Back on the Beat

(but not the Twins' beat!)

The first round of the IBL playoffs was surprisingly academic – the first through fourth seeds advanced, and the fifth through eight seeds were eliminated. As I remember it, in addition to Brantford sweeping the Twins, Guelph and Barrie beat Oshawa and Kitchener respectively in five games, and Toronto knocked out the defending pennant winners (and seventh game championship losers) London.

Interestingly, Kitchener got close – very close, even – against Barrie, even if the 4-1 series win doesn’t show it. Two of their losses were by a single run, another was by 2 and the third by five. For a team that started the season 8-8 and then only won a single game the rest of the way, that ain’t bad at all.

So, the second round (semi final, actually) pairings feature Brantford against Guelph and Barrie against Toronto. Both series are already underway, and to recap:

Brantford dropped game one at home by a count of 5-1, but bounced back to win game 2 on the road 4-2. They had a week’s layover between their sweep of the Twins and game one, and let’s face it – they hadn’t had to play hard for the back half of the Twins’ series, either. Until Guelph can prove otherwise, I’m going to say that Brantford was just shaking off a bit of rust and are good to go for the rest of the playoffs.

I’m not too sure what the storyline going into the Toronto-Barrie series is. Toronto had a very see-saw six game first round against London, and there’s no question they had to be locked in all the way to the end. That would suggest to me that they carry some momentum into the Barrie series. As for the Baycats, though, I think their far-from-overpowering showing against Kitchener may have something to do with how early they clinched and the fact that they were on cruise control for what must have been a long time in a league like the IBL. Maybe the Kitchener series was just them getting back into the swing of meaningful baseball, and they could well be newly awakened giants from here on out.

Barrie won game one by a count of 8-7, so that could well bear my argument out. Game two goes tomorrow (Sunday) at Christie Pits at 2 PM, and I’m planning on being there. I fully expect an exciting game and great atmosphere tomorrow, as well as a competitive series the rest of the way!

(Settling into) The Noose

The noose that I suggested the Twins were trying to slip is now fitted firmly around their necks, and their only way out is to somehow pull off four consecutive victories against the defending champions.

They dropped tonight’s tilt in Brantford by a score of 14-2 – it was a great game for most of it; the wheels came off in the bottom of the eighth when the Twins surrendered 10 (ten!) runs, putting it far out of reach.

In that eighth inning (as will be documented in game story, to be posted soon on the Twins’ site), Mike Bonnano was put in to do mop-up duty and he was just all over the place – at one point, the bases were loaded and all three runs scored on passed balls. Not pretty.

Other than that one inning, the Twins absolutely showed up tonight – in terms of defense and pitching, at least. They kept it close; it was a 1-run game for a lot of it and only a 2-run game as of the sixth inning. The big problem, though, was that the bats just would not come around – they couldn’t get hits in key situations, and they ran themselves into a lot of stupid outs (Brendan Emmett making the third out stealing third; Branson Joseph hosed at the plate on a hopeless send; Jonathan Slattery picked off second to end an inning).

Bonnano being put into the game was more or less a waving of the white flag of sorts. After the game, coach Held conceded that he was basically out of options. The only real bullets he had left in his chamber were Derek Gordon and Adam Banski, both of whom will be needed at full capacity for Wednesday’s elimination game (although they’re all elimination games from here on out, which is obviously a bit of a problem).

Held obviously had no intention of taking Bonnano out of the game – I wonder just how long it could have gone on for – and I suppose that’s fine. It must have been a bit demoralizing for the players on the field – and Bonnano himself – to have to string it out, but what other options were there? Throw in another position player and hope he gets better results? I suppose that was one of them, but in the grand scheme of things it’s hardly a debate worth having.

But really, in case I’ve overlooked it – this was, up to the eighth, an absolute jewel of a game and I had a blast watching it in the Brantford press box with some IBL lifers who really knew their stuff and had a ton of knowledge to share about the league.

So, then, to the future we now look. And the view isn’t pretty – I don’t really care to research the exact percentage chance that teams down 3-0 in best of sevens have of coming back, but we can all imagine it’s a very low one. I’ll say this for the Twins, though: the Boston Red Sox in 2004 had a far lower chance of coming back against New York than Mississauga does against Brantford, and we all know how that one turned out (or we shouldn’t be reading a baseball blog if we don’t, anyways).

And dammit, the Twins have been so frustratingly close. Surely, surely, surely, if the baseball gods have any sense of justice whatsoever, they manage to rattle off a win or two in this series. It’s true – it would require the full wrath and fury of the baseball gods being directed at the Red Sox for the Twins to come back and win this thing, but a few wins hardly seem out of the question.

Anyways, I guess we’re standing on the abyss – I’ll be back on Wednesday with coverage of game four, and with any luck there’ll be a fifth one. Stay tuned!

(Plotting to Slip) The Noose

I sort of fell behind the blogging curve because of being up north, but I’m back now and the Twins are in the heat of their first ever playoff series – not incidentally, they’re also teetering on the brink of disaster.

They wound up coming in seventh, passing Kitchener in the tiebreaker, which turned out to be run differential in head-to-head games. As a result, they drew second place Brantford in the first round. I heard several different descriptions of how the tiebreaker was settled throughout the season; I’m pretty sure that head-to-head run differential was not one of them.

Anyways, even before game 1 was played I saw a bit of a problem with this. I have always argued that a first round match-up with Brantford was the Twins’ best shot because they’ve beaten them and played them tight in the regular season, but my thinking shifted over the last week of the season: Barrie spent the better part of a week on cruise control after clinching; Brantford, on the other hand, have been playing hard to fight for second.

Trying to jump the complacent, cruise-control team and take them by surprise seemed to me, by far, to be a better bet than taking on the Red Sox. Reality, I think, bears me out: Barrie find themselves in a shockingly tight series with Kitchener, up 2-1 but with both of their wins being by a single run. Mississauga, on the other hand, trail Brantford 2-0. I think the Twins are a better team than Kitchener, so had they drawn Barrie it’s not unthinkable that they could have the 2-1 advantage.

But the punchline is that they didn’t – they’re in a hole against Brantford and have their heads in a noose heading into tomorrow (today’s) 8.00 tilt in Brantford. If they lose, the noose is substantially tightened as they’ll trail 3-0 in the series; if they win, they’ll come home with a chance to even the series up before heading back on the road later in the week, where they normally play far better than at home.

There’s some upside for the Twins. The two games that they dropped to open the series have been very tight – the real heartbreaker was a 2-1 loss in extra innings to open the series up on Saturday night (they took a 1-0 lead in the top of the ninth and coughed it up), and today they lost 7-4, and, from what I’ve seen and read, they were right there: it was a 1-run game until Brantford put up 2 in the ninth, and given the Twins’ season it’s very likely that a couple of the Brantford runs shouldn’t have scored and/or that they missed a few chances to punch in extra runs.

Branson Joseph, I’m pretty sure it was, told the Mississauga news today that he felt the first two games of the set were the best the Twins have played all year.

So, the following factors all go in the Twins favour right now, despite how ominous a 2-0 deficit strikes most people as: they have beaten Brantford in Brantford; they’ve come close to beating Brantford at home; they’ve played very well lately; they’ll have an acute sense of urgency that Brantford will not have, being down 2-0; and, most importantly, they play a hell of a lot better on the road than at home.

Like I said, all it takes is a W tomorrow on the road, and they get to come home looking to tie the series. They’ve been very close; tomorrow could well be their day.

I’ll be at the game tomorrow – to make up for missing the 2 o’clock long-weekend Sunday home game – and on Wednesday, and likely the rest of the games from here on out (for the first round, at least).

Take a look at my game story from the Kitchener playoff-clinching win at http://www.mississaugatwins.ca/gamenotes.htm and check back tomorrow night for post-game blogging!

Scheduling the Twins

The most important day of the Mississauga Twins’ season came and went without a single game being played that affected them. There were six games on slate for Sunday in the IBL – an absurd number for a nine team league – and only two were played; that was a doubleheader at Christie Pitts, where the Maple Leafs beat the just-clinched pennant champion Barrie Baycats twice.

All of the rained out games directly impacted the Twins in some way: Brantford-Kitchener was cancelled, and the Twins need Kitchener to continue losing if they are to have a shot at seventh place; both of the Twins’ games, including a pivotal contest against Kitchener that will determine whether or not the Twins even have a chance at the seventh spot and a rained out home game against Guelph that was only being played in Guelph due to diamond availability, were scrapped; and, lastly, the Hamilton/London game, in which a Hamilton loss would assure the Twins of a playoff spot and a Hamilton victory would force them to win at least one of their remaining games to not finish the season in a tie for eighth was also a wash.

The Hamilton-London contest will be played tomorrow, Monday, as the only game on the IBL slate, and its outcome will certainly dramatically alter, one way or another, the tone of the Twins’ final three games: there will be a big difference between playing for a playoff spot and playing with a playoff spot guaranteed and only the luxury of moving up in the standings hanging in the balance.

Mississauga’s schedule the rest of the way out is not entirely clear just yet, in part due to what appears to be an administrative error by the league. What we do know is that the Twins play Kitchener in Kitchener on Tuesday; however, the IBL website lists the Twins playing Guelph twice on Wednesday. The problem with this, of course, is that the Twins only have one game left against Guelph – their other remaining home game is a make-up against Brantford.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on – maybe there wasn’t an administrative error and the Twins actually are playing Guelph twice on Wednesday, instead of Guelph once and Brantford once. Brantford are in Kitchener Wednesday night, so it would obviously be very hard for them to play in Mississauga earlier in the day and get up there for a 7.30 start. In this case, they would have changed the schedule, obviously, having Guelph take Brantford’s place in a game against Mississauga, and while that seems highly improbable, the IBL are desperate to wrap the regular season up and it’s tough to imagine the season extending beyond Wednesday. Of course, it’s equally tough to imagine that they’d just substitute one team for another in the schedule, so I really have no idea whatsoever.

I’ve sent a couple of emails and I’ll probably follow them up with phone calls tomorrow if necessary to get concrete answers. If I do get a reply tonight that contains important information, I’ll put it up here and fire off a news post for the website.

One more thing before I go – looking at the standings, a very interesting development has cropped up: Toronto is now tied for second place with Brantford, each of them two games back of Barrie. The kicker, though, is that Brantford has played two games less than Toronto has – all the more reason to think, given that they’re now in a tie, that they absolutely must get that rain-out against Mississauga in.

Beyond that, though, the exciting part is the possibility of Mississauga finishing in seventh and Toronto second – that would set up a Battle of the GTA first round, and I’m sure it would be a lot of fun for everyone. It’s certainly an angle I’ll keep an eye on as the next few days play out!