League Playoffs

They say timing is everything, and it couldn't have been truer for the Westpark Ripcats, who won the league world series this year by sweeping the Virginia Beach Oddsox, giving the Liberty League its fourth different champion in its four years of existence.

Only four teams made the playoffs, with one series in the first round matching up Virginia Beach and the Conn River Patriots, both with 91-71 season record. The Oddsox prevailed in six games, despite being outhit (.251/.340/.382 to .271/.356/.469) and outpitched (4.42 ERA to 3.50). They weren't outfielded, though; they committed only one error, while the Patriots committed seven. Those seven errors led to five unearned runs, and unearned runs were the difference in three of Virginia Beach's four victories.

The other series matched up Westpark's league-leading 97-65 record against Maui's 88-74. Westpark had figured to be an offensive powerhouse this season, since virtually everyone on their roster, including several of the players picked up in the latter rounds of the draft last year -- like Gary Matthews, Jr., David Ross, and Mark Derosa -- had turned in career years. That didn't turn out to be the case, though, with almost everybody in the lineup except Jim Thome underperforming: Matt Holliday, Garrett Atkins, and Matthews finished with an OPS about 150 points lower than in real life.

And that held up during the first round of the playoffs, when the Ripcats found themselves on the short end of a 3-2 edge, having batted a miserable .238 with only 18 runs scored in those five games. From that point on, though -- the remaining two games of the series with Maui, and the four games with the Oddsox -- Westpark clubbed the ball at a .342/.385/.445 clip, averaging over seven runs a game.

The playoffs proved two things. First, anything can happen in a short series. Had the Patriots been a little more careful tossing the ball around, they very well may have been the team that advanced to the league championship series. The 7th game between Maui and Westpark went 11 innings, and Maui had the winning run in scoring position in the 8th, 9th, and 10th innings, but couldn't push it across. And Virginia Beach, even though it got swept, was arguably the victim simply of one team getting very hot while the other team got very cold. It had actually had a season's edge in contests with Westpark, winning 10 of the 18 games between the two.

The other thing the playoffs proved is that the league structure of allowing teams to retain only a limited number of players each year substantially increases competitive balance. Westpark and Marriottsville (then Dublin) had the two worst records in the league in 2006; this year, Westpark won the championship and Marriottsville fell just two games short of making the playoffs.

So we'll see who wins next year. Odds are it won't be the Ripcats.