Coaches Scrap Tournament, Extend Conference Season

Baseball coaches from the 11-team Western State Conference have voted unanimously to eliminate their conference playoff tournament in favor of a 30-game regular season that guarantees a berth in the state’s postseason playoffs to the top two finishers.

The new format will become effective next season.

“I like it, especially since we finished in second place this year and there is a chance we won’t make the state playoffs,” Ventura Coach Gary Anglin said. “(With the new format), you get to second place and you’re protected.”

Under the current format, WSC teams play a 20-game regular season with an automatic berth in the Southern California regionals guaranteed for the champion or co-champions. Pierce won this year’s title at 16-4 and will play host to a state playoff opener May 8.

But second-place Ventura, which finished two games behind Pierce, was forced into a single-elimination conference tournament with the third-, fourth- and fifth-place finishers to determine the conference’s No. 2 team, which also earns an automatic berth in the regionals.

Ventura beat fifth-place Moorpark in the first round of the tournament Tuesday and will play No. 3 Cuesta on Thursday for the automatic regional berth.

Under the new format that was approved Monday, the regular season will be divided into three rounds of 10 games each. And because each of the conference’s 11 teams will play one another three times, the format also has a built-in tiebreaker--if two teams finish the regular season with identical records, results in head-to-head meetings will be used to determine the conference champion.

However, in jumping from 20 to 30 games during the conference season, teams will be limited to only six scheduled nonconference games. The Community College League of California’s Commission on Athletics limits schools to 36 games before postseason play.

This is not the first time the WSC has changed the way it chooses its state playoff representatives. A true Shaughnessy playoff format involving the top five conference teams was scrapped after the 1989 season. That year, College of the Canyons won 10 games in a row to gain a share of the conference title only to be eliminated from regional contention by losing its tournament opener.