Minor League Baseball: The wacky world of Northern League baseball

In the Northwest League, the best team in the North division didn’t make the playoffs and the worst team in the South division is in the finals. Ah, minor league baseball.

The short-season A-ball Northwest League is around the first rung of the ladder for prospects in minor league baseball hoping to someday make it to the big time. It’s a climb to the major leagues that many begin, but few finish. The league has teams in the Pacific Northwest—Washington, Oregon and Idaho—and a team in Canada. The schedule runs from mid-June until early September.

There are many Latin American players and recently-drafted players in the Northwest League. Slugger Curtis Terry, of the Spokane Indians, is a 13^th round draft pick in 2015 out of Archer HS in Lawrenceville, Georgia. This year, he led the league in slugging percentage, home runs, RBI and total bases.

Finishing third in the league in home runs was catcher Joey Bart, the second overall pick in this year’s June Amateur Draft. Bart plays for the Salem-Kaizer Volcanoes, an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. He launched 13 home runs in just 181 at-bats so he actually had a better HR/AB rate than Curtis Terry.

The league consists of eight teams separated into a North Division and a South Division. The North division has the Spokane Indians (Texas Rangers affiliate), Vancouver Canadians (Toronto Blue Jays), Everett Aquasox (Seattle Mariners), and Tri-City Dust Devils (San Diego Padres). In the South division, you find the Hillsboro Hops (Arizona Diamondbacks), Eugene Emeralds (Chicago Cubs), Salem-Keizer Volcanoes (San Francisco Giants) and Boise Hawks (Colorado Rockies).

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Right now, the league is in the middle of the first round of playoffs. This is where the wackiness comes in. The Northwest League plays two halves. The best team in the first half of each division gets a playoff berth against the best team in the second half of each division. The winners of each half play each other in a best-of-three series, with the winning teams advancing to a best-of-five final.

This year, in the North Division the Everett Aquasox won the first half with a 20-18 record. The Vancouver Canadians finished second. They were 19-19. This gave Everett a playoff berth. In the second half, the Spokane Indians finished first, with a 22-16 mark. The Vancouver Canadians again finished second, going 21-17. This gave the Indians the other playoff spot in the North Division.

The end result is that the Vancouver Canadians had the best record in the North Division, going 40-36. The Aquasox and Indians were both 38-38 overall, with the Tri-City Dust Devils bringing up the rear at 35-41. Despite having the best overall record, the Canadians are sitting home watching the playoffs on their tiny little Canadian TVs while the Aquasox and Indians battle it out to reach the finals. That doesn’t seem very fair to the Canadians, but those are the rules in minor league baseball.

Amazingly, what happened in the South Division is even wackier. The Hillsboro Hops won the first half with a 24-14 record. The Eugene Emeralds finished in last place with an ugly 14-24 mark. The Hops continued their dominance by going 27-11 in the second half, while the Emeralds snuck into second place with a 17-21 record.

The Hops made the playoffs because they were the first half winners, but they can’t play themselves in the playoffs, even though they also won the second half. By rule, the team that finished second in the second half, the Eugene Emeralds, gets the other playoff spot. So the first round of the South Division playoffs features the team with the best overall record in the Northwest League, the Hillsboro Hops (51-25), against the team with the worst overall record in the Northwest League, the Eugene Emeralds (31-45).

Then, just as a reminder that baseball is unpredictable, the Eugene Emeralds beat the Hillsboro Hops in the first two games of their best-of-three series and have advanced to play in the finals, which start Saturday. In the North Division, the Aquasox hosted the Indians in Game 1 and had a rehabbing Hisashi Iwakuma on the mound. He allowed seven base runners and three runs in two innings and the Aquasox lost the first game. They bounced back with a Game 2 victory and will attempt to reach the finals in Game 3 on Friday.

Minor league baseball is for the development of the players on the teams, not necessarily the won/loss records of those teams. Once again, the Northwest League gives a great example this year!