Congratulations to The Alcohol Think again Perth Heat on winning the inaugural Australian Baseball League Championship! Congratulations too to all involved with the club and the ABL for putting on a great show down at Baseball Park over the past three days.
Yesterday was a show of real professionalism from the Heat players especially pitcher Ben Moore who was outstanding and a worthy winner of the MVP award.
What was pleasing to see and other sports could take note, how quickly the stage was arranged for the presentations, which meant most of the fans stayed to applaud the champions and the vanquished Adelaide Bite. Not only was that to be applauded but the way the coach introduced each of the players to collect their medals rather than the announcer, as it made it much more personalised as each coach acknowledged the contribution of each player to the season.
The ABL must be thrilled with the way their first season has panned out, the finals not decided until the very last round of games, and then the final going down to the very last game as the Heat came back from one game down to win 2-1 in the best of three finals.
The atmosphere at Barbagello Ball park yesterday was excellent and it augers well for baseball. Shame the West Australian newspaper didn’t feel that WA’s new national Champions did not deserve to be on the back page ahead of a pre season game in the sport we don’t mention!
Could not have said it better myself.
Maybe a one day protest where no one buys it would send the required message, would be hard to co-ordinate though.
Unfortunately The West doesn’t seem to think that sports other than Footy, who are in their ACTUAL seasons for their respective National Competitions are worthy of a back page over a rubbish pre-season game or tabloid rubbish (such as todays back page article about a player who has an injury????).
Its a constant source of frustration that we have teams like the Perth Heat, Perth Wildcats, Perth Glory, West Coast Waves, Perth Glory Womens, West Coast Fever and to a lesser extent, the Western Force who are relegated to the inside pages despite in most cases drawing bigger crowds than the competitions that do get exposure eg WAFL, Sheffield Shield!