Region XXIII a little different from the season

By By Tony Krausz/assistant sports editor
May 8, 2004
Welcome to a new ballgame Region XXIII Baseball Tournament participants.
Okay, it's not really a new game. The standard rules of baseball still apply. It takes three outs to end half of an inning, batters still get three strikes, you can only put nine players on the field at once and so on and so forth.
But the teams playing at Scaggs Field this weekend in the regional tournament to earn a berth into the super regional and a shot at a spot in the Junior College World Series are finding the games to be slightly different than the regular season.
The biggest change is the jump from seven inning doubleheaders to a full nine inning game.
The additional two innings have made the axiom of "you win with pitching" more prevalent than ever on the diamond for the junior college squads.
Planning beyond the seventh inning may not seem like much of a problem for the head coach's navigating through the double-elimination tournament that began Thursday and runs through Sunday.
It's just two more innings right? Wrong.
The Eagles avoided having to deal with the tricky question of how to best use their staff in an opening-round win over Delgado on Thursday.
MCC starter Chris Rayborn went the full nine innings in a 4-3 win, striking out 10 and allowing three hits for his ninth win of the season.
Coaches cannot rely on pitchers going the distance every game over the four days, and MCC may be more aware of that than most, considering the Eagles lost their top relief pitcher in the state tournament last weekend.
MCC sophomore Jason Phillips suffered an arm injury and will undergo Tommy John surgery in Birmingham, Ala. The loss of the right-hander hurler has left a void in the Eagles' bullpen.
Of course, MCC isn't the only team with bullpen concerns this weekend, but other squads have found ways around having to go to reserve arms in the opening day.
Gulf Coast Community College finished its first game in seven innings thanks to a two-run homer that invoked the eight-run rule after seven innings to give the Bulldogs a 10-2 win over Northeast Community College.
Bulldogs head baseball coach Cooper Farris may have gotten out with using one pitcher thanks to his offense to start the tournament, but the longtime Gulf Coast skipper knows that will not be the case in every game.
Even though the coaches may have pitching on their minds, they cannot afford to manage a game any differently over the course of the tournament.
It's amazing what two more innings potentially 12 more outs can do to a baseball game. The contests look exactly the same, but with an eighth and ninth inning, it's complete different.
And some how, it's just that much better.