Slo-pitch final cancelled

Plans for tonight’s championship final in the Fort Frances adult slopitch league have landed foul.
League co-ordinator Megan Ross said this morning that the scheduled final between the league’s ‘A’ bracket champion Rural Reps and ‘B’ bracket titleists Little Rascals would not go ahead—and that there would be no overall champion this season.
“Because of games having to be postponed due to bad weather and unforeseen circumstances, we’ve decided that we’ll just have an ‘A’ champion and a ‘B’ champion and leave it at that,” said Ross.
The decision was a reversal of one made earlier by Ross, stating the Little Rascals would be deemed the overall champs by forfeit because the Rural Reps were unable to field enough players.
Two weeks ago, teams still alive in the playoffs voted by a 4-2 margin to have a championship final between the ‘A’ and ‘B’ bracket winners, with the Rural Reps one of the two voting against the measure.
“The season was supposed to be done before Labour Day,” said Rural Reps spokesman Todd Kenny in explaining his team’s opposition.
“We had players going back to school, and there’s a couple on our team getting married this weekend in Thunder Bay and some of us are going down to that today as groomsmen.
“We didn’t think, after playing ‘A’ side teams all year, that we should have to go and play a ‘B’ side team, anyway,” he added.
The original plan was to play the championship final immediately following the ‘A’ and ‘B’ bracket finals last Thursday.
But Kenny said that when he got home from work last Thursday afternoon, there was a message from Ross saying that there would be no second game that evening due to the inclement weather.
In years past, the league playoff was set up with a more openended format, where it was left up to the top teams in each of the nightly leagues to decide whether they wanted to take part in a round-robin playoff to decide an overall champion.
Last year, though, there was no such arrangement as not enough teams voiced an interest in going through such a process.
“We want to play the game,” Little Rascals spokesman Russ Ling said this morning about possibly winning the title by forfeit, before being informed about the final decision on the matter.
“We don’t want to take the win this way.”^The local slo-pitch league has fallen on hard times in recent years, with participation numbers dropping from roughly 80 squads in the mid-’90s to just 24 this past season.