Griffons gearing up for NBC World Series

Herald-Tribune

It seems like deja vu for John Hill III.

Hill, the Nevada Griffons' head baseball coach, has been there before.

For the third straight season, Hill has the Griffons headed for the National Baseball Congress World Series at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium in Wichita.

The Griffons, who finished the regular season at 25-21 in the Jayhawk League and 32-23 overall, are tentatively scheduled to play Monday at 1 p.m. against an undetermined team. Nevada got the word late Friday morning that it had received an at-large berth for the NBC World Series. It finished No. 4 in the league standings and was denied an automatic berth which the top three teams in the league secured -- the Derby (Kan.) Twins, the Hays (Kan.) Larks and the El Dorado (Kan.) Broncos.

When it was all said and done, though, the Griffons, who have finished No. 9 in the World Series in each of the previous four seasons.

"No one remembers how you got there," Hill said late Friday night after the Griffons returned from Ozark, where they lost their regular-season finale to the Springfield Generals, 8-7. "They just remember how you do.

"As long as you get there, it doesn't really matter. It's not like an NCAA (basketball tournament, ala March Madness) bubble team. Once you're offically in, you're not a bubble team. You're just part of the tournament and part of the field of play and you have as good as chance as anyone else."

To be sure, the NBC World Series is the summertime baseball version of the "Big Dance," if you will. There wasn't a bunch of celebrating, though. The Griffons knew they had a good chance of receiving an at-large bid.

Just what the doctor ordered.

"We didn't get to talk about it as a team," Hill said. "Dr. (Jason) Meisenheimer (General Manager of the Griffons) saw some of them at the field (Lyons Stadium as they prepared to leave for Ozark) and the word kind of spread like wild-fire after that, so I really didn't get to see the reaction to the team as a whole.

"We didn't talk about it until we got to the field (to play Springfield). We just went over the specifics about when we might play, the day we might play and what the next couple days would look like."

The Griffons made it interesting Friday night, falling behind 8-1 before scoring six runs in the seventh and coming up short.

"We would have liked to win, sure, but our sole focus was getting ready for the World Series and getting our pitching in order and our position players rested."