The MWL seeds are mostly set, with Wednesday's Springfield - Churchill game determining the 5A three and four seeds. I'm hoping it's a match-up of Kameron Bates and Jake Lessel. I don't think either pitched Monday.
Several people emailed me and asked why I already had North Eugene as the number one 5A seed and Marist number two. They play each other Wednesday. If Marist wins, North and Marist will have identical 12-4 records and will have split their season series. Each league sets up their own tie breaking rules. This is the current tie-breaker set up.
- Check to see if a team won the head to head match-ups.
- If the teams split their head to head, then start at the top of the standings and check to see if either team beat the top ranked team. So, ff Marist & North tie, the league looks to Thurston as the highest placing team besides Marist and North.
- North beat Thurston once, 5-0. Marist lost both games by scores of 8-5 and 10-9.
- Had Marist and North had the same record against Thurston, the league would check the next highest placing team which is Sheldon. North and Marist both split with the Irish.
- Just keep going down the standings until you find the first team that one of tied teams beat more than the other tied team and you have found your winner.
- If there is a 'perfect' tie, where the tied teams split against each other and beat everyone else the same number of times, then this year I believe the RPI was going to be used as the next tiebreaker.
Marist is currently ranked fourth in state in the RPI at 575, while North Eugene is 5th at 564. If North beats Marist at Marist, their RPI's should be very, very close. The RPI formula depends on the record of every in-state team that either Marist or North have played. Without adding in all of those teams, their difference is less than one RPI point in North's favor if North wins.
What it all means is that if both teams keep winning they should not see each other until at least the semi's.
Thurston is ranked #6 in the 6A RPI and automatically advances to the 6A round of 32 and should have a good match-up based on the #6 RPI rank.
Does it matter if your team is a co-champion but second seed?
This will lead into a longwinded story involving Sheldon's assistant coach Jim Fryback, so you may want to get back to work and wait until the next blog.
I believe this year the AD's decided that "There will be only one MWL champion". In the case of a tie, the tie breaker process will be used and if there is a perfect tie, the RPI will break the tie. That made sense if the two teams were from the same classification, like Sheldon and Thurston from 6A, or North and Marist from 5A. But this year a tie could be between a 5A and 6A team, and I say a 'co-championship' would be appropriate.
Maybe I'm sensitive to co-championships because my senior year at Marshfield, I played on an 8-1 co-champion football team, a 15-3 co-champion basketball team and a co-champion baseball team. Back in those days only one team went to state in football and baseball, and Marshfield was the odd man out. So I only went to state in basketball, where my awesome 15 inch vertical kept me on the bench most of the time.
But the district co-championship in baseball means a lot now, especially in baseball, as no one thinks Marshfield was ever good in baseball. But if you go into the Sheldon gym, look at their banners, and if Jim Fryback hasn't gotten a ladder and removed the asterisk by 1968 in baseball, you'll have proof that Sheldon and Marshfield tied for the district champoinship.
Adults can do wonderful things to kids, and the Eugene-Springfield schools cooked up a good one to keep Marshfield and North Bend out of the state baseball playoffs. The MWL was set up in two divisions for several years. The Eugene-Springfield schools played in the 'northern league' while Marshfield and North Bend played each other a million times in the 'southern league'. Then there was a playoff. The winner of the southern league played the number two northern team. If the southern team won, then the southern team played the northern team, but had to beat them twice to get to state. It was a diabolical set up. I suppose in response to Marshfield's domination of football and basketball in the 50's.
Here's where Fryback comes in. I didn't know him back them. But I was a 190 pound fullback and he was a much smaller defensive player who I enjoyed flicking off my thigh pads. Fryback was quite the basketball player and as I said, I was vertically challenged, mostly by the weight of my large derriere. We split our basketball series with Sheldon and got to play them in Mac Court to see who would be the one and two seeds in the Rose Garden. I offered my services to Marshfield's legendary coach Bruce Hoffine to go into the game early and, shall we say, 'frustrate' Fryback and Sheldon's big center, but Hoffine told me to go practice my free throws. Coach should have taken up my offer as Sheldon won. Marshfield lost the tourney opener against number one David Douglas by three points, while Fryback and Sheldon handled Baker in their opener. The Irish eventually lost to David Douglas by 9 in a contest for the fourth place trophy.
So then comes baseball season. The Eugene schools really didn't know much about Marshfield because we played our summer ball in the Klamath Falls, Medford and Roseburg legion hotbeds. Old timers will remember the Keck, Brosterhaus, Miller combo's from Klamath and Jim Beamer from Roseburg. Those guys were baseball's LeBron James.
We handled the pesky Bulldogs and we were pumped for our series against North Eugene and Sheldon. We were strong on pitching and felt we could take all three. One of our pitchers, Herb Pryor, would go on to set the NCAA record for complete game victories at UNLV and go on to triple A ball. It rained and rained and we couldn't get our games in. Finally the OSAA said we had to get our games in, so Marshfield, North Eugene and Sheldon headed off to Bend....... Fryback told me the next part of the story when a bunch of Sheldon parents were socializing back in the 90's, but he didn't realize who I was.
Fryback was still seething during the baseball season about me running over him in football. Things were different back in the good old days and not much was out of bounds. So he sends a batch of tainted kielbasa to Marshfield high school, knowing that there were three Polish coaches who would probably take home the kielbasa, my Dad being one of them. I ate it up! It was great! But the next morning when we got on the bus, I had a horrible pain in my side. I thought I was nervous, so I didn't tell my dad (the coach) anything. The pain just kept getting worse. I finally had to tell dad that I was sweating and my gut was killing me. They took me off the bus in Drain and found the only doctor in town, who quickly diagnosed me with appendicitis. Turned out the 'doctor' was an Irish alum. Anyway, I was sent back to Coos Bay, and had my appendix removed by another Irish alum.
The bus travelled the rest of the way to Bend. Marshfield took care of North Eugene 2-0. Then the Pirates beat Sheldon 4-2, earning the co-champion title, and headed to the bus to go to the motel for a good nights rest before playing Sheldon for the tie breaker. But no, the OSAA pulled Marshfield off the bus and said we had to play a triple header. Sheldon won the tie-breaker 5-1. The next year in a similar set-up, Pirate Herb Pryor threw 12 innings of no hit ball in the divisions playoffs, but ran out of innings.
Anyway, the title co-champion does relieve the sting a little bit. And I've mostly forgiven Fryback for the Kielbasa trick. Though when I see him at Courtsports and he thinks I have walked over to his recumbent cycle to talk some baseball, I am really turning on the radioactive isotope under his seat.
Good Luck in the playoffs everyone!
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