Some Give Seeding Meeting an ‘E’

The most amusing part of the City Section playoff selection meeting won’t be watching eight coaches squeeze into single-seat desks arranged neatly in front of a blackboard in a nutritional health classroom at Los Angeles Hamilton High.

The real entertainment value will be what takes place before, during and after the meeting, which begins at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday and ends, hopefully, before egos crack and tempers erupt.

There’s never a lack of drama, be it real or concocted, in the process that gives 16 teams an invitation to the City Championship baseball playoffs, which begin Friday and end June 10 at Dodger Stadium. (Another 16 teams are chosen for the City Invitational, essentially the City’s equivalent to college basketball’s National Invitation Tournament.)

“You walk out of that meeting feeling like you’ve been in a 12-round fight,” Woodland Hills El Camino Real Coach Matt LaCour said. “Every coach I’ve talked to said it’s a bad deal. They don’t like the way it’s done.”

At the heart of the matter is a problem unique to baseball, which has a playoff selection process unlike any other sport in the City Section.

Each of eight City Section leagues send one representative to the meeting. Each has an equal vote in the selection process.

In every City Section sport besides baseball, a school is designated to be its league’s representative before the season begins, usually on a voluntary basis. That is, if Verdugo Hills volunteers to be the Sunset Six League representative before football season, the Dons’ coach attends the selection meeting whether his team finished first or sixth in league.

In baseball, however, the league representatives are determined after the regular season: The champion of each league is automatically designated for the duty. Thus, there are eight coaches at the meeting who have just won league titles and want nothing more than to continue their success. That’s where the fun begins.

“When you have coaches in there that have teams in the playoffs, no matter how fair they try [to] be, they always have their own interest in mind,” LaCour said. “That sometimes takes precedence over what the right thing to do should be.”

Last season, El Camino Real won the West Valley League, considered the City’s best baseball league. LaCour was the league representative for the selection meeting and the Conquistadores were seeded No. 3. No problem, LaCour said.

But Chatsworth, a perennially strong team that finished third in the West Valley League last season, was seeded No. 6 with the sole intention of making El Camino Real’s playoff path more difficult, LaCour said. Indeed, Chatsworth defeated El Camino Real in the quarterfinals, 13-6.

“As soon as their name went up on the board for the sixth seed, every coach in that room saw the potential of Chatsworth and us matching up in the second round,” LaCour said. “It was pretty blatant. They’re going to try and do it again this year.”

LaCour isn’t the only coach who questions the system.

Reseda Cleveland was seeded No. 15 last season after finishing fourth in the West Valley League, but the Cavaliers won the City Championship. They are in a similar situation after again finishing fourth in the West Valley League. It’s not known if Cleveland will make the City Championship playoffs, but Coach Joe Cascione has his own thoughts about the selection process.

“The way they do it is real archaic -- some people vote, some people don’t vote, some people vote twice and nobody catches it,” Cascione said. “Some people are so clueless they don’t know if things are coming or going. Basically, they’re looking out for themselves. If you’re a good team, they don’t want to play you in the second round or the semifinals. They want you in the other side of the bracket.”

LaCour believes the selection process should be similar to the Southern Section’s, which has small committees of two or three coaches who submit a final regular-season top 10 in each division to the Southern Section. The section office then determines the 32-team brackets for each of the six divisions.

“They get more of a level playing field in the [Southern Section], a better draw,” LaCour said. “There’s never anybody that comes out and says, ‘Hey man, we just got worked.’ There’s nobody with their own agenda inside that meeting.”

The only way the selection process can change is for the baseball coaches to change it.

There are 20 baseball coaches on the City advisory committee for the sport. As per City rules, the advisory committee is the only entity that can change the playoff selection process. LaCour is a member of the committee.

“We’ve talked about it here [among City Section officials] but it’s not our place to change it.... It’s up to the coaches,” said Jeff Halpern, section assistant commissioner. “Everybody talks and grunts and grumbles but everybody sits back and waits for someone else to do it. Talk is cheap.”

For the record, the final product of the selection meeting has rarely held form in recent seasons. In addition to Cleveland’s championship last season as the No. 15-seeded team, Roosevelt made it to the title game two years ago from the No. 15 position.

In comparison, Westchester and Fairfax were the top-seeded teams in boys’ basketball the last two years and faced each other in the City Championship both times, with No. 1 Westchester defeating No. 2 Fairfax.

Boring? Perhaps. More fair and accurate seeding? Definitely.

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So much for an intentional pass to the championship for the top two Southern Section Division I teams.

Top-seeded Huntington Beach Edison, the feel-good story of the season after a mediocre 15-11 showing last season, and No. 2-seeded Camarillo, the defending Division I champion and winner of 23 consecutive games, have surprisingly rough second-round games Tuesday.

Edison (24-4) plays at Anaheim Servite (17-8), which defeated the Chargers, 3-0, in a season opener. The Chargers will face the same Servite pitcher who blanked them, Dan Strough, who is 8-3 with a 2.53 earned-run average.

“I didn’t expect to play them [again],” Edison Coach Matt Mosiello said. “It’s not worth getting upset about. It’s a tough game. There’s a lot of them.”

Camarillo (23-3) plays at Riverside Arlington (22-5), which finished second in the Ivy League and has had a presence in The Times’ rankings throughout the season. Zech Zinicola is not expected to pitch for Arlington but the Lions’ offense could cause problems for Camarillo.

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Santa Margarita is starting to percolate. It must be playoff time.

For the second consecutive season, the Eagles are piling up victories after an unassuming regular season, this time upsetting Upland in the first round after beating Long Beach Millikan in a Division I wild-card game.

Last season, the Eagles were 13-10 in the regular season but won four playoff games before losing to Arlington in the Division III championship game, 1-0.

“My assistant coach calls me Steve Lavin,” Santa Margarita Coach Mike Borowski said. “We barely squeak through the season and kick it up another notch in the playoffs. I can’t figure it out.”

The Eagles need a strong postseason to salvage a largely underwhelming season. Santa Margarita was No. 6 in The Times’ preseason rankings but faltered at the start and at one point was 2-6 in the Serra League.

The Eagles (17-7) have won 10 consecutive games and will play host to San Bernardino San Gorgonio in the second round.

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Santa Maria Valley Christian was a little down on its luck. And run production.

The result was an 11-0 deficit in the bottom of the fifth inning of a first-round Division VI game against Carpinteria Cate.

“I was basically thinking, should I collect the uniforms today or have them bring them in next week,” Valley Christian Coach Curt Bickley said.

Then came one of the biggest rallies in Southern Section playoff history.

Valley Christian scored three runs in the fifth inning and eight in the sixth to tie the score, 11-11.

Cate took a 12-11 lead in the top of the seventh, but Joey Martinez’s two-run home run to left-center gave Valley Christian a 13-12 victory.

“Unreal,” Bickley said.

The good fortune continued the next day for Valley Christian, which won a coin flip with Big Pine and will play host to the Warriors instead of taking a seven-hour bus ride Tuesday to their second-round game.

“I don’t want to think about [our recent luck],” Bickley said. “I just want to keep playing.”

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Palm Desert was perilously close to being the only top-seeded team to lose in the first round.

How close? The Aztecs were extended to extra innings by Orange and trailed in the ninth, 11-5.

But the Aztecs (24-2) scored seven runs and won, 12-11, on freshman Kevin McDonald’s two-out run-scoring single.

“We couldn’t play much worse than that and we got away with a win,” Coach Darol Salazar said. “We definitely feel like we escaped.”

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EXTRA BASES

HIGHLIGHTS

* Chuckie Tiffany had 15 strikeouts and gave up one hit, a seventh-inning single, in Covina Charter Oak’s 2-0 victory over Orange Lutheran.

* Matt Strom pitched his second no-hitter of the season, striking out seven and walking one in Temecula Valley’s 7-0 victory over Ontario Chaffey.

* Phil Hughes of Santa Ana Foothill struck out eight in six innings and had a grand slam and five RBIs in the Knights’ 6-2 victory over Calabasas.

* Mark Rzepczynski of Anaheim Servite gave up two hits, both in the seventh inning, and had 14 strikeouts in a 2-0 victory over Alhambra.

HEROICS

* Kevin Hansen hit a two-run home run, his second homer of the season, with two out in the bottom of the seventh to give Glendora a 5-3 victory over Los Alamitos.

* Santa Ana Mater Dei’s Mike Torres had three hits, including a bases-loaded single in the bottom of the seventh, to give the Monarchs a 4-3 victory over Diamond Bar.

* Brandon Gill’s run-scoring single in the bottom of the eighth completed San Bernardino San Gorgonio’s comeback from a seven-run deficit in an 8-7 victory over Chino Hills Ayala.

ON DECK

* Camarillo continues its attempt to repeat as Division I champion with a difficult second-round game Tuesday at Riverside Arlington.

* Moreno Valley Valley View plays Tuesday at Lakewood in an intriguing Division I second-round game between the Ivy and Moore league champions.

* The top Division II second-round game Tuesday is between Placentia El Dorado, ranked No. 9 by The Times, and host No. 13 Valencia, the Foothill League champion.