FINAL DAY REPORT
Post, Times Secure Final Berths
History Is Made as Post Wins Its First MMSL Division After 17 Seasons

The usual excitement of Final Day brought playoff berths for the Associated Press, CBS News and Washington Times, and the No. 1 seed for Team Video, thus settling the field for the Playoff Championship Series. But above all that comes the remarkable story of the Washington Post winning a berth for the first time since 2000 and capturing its first division title in league history.

Game action from WTTG vs. Philibusters, a defeat that ended the Phillies' season. Sorta.
Photo (and cover photo) by Tony Colella
What’s the big deal?

The Post is a charter member of the MMSL, one of the true founding members of the program and a playoff team from 1991-’93. But who would have guessed the Post would need 14 seasons to snuff out history and wrap up the Wheaton Forest title by knocking off arch rival Post.com?

Aside from winning the division, playoff berth and finally taking the Johnny Livengood Red Shirt Award for its series with Post.com, the Post eliminated the Bucketheads from the playoffs for the first time since 1998. It’s been that kind of year as The Gazette, another playoff mainstay and division rival, also goes home on Final Day for the first time since ’98.

As usual, Final Day, which comes earlier this year than anytime before, settled the dust of playoff races. WTTG (Veirs Mill), AOL (Burning Tree), Team Video (Aspen Hill), along with AP (Layhill) and the Post won their divisions and gained an automatic slot in the playoffs. CNN (Capitalview/Homewood) clinched two weeks ago.

The Burning Tree and Aspen Hill divisions send three teams each to the playoffs.

Each division winner gets a team trophy and each player gets a championship t-shirt, to be presented at the playoffs.

The wild-card races finally developed around the bottom two out of six berths as the results of Week 7 offered a foretelling. The Washington Times gained the last berth Saturday by holding off Dow Jones and CBS News gained the other wild-card because of a tiebreaker victory against the Philibusters.

For the second year in a row, the WJLA/NewsChannel 8 contingent misses the postseason due to a tiebreaker when a victory—anywhere along the way—would have shoved them into the playoffs.

So, as the Final Day scores trickled in on Saturday, what became evident was the extent of tiebreakers needed to break seeding ties. Team Video, which played the league’s weakest schedule and did not face WTTG or CNN, grabbed the top seed in a three-way tie due to Team’s league-best runs differential. WTTG is the No. 2 seed based on a victory against CNN.

A tie for the No. 4 seed among WRC, Comcast SportsNet and AOL goes to the Original Peacocks, thanks to victories against the SportsNuts and AOLiens.

Atlantic Video’s June surge lands them at No. 7 and defending champ USA Today lost by a run to AOL and slipped to No. 8, which might be a blessing. That’s because the 8-9 game is an interesting bracket that plays on Cabin John Field 2, the championship diamond, where the Gannetoids are quite comfortable the past few years—their traditional early-tourney struggles aside.

Jay Crissman and AOL are headed back to the playoffs, where the AOLiens' 6-seed has them in a tough bracket.
Photo by Katie Martin
The season’s most perplexing tiebreaker was seeds 9-12. AP, Times, CBS News and the Post have 9-7 records. Some played against each other, some did not. So they were placed in a cluster and individual records in games against each other calculated.

AP (1-0) gains the No. 9 slot due to a victory against CBS News and not having any losses in the cluster. Then, the Times, CBS News and Post were 1-1 against each other—the Times beating CBS News, which beat the Post, which beat the Times. This three-way tie thus went to runs differential, with the Times gaining the No. 10 seed, CBS News No. 11 and Post No. 12.

This year's seedings set up an interesting tournament bracket that we’ll analyze more closely as the playoffs near. But the bottom half of the bracket is extremely difficult and the upper half holds a couple of windows of breezy opportunity for a trip to Championship Sunday.

In other Final Day events, the Press Club scratched back to finish 8-8 after struggling most of the year. But AP had clinched the division a game ahead of Big Blue’s 11-8 triumph against ther Flash in their annual Final Day showdown.

Atlantic Video’s 9-4 victory against Team Video gave Comcast SportsNet a chance to grab the Aspen Hill Division, but Team responded with a sound 11-5 victory, completing a storybook season in which Team has gone from 7-9 and 14th a year ago to 14-2 and the top seed this year.

And, revealed last week in The Gazette was more news about the Intercounty Connector passing over Layhill Park, taking nearly a mile-wide swath of property. Surely you’ve seen the signs of protest along the road around the park.

The state has agreed to build a new, 70-acre park a couple of miles up Layhill, likely around intersections of Norbeck or Norwood, under the new name of the Llewellyn Sports Complex. There will be soccer fields, tennis courts, a baseball field, picnic area and bike trail.

Look closely. No softball fields.

That means sometime in the future, probably 2010-’11, the MMSL’s best field, its flagship site, will be lost.