Slightly off-topic: Baseball on the brain

Anyone smarting over the bad calls in the Major League Baseball playoffs has nothing on the University of New Brunswick Cougars.

It is not a CIS-sanctioned sport, but a whack of Canadian collegiate baseball articles have been piling up. You might want to read about what happened to UNB, which firstly had its championship series vs. Cape Breton cancelled due to bad weather, then was told it would not receive a wild-card berth for the Canadian Intercollegiate Baseball Association (CIBA) finals in Oshawa. The six-team field includes OUA champion Western, "even though the OUA is separate from the CIBA."

Crazy. There's no interest here in taking sides, but when UNB manager Randy Corey is talking about "obvious underhanded stuff" and likening dealing with CIBA to "fighting the devil," it seems post-worthy.

As noted, it's like AB's recent post about former Brock ballplayer Andrew Tinnish becoming the Toronto Blue Jays' director of amateur scouting set off a chain reaction:
  • Tinnish, who's from the Ottawa suburb of Nepean (he attended Merivale High School, walking distance from my house!), was profiled in the Ottawa Citizen by its fine sportswriter Don Campbell. Don is a well-respected baseball coach with the Ottawa-Nepean Canadians.

  • Former McMaster Marauders player Todd Devlin, who's now contributing to the Canadian Baseball Network, wrote a piece on OUA baseball is underrated.

  • Laurier's team, which is entirely self-funded, reached the OUA final.

  • Via Fagstein (like the man says, can you think of a better title?) comes a video documentary by Concordia student filmmakers François Nadeau and Steven Myers about the diamond version of the Stingers, which you may view at their site.
Anyway, excuse the digression. Baseball is my favourite sport, part function of having been at an impressionable age when the Blue Jays were a top team and part function of being an oddball. My Seamhead bona fides are beyond reproach, seeing as I managed the binary representation of the all-time Jays in a historical sim league with big-time baseball types such as the former pitcher Curt Schilling and writers such as Joe Posnanski, Mike Vaccaro and Jonah Keri. (The all-time Jays lost in the playoff's to Poz's Clevelanders and my conceit of being just happy to make the playoffs got blown out of the water when Keri steered his Montreal Expos on a deep post-season reason.)

Related:
Baseball Caper works against Cougars (Bruce Hallihan, Fredericton Daily Gleaner)
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3 comments:

  1. Sager - I'm a Woodsworth alum. Which school'd you go to?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I only moved to Ottawa in 2006 ... remember, I'm from the K-hole (Kingston) originally, went to Ernestown Secondary.

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  3. Did someone mention the OUA baseball final?

    Dangerous territory. I am this close (imagine my thumb and forefinger being very close together) to describing to everyone the bitterly cold conditions; the extra-base-hit-eliminating winds; the potential-game-tying runner who fell asleep off third base in the bottom of the ninth; and the crazy, crazy, crazy play that gave Western the win.

    But I like you, so I won't bring baseball into the relationship.

    ReplyDelete