The Na Koa Ikaika Maui (Maui Strong Warriors) won the 2013 Pacific Association championship which was held this weekend at Albert Park, home of the San Rafael Pacifics:
This is Maui’s first championship in its 4 years of play (2010 Golden Baseball League, 2011-2012 North American League, and 2013 Pacific Association). The team’s victory culminates a tumultuous first season for the Pacific Association which had 4 primary teams and a rotating schedule of other teams. The other rotating teams for the Pacific Association’s schedule included the East Bay Lumberjacks (who became full members of the league and were renamed the “Bay Cal Lumberjacks”), the Santa Rosa Rosebuds, an early-season “inter-league” play with the Freedom Professional Baseball League (based in Arizona), and the Hawaii teams played against teams from Japan’s Baseball Challenge League (BCL).
The all-time independent baseball league champions page (detailing all league champions since 1993) has been updated here:
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And another makeshift “championship” again at that…a semifinal and a final both on the same day? Just like a college setup. Guess they did not figure on a great draw enough for even a best of three. As such, this “championship” leaves a lot of doubt in its validity with many other independent leagues. The Freedom is even worse, inviting all four of its teams into the playoffs this week. But at least those are two decent rounds of best of three, and the league has been highly competitive as the standings reflect.
Just cannot figure how many of those interleague games actually stayed in the standings of both leagues. Didn’t help that Vallejo reneged on its two week trip to the islands, while an even lighter opponent took their place in the form of the Lumberjacks. Just hope that turns out adding them to the league lineup next year. Hawaii and Maui had tougher schedules having to play the Japan indy teams, and that probably played in favor of Maui winning this one game set.
Hopefully the PAC doubles in size both on the mainlland and on the islands, and be able to play each other with adding the interleaguers.
The Freedom should be strong enough to go ahead and add the two other franchises they shelved this year. That was a mistake!
I just checked the web site for the Maui Strong Warriors. Nobody is home! There is not the slightest mention that their home team just won a “league championship.” Their schedule added some kind of a double round robin setup for the other three teams to play as, I guess, a way to win the third seed legitimately. Not very well advertised here I tell you, but let’s hope the PA announcers did so at the season ending games.
Weird. You would think it still had vestiges of the Golden League in it.
One would think that the home team would be declaring from the rooftops (including its own website) that it just won the league championship. Everything was mentioned on the Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Na-Koa-Ikaika-Maui-Baseball/226583287363414). This type of discrepancy may be happening for a few reasons; but ownership must recognize that its website should trump Facebook in terms of authority simply because the ownership controls the hosting, domain, etc. Whereas on Facebook, that page (and all of the content) could go away immediately if that site deems there to be a violation of the terms of service. Hopefully this gets straightened out in all of the lower-level independent leagues because having such discrepancies opens up the “amateur” or “you are not a legitimate professional organization” comments from nay-sayers very quickly.