By Michael Letendre

It’s almost time for the Connecticut Senior American Legion baseball state tournament action as thirty-two teams will qualify for postseason play over the five zones. 

In an interesting quirk, the official 19U State Tournament Overview – from June 26 – says that five teams will qualify from Zone 1. 

However, the document also states that no team will have 100-percent of its teams qualify. 

Zone 1 only has five teams. 

Here is the breakdown for the playoffs in terms of zone qualification: 

• Zone 1 will have 5 teams qualify,  
• Zone 2 will have 6 teams,  
• Zone 3 will have 8 teams,  
• Zone 4 will have 7 teams  
• Zone 6 will have 6 teams.  

The regular season will end on Thursday, July 14 and after that, the ranking process will commence. 

Teams will be ranked within their Zone and assigned to predetermined pods. 

Any ties within the zone will be broken first by head-to-head record and, if needed, by a higher pre-selected number.   

Each four-team pod will determine a winner via a double elimination format.  

The eight winners will go on to the double elimination super regional tournaments at Muzzy Field in Bristol and Palmer Field in Middletown beginning on Saturday, July 23.  

From there, teams will be reseeded based on regular season records for the super regionals.  

And there’s an interesting quirk for Post 2 if the program can win its pod. 

If Bristol or Middletown qualifies for the super regional, the squad will play from their home site and all teams seeded in their half of the bracket will be assigned to that site.  

The winners of the two super regionals will meet in a best-of-three championship series beginning on Friday, July 29 from Palmer Field.  

As you can see, between now and then, there’s a ton of baseball to be played.  

Currently around the state, West Hartford is 14-0 in Zone 1 while West Haven (15-3 in Zone 2) is another top contender.

Middletown (17-1) was 1.5 games ahead of RCP as of Monday in Zone 3.

Zone 4 sees Stamford sitting in first place at 17-6 and finally in Zone 6, Waterford (20-3) and Willimantic (19-4) are fighting for the league.

Those should be some of the top squads over postseason play this season.

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