CCBL expands, maintains local feel
It may look a bit different from previous years, but within the first few pitches the oddities slip into irrelevance while the realization that baseball is back washes over.
The Connecticut Collegiate Baseball League is underway, and despite the differences such as the home plate umpire standing behind the pitcher’s mound, coaches wearing masks in the dugout, and uniformed players sitting in the stands, the game is finally back from its pause since March.
“Everybody just wants to play and this was an opportunity,” Hamden Miners manager Bill Roberston said. “It’s a college league so they either didn’t play games or got shut down and the high school seniors didn’t get to play at all. This is a chance to get some work and get some at bats.”
The CCBL, which expanded from six to ten teams this season, is a league consisting of mostly local players who are playing baseball in college currently, or are incoming freshman for the 2020-21 school year.
With other Collegiate Leagues such as Cape Cod and the New England Collegiate Baseball League cancelling the 2020 season, the CCBL has benefited.
“Last year we had six teams, and I was planning on having six again this year but once the Cape Cod League and the NECBL cancelled their season the dominoes started to fall,” CCBL Commissioner Tim Vincent said. “They kind of fell into our laps so we added four more teams. We are now up to ten teams with 25-28 men on each roster.”
Despite its expansion, the CCBL has a different feel from other collegiate leagues, largely because the teams are so localized.
“The protocol is that every player has to fill out a Connecticut Collegiate Baseball League application,” Vincent said. “Those applications come to me and 80 percent of the time I assign them to a team. We do it by territory, it is not a black and white system, but
if a kid lives in Wethersfield or Newington he plays for Glastonbury, if he lives in New Britain he plays for Southington. We have territories similar to legion, not that the territories are the same but the philosophy is the same.”
Leagues such as the Cape League and NECBL have players from across the country joining rosters, but in the CCBL teammates and opponents are more familiar.
“It is interesting because all of these guys seem to know each other having played against each other for so many years,” Robertson said. “They know their opponents either by playing against them growing up, going to school with them or even being in the same conference now. All the faces for them are very familiar.”
Teams will feature unique connections. Hamden will feature three incoming UConn freshman taking the field together, the Southington Shock will run back eight players from the town’s 2018 Legion State Championship team and the Wallingford Silver Storm will feature 10 recent Cheshire graduates.
“One thing that I really like about it is when you have a team that comes in for the summer, you have so many guys from different backgrounds,” Hamden Miners GM Tim Binkoski said. “What makes this special is that a lot of them already know each other. They are from the area and it makes things easier in terms of team goals.”
The league will host a double-elimination playoff beginning August 3 with two Manchester teams assuming the role of early favorites.