Bracket A

McLean (L4) @ Lake Braddock (P1)

Westfield (C3) @ Edison (N2)

Bracket B

T.C. Williams (P4) @ Stone Bridge (L1)

Washington & Lee (N3) @ Oakton (C2)

Bracket C

Robinson (C4) @ Yorktown (N1)

Langley (L3) @ West Springfield (P2)

Bracket D

Mount Vernon (N4) @ Chantilly (C1)

South County (P3) @ Madison (L2)

All first round games begin Friday

Predictions???

LB over McL
Westfield over Ed
SB over TC
Oakton over W&L
Robinson over York
WS over Lang, althought this is toss up, Kent vs Zarella
Chan over MV
SC over Mad in close game, Beal vs Jeter will be fun to watch

Agree with all of Spartan's picks, but I'll take Madison over South County...

Are all of these games at the home team's field? Or are some at Westfield?

Friday games are all at highest seed's home field. 2nd round games are at South County and Robinson, I believe. Semi finals and finals are at Yorktown.

Westfield is where state semifinal and finals will be.

Northern Region semis are at South County on May 28. (I am looking at a hard copy of the sched as I write). Final IS at Yorktown on May 30.

WS over Langley,,,,,with Kent on the mound, no tossup. WS all the way.

Beal on the hill for So Cty, great match up Beal vs. Jeter....I take Beal in this one....

I am looking for a great baseball game to go and se on friday night. Which first round northern region tournament game will be the best to go and watch?

South County at Madison will be the best game. Two great pitchers, Jesse Beal for SC, headed to Maryland, will face off against Jesse Jeter, who certainly would have received a scholarship if he desired to play college baseball, for Madison.
If weather is good, there will be a big turnout from the Vienna faithful rooting on their team.

SC is the defending regional champ, led by Patriot POY in Brent Frazier. Madison has had a non-Madison-like year and got pasted in the district final by Stone Bridge, but that means nothing as its a new season. Each team needs 3 wins to qualify for the state tournament.

Other games shouldn't be near this close or hard fought. But for some humor, catch Westfield's Snyder brothers at Edison. Who knows how many homers these two would hit if they played there.

Speaking of fields, I had the chance to check out the baseball field at South County. It will be criminal for any regional game to be played on this field. It is in terrible condition. Someone should take action now to get this changed, but it's probably too late.

Spartan, just to correct a few things in your post.

Beal has had a difficult/horrible year. He has really struggled. Nothing like the great year he had last year. Not saying he couldn't pitch a gem. He will not go to Maryland, he is being projected as a 5th rounder and he will go pro.

Oakton was the regional champ last year, not SC.

The new grass at SC was put in last fall. It takes at least one full year for it to mature. I question why they scheduled the regionals there knowing that. The field is not in bad shape at all, it just looks bad. because the grass has just not completely filled in.

Thanks for the update. At least I got it right that this should be the best game of the first round. Good luck to Beal. We've always enjoyed playing against him. He will find himself.

Move the games from SC. If it's not filled in, then wait until it's complete. Westfield has the same problem in their outfield, but not the infield as it was covered by blankets this winter. Use the better fields now.

As for Beal, I'm no draft expert, but here's a statistical comparison of junior vs senior year high school seasons so far.

Junior year: 8 earned runs in 45 innings, 40 hits, 6 walks, 55 K's, 1.2 ERA

Senior year: 16 earned runs in 39 innings, 28 hits, 6 walks, 58 K's, 2.87 era

This data is from the inputs to the all region team for both years. There is no data that I have on the ball-strike ratio, but if you are saying he's been "horrible", then I would guess that even though the walks/ip ratio is not that much different, the ball/strike ratio is much higher this year. That to me would be one metric of struggling. Another would be the number of extra base hits he's given up, and that's probably higher than last year, given that he's allowed twice the earned runs in 6 less innnings, although the hits per ip is slightly less.

The PG draft list has Beal as the #6-10th ranked player in the state, in the projected 11-25 mid round block of players. Jesse does have the physicals at 6'7 and 200+ pounds to move up. He's always had great mechanics and is a competitor.

Is it possible that he wasn't quite as horrible as you say, but that the hitting in the Patriot was better this year?

Regardless of how Beal pitched this year, if I could only watch one first round game, it would absolutely be the SC @ Madison match up.

How does their defense compare to last year?

The goal of ERA is to come up with a way to measure pitchers' performance with some effort to equallize for differences in the quality of their defense. But it falls far short of that goal.

A team that gets to a lot of balls, turns double plays, keeps its pitchers' pitch counts down, etc., will see a much lower ERA than a team that doesn't do those things. Another big factor is your catcher; does he stop balls in the dirt, or does he let them become wild pitches? Does he get you "free outs" on the bases, or do the opponents steal at will?

Your stats indicate he has only slightly more walks per game, fewer hits per game, but a higher ERA. Sounds to me like maybe they just aren't making plays like they were last year, but he's still doing his job.

I saw a lot of games this year, not only SC but LB, WS etc.......

I am not trying to slam Jesse at all. He will probably do great wherever he ends up. It just seemed he **** it down a little after all his success last year. You gotta keep working.

He had no problem with all the lower teams in the District, but got beat up pretty bad against LB and WS during the year and in the district semis against WS he gave up six straight solid hits when SC brought him in to close with a 3-1 lead. He did beat Kent during the year and pitched a great game.

He had the same catcher and the defense was about the same behind him. All in all, many nights he just didn't seem to have the same fastball as he did last year. His off speed stuff was about the same, but when the batters were sitting on the fast ball, they seemed to be able to catch up with it this year.

They had blankets on the SC field last winter; it just takes a good year for the field to mature. Moving the games wouldn't be a bad idea.

You are probably right on the SC and Madison turning out to be a great pitching duel. I will be at the LB game myself.

So much for a Pitcher's duel (which is what I called!):
South County 12, Madison 8
Was not at the game, but read and heard there were some contentious moments.
Other NR scores:
Stone Bridge 5, TC Williams 2
Oakton 8, Washington-Lee 2
(1-0 game until the 5th, Williams hit a grand slam)
Lake Braddock 5, McLean 2
Westfield 8, Edison 1
Robinson 5, Yorktown 0
West Springfield 5, Langley 2
Chantilly 5, Mt Vernon 3

Congrats to the Concorde, who advanced all 4 teams.
District representation in "Elite Eight":
Concorde 4
Patriot 3
Liberty 1
National 0

Good luck on Monday.....should be some great games with great weather!!!

You guys were right. The South County @ Madison game was definetly a great game to watch.

The game was back in forth but Beal was just better then Jeter at the end.

Beal may not have pitched as well as he might have liked but he helped himself out with a sac-fly in the top of the first to score Frazier. Then Madison in the next two innings scored 5 runs and it looked bad for SC until the 5th inning when they scored 3 runs to get back in the game(one on a solo homerun by Fitzgerald). Then in the 5th inning got a 3 run BOMB by Brent Frazier(best SS in the region in my opinion) on a 3-2 2 out pitch. Then in the top of the seventh SC added 5 insurance runs on basehits. This made ths score 12-6. In the bottom of the 7th Beal shut down Madison after they had a small rally scoring two. The final was 12-8.

The game was very heated. Both coaches got into arguments with umpires, and the players did not like each other(I will leave it at that). Also i heard Madison did not even shake Beal's hand at the end of the game.

One more thing i would like to add is that if South County hits as well as they did last night i believe that they can go furthur then people expect.

Here are my predictions for the second round

Lake Braddock over Westfield
Oaktown over Stone Bridge
West Springfield over Robinson
South County over Chantilly

No one has taken South County lightly. They went to states last year and have most of the same lineup back. Yes, they graduated Graham, who is now at VCU?, but, they are right on track for competing for a return trip to states.

Yes Graham is at VCU but they also lost Hald who is at ODU who was their #1 last year.

Im not saying people are taking them lightly but they arent expected to go back to states from what i have heard.

what time are the games on monday?

1:00 and 4:00. South County and Robinson