NECBL Announces Complete Schedule for 2023 Season
Published on January 30, 2023 under New England Collegiate Baseball League (NECBL) News Release
SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. - The 2023 New England Collegiate Baseball League (NECBL) first pitch is slated for June 6th, as Commissioner Sean McGrath has announced the full schedule for the 29th playing season.
All eyes will be on Dodd Stadium in Norwich, Connecticut on June 6th, as the league kicks off its season with the Mystic Schooners hosting the Newport Gulls in the lone matchup of opening day. Ten other teams, including the defending champion Martha's Vineyard Sharks, will get to work on June 7th, with six games on tap, while Sanford is the last team to open their season, part of a seven-game schedule on June 8th that includes the first doubleheader of the year.
In 2022, Martha's Vineyard claimed their first league championship with a 2-0 sweep of the Vermont Mountaineers. That completed a prolific season for the Sharks, who had hosted the 2022 NECBL All Star Game and earned a Wild Card berth in the postseason. On their way to the championship, Martha's Vineyard knocked off both of the top seeds, the Bristol Blues and the Mountaineers, who had each tied an NECBL record with 32 regular season wins.
The anticipated rematches of the championship series will take place on June 27th on the Vineyard and July 12th in Montpelier.
Comprising 13 teams for the 2023 season, the league will once again operate with a three-division alignment. The Coastal Division will feature five teams (Martha's Vineyard, Mystic, Ocean State, North Shore & Newport), while the North Division (Keene, Vermont, Sanford, Upper Valley) and West Division (Bristol, Valley, North Adams, Danbury) will each include four teams.
Once again, all teams will play a 44-game slate in which they will play each of their divisional opponents seven times. Coastal Teams will play each non-division opponent twice, once at home and once on the road, while teams in the North Division and West Division will play non-divisional opponents three times apiece.
The league is grateful to the work of Ben Grannan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Business Analytics at Queens University (NC) for taking on the complex task of creating the 2023 schedule. Grannan had to balance each team's facility availability, the number of intra- and inter-division matchups, travel considerations, double-headers, off-days, and more.
"The combination of computers and subject matter expertise is the current best practice to create sports schedules," explained Grannan. "Specifically, analytical models are used to track the potential home team, away team, and date of each baseball game during the season. The best schedule satisfies as many items as possible from the list of submitted NECBL team requests as well as the league requirements. Most importantly, the league office participates in a feedback loop to review the schedule and identify any nuances missed by the computer."
Sunday, June 23rd will see the league's best gather at historic Fraser Field in Lynn, Massachusetts for the 2023 NECBL All-Star Game, presented by Metro Credit Union. The All-Star Game features the NECBL's top talent, with players from all NECBL organizations showcasing their skills in front of scouts from every Major League Baseball (MLB) organization.
In the final week of the season, each of the league's 13 teams will play solely against division rivals in hopes of qualifying for the 2023 NECBL Postseason, which will feature six teams (the three division winners and three wildcards who have the next three highest winning percentages league-wide after the division winners).
The division winners with the top-two regular season winning percentages will earn first-round byes, while the third division winner will battle the wildcard team with the lowest win percentage, and the wildcard teams with the best and second-best win percentages will also face off in a single-elimination wildcard round matchup.
The top seed/division winner will then meet the advancing team that is the lowest remaining wildcard team, while the second-highest seed/division winner faces the highest remaining wildcard team in the best-of-three semifinals before the last two teams standing square off in a best-of-three NECBL Championship Series for the right to hoist the Fay Vincent, Sr. Cup.
The final games of the regular season will be held on Saturday, July 29, with the following day (July 30) open for makeup games before the postseason begins with the Wild Card games on Monday, July 31st.
The semifinals series will be played from August 1st-3rd, and the final two teams will play for the championship from August 4th-6th.
All NECBL games will be streamed live on the NECBL Network, powered by BlueFrame Technology. The NECBL Network is available on both your desktop and mobile/tablet devices, as well as Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV and Apple TV 4th Gen.
Rosters are filling up, and you can check out who is coming to play for your favorite team by heading to their team page at www.necbl.com. Make sure to follow these players all spring long as they compete for their colleges and tune up for their summer in the NECBL!
The New England Collegiate Baseball League is a wooden bat college summer league that fields teams in all six New England states. Partially funded by Major League Baseball, the New England League started play in 1994 and has sent over 200 alumni to the Major Leagues with nearly 30 alumni taken in the first round of the MLB Draft. For continuing coverage of the NECBL, visit NECBL.com and follow the league on Twitter, Instagram and on Facebook.
New England Collegiate Baseball League Stories from January 30, 2023
- Navigators Unveil Schedule for 2023 All-Star Summer at Fraser Field - North Shore Navigators
- 2023 Mainers Season Schedule Released - Sanford Mainers
- NECBL Announces Complete Schedule for 2023 Season - NECBL
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