 rjonas, Sun, June 8th, 2008 Memo to Section II baseball committee: Do whatever it takes to avoid another triple- or quadruple-header. Especially when Sectional titles are on the line. Saturday's quadruple-header at Joe Bruno Stadium turned into a marathon that didn't end until more than 12 hours after it began at 12:30 p.m. with the Class C-CC final. Not that it was supposed to be a quadruple-header. Originally, the Class C-CC final was scheduled to be played in Queensbury, but the game was moved to "The Joe" when the Queensbury field was judged to be unplayable. And not that moving the game to Troy was a big deal, either. Originally, the first game scheduled for "The Joe" was the 3 p.m. Class B final between Chatham and Granville. The committee simply tacked on the Class C-CC final at 12:30 p.m. to keep the other three games on schedule. At least, that was the idea. Unfortunately, the Class B final turned into a 3 1/2-hour marathon because of a 40-minute lightning delay and ... well, top-seeded Chatham simply picking apart No. 3 Granville to the tune of a 16-0 final score. Granville didn't help the speed of the game, either, as it committed seven errors to go along with Chatham's 13 hits. The length of the Class B final backed everything else up. The Class A final between Mohonasen and Ichabod Crane didn't start until after 7 p.m. -- more than 90 minutes later than its originally-scheduled time of 5:30 p.m. And the Class AA final between LaSalle and Columbia started around 10:15 p.m. and didn't finish until nearly 1 a.m. -- hardly a time for a high school baseball game to be played. So even if the Class C-CC game didn't get moved to "The Joe," the tripleheader would have still wound up taking until early Sunday morning to complete. That's simply unacceptable. What needs to be done in the future is to hold Sectional finals as doubleheaders at two sites, each with the necessary equipment to handle weather delays. Keep the Class A and AA finals at "The Joe" and move the Class B and C-CC finals to Amsterdam's Shuttleworth Park. You should be able to get both games in before the clock strikes midnight. Just a modest proposal from a person who expected to be home by 8 p.m. and was stuck at the ballpark for two extra hours because the Class B final took too long. CATEGORY: General Society
blog comments powered by Disqus  |
         |
