One more to go

UPDATED

It still has one game to play, but Salem CC will be on the road in the first round of Region XIX baseball playoffs, likely to play Northampton

By Al Muskewitz
Riverview Sports News

CARNEYS POINT – The rain wiped out the second game of Salem CC’s regular-season-ending doubleheader with RCSJ-Gloucester Saturday, turning Monday’s rescheduled game a potentially big one for the Mighty Oaks’ Region XIX Division III playoff seeding.

The Oaks dropped Game 1 of the scheduled doubleheader 21-1, but the second one never got started. The game will be made up 3:30 p.m. Monday at the Carneys Point Rec Complex and must be completed by Tuesday. If the Oaks win, they could move up a spot in the seedings.

Salem currently holds the No. 7 seed in the seven-team field, but if Ocean gets swept in its final two games with Camden Sunday, a Mighty Oaks win over the top-ranked Roadrunners would vault them to No. 6 by virtue of holding the tiebreaker over Ocean.

A No. 7 seed would send them to No. 2 Northampton in the opening-round best-of-3 series, while a No. 6 seed would send them to No. 3 Brookdale. Gloucester is the No. 1 seed by virtue of its 26-3 (.897) region-eligible record and a no contest ruling on Bergen pulling out of its series with Northampton, which finishes at 23-4 (.851).

“I guess we can kind of determine who’re going to play,” Salem coach John Holt said.

Right now, it looks like this: 1. x-RCSJ-Gloucester 26-3, 2. Northampton 23-4, 3. Brookdale 23-7, 4. Middlesex 18-12, 5. RCSJ-Cumberland 17-13, 6. y-Ocean 14-14, 7. x-Salem 13-16. x-1 game remaining vs. each other, y-2 games remaining vs. Camden

If these standings hold, the playoff series would be Salem-Northampton, Ocean-Brookdale, RCSJ Cumberland-Middlesex. RCSJ Gloucester has a first-round bye.

When it comes to making projections and preferences, Holt takes the Charlie Manuel approach.

“I’m not gonna put the cart in front of the horse yet,” he said. “I’ll worry about it when we know who we’re going to play.”

In the only game the Mighty Oaks played Saturday, freshman left-hander Sean Kelby pitched the first five innings Holt explained “to get him his innings to prep him for next week.” 

The second game was going to see Ryan Silnik for the first three innings, Inaki Hutchinson for two and John McAllister for two. The pitching plan for Monday, Holt said, “probably won’t stray too far from that.”

“It’s baseball,” Holt said. “We’ve got to finish out the season, we want to try to win the game, but we also, at the end of the day, want to make sure everybody’s healthy and ready to go for the weekend.

“The good thing is I think we’ve got our pitching lined up to where it’s supposed to be and with the situations and scores and opponents we’ve had we’ve been able to give everybody some playing time to kind of sharpen up. This last one, granted, we don’t take the field to lose, but it doesn’t have a lot of bearing on where we’re at right now.”