ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Jonah Heim’s walk-off single with two outs in the ninth inning to center field scored Josh Smith and the Texas Rangers beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-3 on Sunday for their fifth consecutive win.

Smith had a two-out double down the left-field line, his third hit to match a career high, off Edwin Uceta (0-1).

Smith and Heim, hitting seventh and eighth in the order, combined for five of Texas’ seven hits.

Jacob Webb (1-0), the last of three Rangers relievers, stranded the potential go-ahead run at second in the ninth.

Neither of Texas’ top late-inning relievers, Luke Jackson (five saves) nor Chris Martin (one), was available because of recent workloads.

The Rays were swept in three games in their first road series of the season. They will return home for a 13-game homestand that will tie a franchise record. Their home schedule is being played outdoors at Steinbrenner Field, while enclosed Tropicana Field is repaired following damage done during Hurricane Milton last October. That scheduled is designed to minimize games during the area’s rainy summer.

The Rangers have won seven straight over the Rays going back to last season. They’ve beaten Tampa Bay nine straight at Globe Life Field.

Corey Seager’s solo home run in the sixth inning was his first RBI of the season, ending his longest season-starting drought at seven games.

Key moment

With the Rays’ José Caballero on second with two outs in the ninth, Webb struck out Taylor Walls. Rangers relievers struck out five over the final four innings.

Key stat

The Rangers are 8-2, their .800 winning percentage leading the AL despite having a league-worst .192 team batting average.

Up next

Rangers right-hander Nathan Eovaldi (1-0, 2.00 ERA) will begin a road series Monday against Chicago Cubs left-hander Justin Steele (2-1, 6.89). Rays right-hander Shane Baz (1-0, 0.00) will face Los Angeles Angels right-hander Kyle Hendricks (0-0, 3.00) in Tuesday’s series opener.

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SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Florida has gone from being picked to finish sixth in the rugged Southeastern Conference to pushing all the way to the final Monday night of the season.

Now the Gators face a Houston team that just pushes teams around with its suffocating defense.

Big 12 champion Houston and Florida will meet in the national championship game in the Alamodome to wrap up only the second NCAA Tournament when all the No. 1 seeds made it to the Final Four.

Still, this title game matchup is quite a surprise, and features two teams that haven’t been this far in a long time. BetMGM Sportsbook had Florida listed as a 1 1/2-point favorite.

The Cougars (35-4) won their semifinal Saturday night by overcoming a 14-point deficit in the final eight minutes for a 70-67 stunner over Duke and freshman sensation Cooper Flagg, the AP national player of the year.

That was after Florida (35-4), with All-America guard Walter Clayton Jr. scoring 34 points, only had to come back from eight points down after halftime in its 79-73 win over SEC rival Auburn.

Houston, which has an 18-game winning streak, is in its first national championship game since back-to-back appearances in 1983 and 1984 during the Phi Slama Jama era.

This is Florida’s first since winning its back-to-back titles in 2006 and 2007 under Billy Donovan. The Gators, with third-year coach Todd Golden, have an 11-game winning streak since a loss at Georgia at the end of February.

“It’s pretty incredible,” Golden said. “In three years, been fortunate to build a great staff that is aligned, that works really hard for each other. Then we’ve just accumulated a great group of guys on our roster. It took a little bit to get all these pieces together. But to a man, they all pull the same direction.”

The Cougars have won 30 of their last 31 games since two overtime losses over three days in a tournament in Las Vegas at the end of November. Their only loss since was 82-81 in OT on Feb. 1 to Texas Tech, an Elite Eight team. Their other loss this season: 74-69 to Auburn in the second game.

Coach Kelvin Sampson and Houston also made the Final Four four years ago, losing to eventual champion Baylor in the national semifinal in the NCAA tourney in a bubble in Indianapolis because of the COVID-19 pandemic. L.J. Cryer, now Houston’s leading scorer, was a freshman for the Bears on that title team.

Now the Cougars will play for a championship after being the first Texas team to make a Final Four held in the Lone Star State — after so much talk about the other teams that made it to San Antonio.

“This whole year, I’ve been trying to stay off social media and stuff like that. I really don’t see those type of things,” Cryer said. “I try just to listen to coach Sampson, and he believed we were the best team in the tournament, so that’s the only person I listened to.”

Florida entered Saturday’s semifinals ranked No. 2 in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency by scoring 129.1 points per 100 possessions, and Clayton had his second 30-point game in a row. He is the leading scorer in this NCAA tourney with 123 points (24.6 per game) and has made 18 of 32 shots (.563) with 8 of 16 3-pointers the past two games.

Houston was ranked first in adjusted defensive efficiency at 87.4 points per 100 possessions, and was one of only four schools — all the teams that made the Final Four — to rank among the KenPom.com top 10 for both offense and defense. The Cougars were at 123.9 points to rank 10th offensively.

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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here.

Nashville is not close to getting an MLB franchise.

The people who want to bring Major League Baseball to Nashville have a logo and are selling baseball hats. Music City Baseball picked out the team name, the Nashville Stars in 2019, and six years later there is a hat and logo. There is still no indication that Major League Baseball plans to add two teams in the near future. The move of John Fisher’s Athletics franchise from Oakland to Las Vegas has hit a number of roadblocks and Stu Sternberg’s Tampa Bay Rays franchise pulled out of stadium-village deal with municipal partners, the city of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, Florida. MLB has maintained that it would not expand until stadium situations in Oakland and the Tampa Bay market were resolved. The problems remain and there are stadium issues that have cropped up in Chicago, White Sox ownership wants a new stadium, Kansas City and Phoenix.

In December, 2024, the mayor of Nashville, Freddie O’Connor threw cold water on the possibility that his city could take on a Major League Baseball expansion franchise or go after an existing franchise that might be on the market. O’Connor appearing on a local radio show told host George Plaster that Nashville does not have the ingredients to take on an MLB business. Music City Baseball is led by John Loar but O’Connor seems to think that Loar’s group lacks some sort of credibility. O’Connor talked about one of the ingredients that would be necessary for Nashville to land a team. The city needs a baseball stadium. If someone wants to build a stadium and is willing to pay for the structure and the land needed for the facility, he would listen and possibly work with the group. Nashville is not paying the freight for an MLB venue. It is still early in the MLB expansion process but Music City Baseball has a baseball cap.