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| Frank 'Shag' Shaughnessy |
While preparing this week’s Sports Flashback feature, I ran
across a sports-related term that I had never heard before, that is, a
Shaughnessy playoff.
To find out what it meant, I do what almost all of us do
nowadays, I Googled it. According to the results, this playoff system is used
to determine a champion in a sports league that isn’t divided into separate
divisions. Invented in 1933 by baseball manager and executive Frank
Shaughnessy, this playoff system pits the top four teams in the final league
standings in a single elimination tournament.
In the first round, the first and fourth place teams play
each other and the second and third place teams play each other. The winners of
those two games, play each other in the finals to determine the overall
champion.
Shaughnessy was a pretty interesting guy. Born in Illinois
in 1884, he went on to play football and baseball at Notre Dame before moving
on to a professional baseball career with the Washington Senators (now the
Minnesota Twins) and the Philadelphia Athletics (now the Oakland Athletics).
Later, he became the general manager of the Montreal Royals minor league
baseball team, and during that time he invented the Shaughnessy playoff system.
This playoff system became popular and has since been widely
used by minor league baseball leagues for years and years. Later, it even
spread to other sports leagues, including several now-defunct American
professional and minor league football leagues.
If you take a look down the page at this week’s Sports
Flashback feature, you’ll see where in August of 1957, the Conecuh County
Amateur Baseball League used the Shaughnessy playoff system to determine its
champion. However, the story in The Courant mentions that this playoff was also
a round robin series, which implies that each team played all the others in
turn. In other words, they used some variation of the old Shaughnessy system.
Plus, the 1957 Conecuh County Amateur Baseball League
playoff also appears to have involved more than just four teams. At the end of
the regular season, Evergreen was in first place, Garland was in second, Paul
was in third, Castleberry was in fourth, Red Level was in fifth and Lyeffion
was in sixth.
In the finals, Lyeffion, the sixth-place team, was facing
Castleberry, the fourth place team. In a true Shaughnessy playoff, Lyeffion and
Red Level would not have been eligible for competition.
Another thing that I found odd about the 1957 Conecuh County
Amateur Baseball League playoffs was the fact that the finals were scheduled to
be played in Brewton, which didn’t have a team in the league. While I don’t
know, it is possible, but probably not likely, that Castleberry played its home
games in Brewton during that particular season.
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If you’re still interested in signing up to compete in our
local ESPN College Football Pick ‘Em contest, you still have plenty of time to
do so. To sign up, visit
http://games.espn.go.com/college-football-pickem/2015/en/ and register. Our
local group is called the “South Alabama FB Experts,” and the password to get
into the group is “football.”
As of this writing (Monday), only nine people, including me,
have signed up, so I hope more of you will join the fun before the contest
begins on Sept. 5. For the record, Glennis Curry is the reigning local contest
champion, but he has yet to sign up for this year’s contest. In other words, at
this point, there’s plenty of room for someone who thinks they can take top
honors this year.
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