Yet another All American Amateur Baseball Association Tournament has concluded, with a familiar result, a New Orleans title earned via a Saturday night win over the local Paul Carpenter entry.
How soon, one might ask, before the AAABA acronym is changed to represent officially the New Orleans dominance, now standing at three consecutive titles and four of the past five, with a runnerup finish in that lone title miss?
Possible replacements:
Another Archetypal Amateur Baseball Ascent
And Again Anticlimactic Bayou Achievement.
Artful Antipathy And Bayou Avalanche.
Alone Again Atop Baseball Aristocracy.
Title redundancy isn’t exactly a new occurrence in the 77 seasons of the AAABA Tournament.
Baltimore won 8 of 9 tournaments from 2003-2011, with New Orleans in 2009 breaking up that run.
Washington won 5 of 6 from 1997-2002, again with New Orleans (2000) providing the lone interruption.
Before that, Baltimore won 12 of 16 from 1976 through 1991.
You will note that Baltimore and Washington no longer have franchises or send teams to the AAABA Tournament, allowing New Orleans to dominate as the last remaining member of the Big Four franchise list.
Detroit, also long ago having gone missing from the AAABA scene, had claimed a Big Four designation with a period of dominance by winning the AAABA Tournament five times in 10 seasons from 1969 through 1978.
The reality that New Orleans is the only member of the Big Four still sending a team to the Johnstown tournament takes some of the shine off their current domination.
Replacing the likes of Baltimore, Washington and Detroit has been impossible.
The list of AAABA franchises in general is such that multiple entries from the same franchise leagues are needed merely to flesh out the 16-team tournament field.
Johnstown long ago was accorded two entries annually, the better to increase the odds of success by a local team and thereby to draw paying customers to Point Stadium to help fund this whole exercise.
But this year necessity also required two teams from Brooklyn. The tournament hit a low of sorts in 2018, when along with two Johnstown entries, there were three apiece required from Buffalo and Brooklyn to reach 16 teams.
Both Johnstown entries made it to the Final Four of this year’s tournament which, depending on your perspective, speaks to the strength of the local league, or to the weakness of the tournament at large.
Regardless, we eagerly await 2023 and another presumptive New Orleans title.
Sam Ross Jr's site 