This year has been an exciting one for the Manchester Twilight League. We brought in 2 new teams, the Moodus Nationals and the Chicago Sam’s Orioles, which kept our league at a strong 10 teams after the loss of the Tri-County Twins and Manchester Mayhem. Lots of new players joined the league this year, keeping the competition level better than ever. The parity throughout the league was fantastic. The Orioles may have had the worst record in the regular season, but one time this year, they beat the Angels (who had the best record) 12-0… proving that on any given day, anyone could beat anyone else. This year we played at some great new fields for the league, like CCSU, Kingswood Oxford, Moodus Legion Field, and Portland High School. We also continued to play at great lighted fields like Muzzy Field in Bristol, Rec Park in Willimantic, Riverfront Park in Glastonbury, Sage Park in Berlin, Rotary Field in South Windsor, and the gem of the schedule when we once again played at Dodd Stadium in Norwich.

The MTL Regular season of 26 games was a very successful one, in that we played ALL our games for the first time in a long time, and also only had 1 forfeit in the whole league (actually the first in a few years). We also continued our tradition of EVERYONE making the double elimination playoff tournament, and anyone having a chance to win the title. The playoffs started with the East Hartford Angels finishing the regular season with the top overall seed and top spot in the central division, while the Glastonbury Pirates (our defending champs) finished on top of the eastern division… giving both a bye in the playoffs.

The battle to stay out of starting in the elimination bracket (starting with a loss), went on throughout the final week of the regular season. It came down to 3 huge games for the Bristol Knights and the Moodus Nationals to determine if they would finish in the 6th (and in the winners bracket) or the 7th seed (and in the elimination bracket). The first was the second game at Muzzy Field on Monday of the last week of the regular season. Bristol defeated Moodus in the head -to-head matchup in a close game. Later that week in a must win for Moodus, they defeated the Orioles, putting them a 1/2 game up on the Knights. Then on the last day of the regular season, the Knights themselves defeated the Orioles in another close game, giving the Knights the same records as the Nationals… but with the Knights beating the Nationals in both head to head games, they got the tie-breaker and into the winners brackets for playoff seeding.

In the playoffs, we had the two top seeded teams advance through their games to matchup in the winners bracket final. The games went to the last inning, and resulted in a crazy walk-off win for the East Hartford Angels over the 2 seed Glastonbury Pirates. Of all the other teams, the Bristol Knights were able to battle throught the winners bracket, and then the elimination bracket to matchup with the Pirates in the elimination bracket final. The Knights came out on top in an exciting game… forcing a rematch with the team the Knights never could beat in the regular season. All year long, the Knights never defeated the Angels, losing a couple close games and a couple not too close games. But now the Championship Series matchup was set, 6 seed Knights vs the 1 seed Angels.

In the championship series game 1, the Knights started Ed Dickman on the mound against the Angels Dan Scully. The game started with the Knights jumping out to an early lead, but the Angels battled back with some timely hitting and a few defensive miscues, and in the end defeated the Knights for the 5th time on the year, 9-3. In game 2, the Knights started Earl Oakes for the third time in the playoffs. Earl had been the Knights closer on the year, but for the end of the season and the playoffs, he was moved into a starter roll after the loss of the Knights Ace Sean Lopata to injury. It was a wise move, and Earl was dominant. In the end the Knights flipped the score and beat the Angles for the first time, with the same 9-3 score.

For the final if necessary championship game, the Knights called upon Chris McGrath, a lefty who only joined the team halfway through the season, but who threw more and more down the stretch. The Angels threw their very strong MTL Cy Young Candidate on the year, Brendan Wyman, another lefy who was undefeated on the year. It was a tight game throughout, but in the end the Knights led by our shortstop and MVP candidate Rick Barrett (3 hits in the final and 15 in the playoffs) defeated the Angels for the Championship. This was a very impressive and somewhat unexpected run. The Knights not only beat the Angels twice who had their number all year, but as the 6 seed they also defeated the 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 seeds in their run.

Now that the season is over, we all have a little time to relax and reflect on the past year… It was a pleasue playing with all of our Bristol Knights players. It wasn’t always easy or smooth, but in the end, we did what we had to in order to win a championship. We have a fantastic group of guys on the Knights and we hope to see as many of you next year as possible. We will be having a post season party pretty soon. Rick Barrett, fresh off his wedding yesterday wants to host again… and he has a great place to do it, so stay tuned on a date and time, and PLEASE, EVERYONE do your best to be there.

We will be getting championship shirts for everyone that wants one. We will get you all the final price for everyone, probably 10-15 dollars we’ll need to collect from everyone. We will need everyone’s size too. We also decided to make a donation from the team to the Pete Frates ALS foundation with our championship check from the league. Our own Drew Gallagher has a very close connection to him and has been helping put together a story for ESPN on him the last few years… so Brian thought this was a good idea, and we all supported this decision. you can watch the segment that Drew produced and ran on SportsCenter last night… here:

http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=11366483 …

In the next few days, we will be asking all the teams to get in our final season stat files… and we will be posting them online on the league website. At that point we will have a short time for all the coaches to nominate players for the MTL Post-season awards. We include regular and postseason stats in the totals. Once we have all the nominations in, we will post a voting form on the site for ALL our Players/Coaches/anyone involved in the league to vote. <strong>We ask that you please try to keep the voting to only those people, NOT to fans and family members.</strong> We have some real strong candidates for some awards, like Rick Barrett for MVP and Playoff MVP, Earl Oakes for Playoff MVP, Brian LaRochelle for Manager of the Year, and many more. So stay tuned for that very soon.

Shortly you can also expect us to post our final stats, Brian and I to do a very team centric post-season writeup, and I believe our very own Rex Cone will be putting together a championship edition “Rex Perspective”

Talk to you all soon. – Scott Dickens