by Riccardo Schiroli
After Thursday’s games, the situation in the Italian Baseball League is a definite one. T&A San Marino and the defending champions Montepaschi Grosseto joined Fortitudo Bologna and Danesi Nettuno in the post season. Since this year the league format changed, we won’t have a classic ‘play off’ series, but the top four teams will play one against the other three times in a round robin that will take off on Wednesday August 6th and will close on Saturday August 23rd. Then the top two teams will play in the classic seven-game Italian Baseball Series starting Friday August 29th.
Thursday night Grosseto advanced to the post season beating Cariparma (4-0) on the best performance of the season by right hander Lincoln Mikkelsen, who struck out a season high ten batters. Parma has not lost their chance to appear in the post season on Thursday, but in the disappointing series against De Angelis Godo. Parma was in fact the only team this season to give up a series against Godo, a part from Rangers Redipuglia and this happened exactly one week after a brilliant sweep against San Marino. Parma blew their chance when everybody felt they could have completed a miracle of a season. In particular, Parma import pitchers Mercado and Romero where dominated by Godo offense, that got 13 hits and three homeruns against them. Godo posted another brilliant hitting night (13 more hits and a couple of homers) on game two and their comeback win on Roberto Corradini, used as a reliever for Natale while he was supposed to start the rubber match of the series, was an impressive one. The two homers (by Lockwood and Sanchez) were the tying and go-ahead run.
Losing two games against Godo Parma found themselves trailing by three games against Grosseto and by two against San Marino. During the last week end of the regular season Parma had to win three but the loss in game one against Grosseto makes the other two games meaningless.
The last two games of the regular season are meaningless for Parma, but for sure not for Grosseto and not for San Marino and Nettuno. These scores will give us the schedule of the next round robin and a home field advantage to the best seeded teams.
