On Monday at noon the Columbia baseball team will gather for what has become a happy, if unlikely, ritual. After practice they will go to an athletic facility lounge on 218th Street in Upper Manhattan and watch on television as their program is selected to the 64-team field of the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Tournament regional play is set to begin Friday, and selection is the right of the Ivy League champion, which for the last three years has been the Columbia Lions.
Not even Lou Gehrig’s Lions could make that claim. First, the Ivy League did not exist when Gehrig played in the early 1920s, and his Columbia teams were barely .