After adding 2-game series to regular season, what’s next for WPIAL baseball?

By: Chris Harlan
Monday, May 17, 2021 | 11:27 PM

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The WPIAL baseball committee’s philosophy is simple: The best team should win section titles and league championships, not the team with one incredibly dominant pitcher.

Whether that happens here in the playoffs is impossible to predict, but the baseball committee takes steps each spring hoping for that outcome. Playoff games are scheduled in a way that rest requirements keep one player from pitching the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals.

The WPIAL first round starts Wednesday and Thursday.

“You’re going to need to have at least two pitchers,” said North Allegheny athletic director Bob Bozzuto, the longtime committee chairman.

In seasons to come, Bozzuto would like to see the number of pitching arms needed continue to increase. Under his direction, the baseball committee in recent years has discussed some creative ways to promote team depth and player development.

One of those novel ideas was implemented in the regular season: Teams played a two-game series against every section opponent. Those back-to-back games prevented a coach from pitching the same starter both days against the same opponent.

Looking back, Bozzuto said he thinks the idea proved to be a great success. The series approach rewarded team depth, especially on the mound, but also highlighted strong coaching.

“Everything that I have heard has been positive, and it’s only going to get better as people get adjusted to it,” he said. “It’s going to push people to develop their personnel a little bit different than they have in the past. You’re not going to have one horse and it’s going to get through the championship. You need to have two, three, four, five pitchers.”

In WPIAL Class 6A alone, 11 of the 30 section series resulted in a split — or more than one-third of the games. But the impact wasn’t limited to big schools.

Two sections ended up essentially with tri-champions after all three teams split against one another. It happened in Section 3-5A with Shaler, South Fayette and West Allegheny, and in Section 1-A with Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Rochester and Union.

“Go back and take a look at Game 2 (of those series),” Bozzuto said. “That wouldn’t have happened because there were some who would have thrown their No. 1 and got him back (for the rematch). That really changed the season, I believe. And that’s going to make it a better game and prepare more kids.”

Among the future tweaks, the baseball committee might consider increasing regular-season series to three games apiece, maybe with smaller sections, Bozzuto said. The committee already supports a multi-game series approach to the playoffs rather than the current single-elimination format, an idea presented to the WPIAL board last May.

The board approved the two-game regular-season series a year ago but denied the committee’s postseason proposal that would’ve created three-game series in the semifinals and finals.

Bozzuto said he understands why the WPIAL preferred a measured approached.

“We’re crawling before we walk,” he said. “Hopefully, later on we run.”

There’s also a push by some to increase the maximum number of regular-season games beyond 20, but that’s a PIAA decision. If the WPIAL board were to reconsider its district playoff format or the regular-season series, that likely wouldn’t happen before the 2023 season, when the next two-year scheduling cycle starts.

“My hope is that athletic directors and coaches will let their feelings be known,” Bozzuto said, “that, yes, we want this.”

Chris Harlan is a TribLive reporter covering sports. He joined the Trib in 2009 after seven years as a reporter at the Beaver County Times. He can be reached at charlan@triblive.com.

Tags: North Allegheny