It’s the taking part until September that counts

The wonderful thing about American-devised sports is that no one is really a loser until quite late in the season. In football and cricket, if you lose your first three or four games you’re probably in a pretty tight spot, and there’s a high chance that you’ll be fighting to survive in the division rather than go all the way and win the title. baseball, ice hockey, American football and basketball offer the opportunity for even the guys finishing with the eighth best record to go down in history for the right reasons.

And in British baseball, this is abused somewhat.

Six teams from the 10 that play in the NBL will qualify for the playoffs, with four of them taking part in the National Baseball Championships. The two division winners will automatically go to the NBCs, alongside the two teams who come through a group of the four with the best record who didn’t win their pool. In reality it means that the London Mets and Southern Nationals will join the Lakenheath Diamondbacks from their group, and perhaps even the Mildenhall Bulldogs will get through as Pool B has looked generally stronger than Pool A. Southampton Mustangs and Richmond Flames will both qualify, although which goes straight to the NBCs without preliminary rounds (as if the season wasn’t already enough!) remains to be seen.

Triple-A now sees the Liverpool Trojans represent the north, alongside one of the other two teams that hasn’t folded from their division. Three of the six teams in AAA South will qualify for the post-season, with second playing against third for the final NBC spot.

AA North and AA Midlands each send four teams out of five to the playoffs; the top two from each will qualify for the AA-standard post-season, while third and fourth drop down to single-A, facing off against each other to decide how much more competitive baseball they’ll get to play in 2011. This means only the Oldham North Stars and Leicester Blue Sox II – who have combined for one win in three years – won’t make the September schedule.

AA South is more reasonable: The top two from Pool A play against the top two from Pool B, first vs second, and then against each other to send one team from twelve to the NBCs, with four of 12 actually participating in the playoffs. And in the A South division, the same rings true. Although it’s four of eight, although to put that in context, two teams have lost one game between them in the league this year, while two more have won only twice between them.

So before we get to the kids, we can see that over 53% of the 49 active teams will be playing in the post season. That’s twice as many as in America.

Is that representative? Does that benefit the sport? Perhaps it should just be division winners for the sake of honour and pride.

As far as I can work out, no kids are eliminated from the post-season until they’ve lost in the playoffs. Inclusion for all, or a bit of a rubbish way to say ‘nobody’s failed’?

It’s something that bugs me a little, but as I am playing on a team that has fought tooth and nail and still hasn’t been good enough to topple the league-leaders, who have only lost twice all year, perhaps it’s a bit fairer on those who pay their money to play the game here in the UK.