Did this game really happen?

As the Fall chills sets into this northern clime, the Swedish baseball season has come to an end.The final standings:

Team	Won	Lost
Leksand	20	9
Karlskoga	19	11
Sundbyberg	19	11
Tranås	17	13
Stockholm	13	17
Alby	1	2

The top four teams go into the play-offs which start next weekend. Unfortunately some of the best players are in college in the United States now. That’s the way it goes…not unlike the best players not being able to play on the national ice hockey team because they are with their NHL clubs.But the Swedish junior baseball standings are a joke. At the end of August a message suddenly appeared on the standings page:“Karlslund and Stockholm have been removed and their games deleted.”This is the only “explanation” offered by the Swedish Baseball and Softball Federation.

Here’s what really happened: The junior (16 to 18 year old) teams often rely on better players from the A-Boys or Cadets (13 to 15 years old) to fill out their rosters, just as the better juniors also play with the adults. Scheduling can be a real headache because of this. What caused several junior games to be cancelled was the federation’s sudden decision to schedule an A-Boy tournament on a junior game weekend. Some teams lost players and couldn’t field all positions.

Make-up games were promised. But the promise was never kept.
Those games could have been made up. This past weekend has seen make-up games among the adult teams. Even though it was the federation’s fault those games weren’t played, rather than allowing the make-ups the two teams hurt worst were just kicked out. This was especially unfair since Stockholm was one of the best teams and certainly would have made it to the junior play-offs.

Even worse, instead of just letting those teams default (and have losses recorded) the federation deleted all of their statistics! Two teams of kids who played many baseball games, and who deserved to have their stats online with everyone else, suddenly had their seasons erased by the very people who caused the problem. Talk about “1984″ and rewriting history!

Fortunately my son (this is my full disclosure of why I am partial about all this) hit his home run in an adult game and not in a junior game.

Also fortunately, I did a paper print-out a few days before the stats were erased. Here are some 2006 junior stats for Stockholm pitcher-infielder Daniel Wood:

ERA 1.50 (fourth among all junior pitchers with at least 6 innings pitched)

Batting average: .428 (third among Stockholm’s hitters)

On base percentage: .500

Daniel’s 2006 adult stats remain online.

(And that’s him batting with the adults in the picture above, so that game did stay in the record books.)