4.

But he has been mostly quiet since ... until Wednesday, when he played in two games -- one for triple-A Indianapolis and the other for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Even stranger is that he pitched in the minor league game, then hit for the Brewers.

Kieschnick was 1-0 with an 8.49 earned-run average in triple A and 0 for 9 as a hitter.

On Wednesday, he gave up two runs in two innings, then struck out in his major league pinch-hitting appearance.

Breaking news: Former figure skating champion Tonya Harding pulled out of a boxing match in Des Moines after breaking her nose in a sparring session.

Harding lost her pro boxing debut to Samantha Browning in February. She was replaced in next week’s scheduled bout at the Osceola’s Lakeside Casino Resort by Christy Martin, one of the pioneers of women’s boxing.

The 32-year-old Harding has been an outcast from figure skating because of her role in the 1994 attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan.

No word on whether Jeff Gillooly was in the vicinity when the nose was broken.

He’s aces: Dave Ladensack will have to wait 335,000 years to again accomplish what he did last weekend at Port Huron, Mich.

Bucking odds mightier than lightning-strike proportions, the 47-year-old shot two holes-in-one in one round Sunday.

Chances of pulling off the feat are 67 million-1, according to a representative of the magazine Golf Digest. That means Ladensack could play 200 rounds of golf a year and not duplicate his feat for another 335,000 years.

For the record, three aces in a round: 3 trillion-1 odds.

Trivia answer: Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson.

And finally: In the People magazine released Friday in which he is listed among the “50 Most Beautiful People” of 2003, San Antonio Spur guard Tony Parker says he uses a multivitamin and a shot of wheat grass to stay trim.

Parker, 20, born in Belgium and raised in France, also says, “Foie gras and snails are my weakness.”

That translates to goose liver and snails.

Don’t know how, but maybe Derek Fisher can use that.