BASEBALL NOTEBOOK

The ties between San Fernando and Banning, who met in a City Championship quarterfinal Tuesday won by Banning, 4-0, run deep.

“We knew everything about them,” Coach Armando Gomez of San Fernando said.

Gomez and his Banning counterpart, John Gonzalez, have been friends for more than 10 years.

Assistant Greg Davis of San Fernando held a similar position with the Pilots the previous three years.

San Fernando beat Banning, 8-0, in its opener and lost to the Pilots, 4-3, in last year’s quarterfinals. The teams have held barbecues together and stayed together for the last three years when they have played in the Las Vegas Bishop Gorman tournament.

Gomez is one of the coaches with a complaint about playoff pairings.

“I’m bitter at the way the seedings came out,” Gomez said. “We shouldn’t have been playing these guys in the second round.”

Banning, the Marine League champion, was seeded fourth after going 20-11 during the regular season. San Fernando was seeded fifth with a 23-7 record after tying for the Valley Mission League championship with Kennedy but received the designation as the second-place team after losing two of three games to the Golden Cougars.

The seedings were determined by a committee consisting of the coach of each league champion and two members of the Interscholastic Athletics Committee.

“The process basically has been the same for years,” said Jeff Halpern, a specialist with the Interscholastic Athletics Office. “There’s always a flawed system when you have human beings involved with it. We think we try to do the best we can with what we’re working with.”