HOT CORNER: P.E.I. football on display in Summerside this weekend

SUMMERSIDE, P.E.I. — It is “Championship Weekend” at Eric Johnson Field in Summerside as the P.E.I. tackle football leagues will crown three champions.
It all gets going on Saturday with the varsity final’s Potato Bowl between the Cornwall Timberwolves and Summerside Cooke Insurance Clippers at 1:30 p.m.
The Clippers went 5-1 (won-lost) in the regular season and are coming off a 60-0 semifinal win last weekend against the Souris Wildcats.
At one time, the Potato Bowl was the P.E.I. High School Football League’s championship game and it is great to see that trophy played for again. Many will remember those cold and windy Remembrance Day Potato Bowl championships played at UPEI’s MacAdam Field.
The Ed Hilton Bowl is awarded to the bantam champion. This year’s matchup will feature the Summerside Waterwise Spartans and Charlottetown Privateers.
Charlottetown is the top-seeded team, but the Spartans will give them everything they can handle.
The Spartans beat Cornwall 90-0 in last weekend’s semifinal and any team that scores 90 points in a game should be a force to be reckoned with. This should be a great game.
The action continues on Sunday with the atom – or under-12 – final featuring the Summerside Cox and Palmer Spartans and Charlottetown Privateers.
The weather calls for a mix of sun and cloud for Saturday, which is great football weather and a vast improvement over the monsoon winds and rain on “Championship Day” last year. It may be a little soggy on Sunday for the atoms, but, overall, it looks to be a great weekend of football.
Fans are encouraged to come out and cheer the teams on in the big games.

Curling
The Suzanne Birt rink is back for another season of competitive curling.
The Birt rink, made up of Marie Christiansen, Meaghan Hughes and Michele McQuaid, had a strong showing last weekend at the Atlantic Superstore Monctonian Challenge in Moncton, N.B. They lost in the final of the $7,500 event to the Andrea Crawford rink from Fredericton, N.B. by a score of 8-2.
Team Birt went undefeated 5-0 (won-lost) in the preliminary round. They are right back at it this weekend in Halifax, N.S., in the Dave Jones Mayflower Cashspiel.
There are 12 teams in this event, including P.E.I.'s Veronica Smith. Former Summerside resident Erin Carmody plays on the Jill Brothers rink from Halifax, which has won this event four times.
There are 16 men's teams in this event and none from P.E.I.

Baseball
The 115th World Series is now history and the Washington Nationals had some kind of season to win their first-ever Fall Classic.
In their first 50 games or almost one-third of the way into this year, the Nationals had a record of only 19-31 and looked very much like a team headed nowhere. A record of 74-38 after that propelled them to a National League wild-card spot.
They got to the dance and that is all that mattered as they went 14-5 in the post-season and won the games they had to. They beat Milwaukee in the wild-card game, upset the Los Angeles Dodgers in the division series and swept the St. Louis Cardinals to become National League champs.
Beating the Houston Astros, probably the most balanced team in baseball, in the World Series tells us the Nationals’ season was no fluke and Washington is deserving of full marks for its championship.
The Nationals became the 13th different team since 2000 to win the World Series and it’s great for baseball having that many winners.
The Boston Red Sox have won four in that span, followed by San Francisco with three while both the New York Yankees and Cardinals each have two World Series titles in the last 20 years. Any sports league is better with a good competitive balance amongst its teams and Major League Baseball (MLB) has that.

Length of games
There has been a lot of talk about MLB games being too long and that area needs improvement. A dedicated, die-hard baseball fan may not mind a four-hour game, but the average fan does.
The seven games in the World Series had an average length of three hours 45 minutes, including Games 2 and 3 that were just over four hours.
The shortest night was Game 5 at three hours 19 minutes. All seven games were nine-inning games.
A lot of time is wasted as it is common to have a 25-to-35-second span between pitches. I stand to be corrected, but I believe the rulebook states that it is supposed to be 12 seconds between pitches.
The batter stepping out of the box and making adjustments to his batting gloves needs to be stopped and the game continued. A lot of at-bats are simply too long and an improvement in this area would help speed the game up considerably.

Looking ahead
It will be another great year for baseball in 2020 and one game to look forward to is the Field of Dreams game. The New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox are going to play a regular-season game in Dyersville, Iowa, on Aug. 13. That is where the 1989 hit movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, took place.
MLB is building an 8,000-seat stadium beside the field where the movie was filmed. That event and game will be something to see. One can be assured that MLB will put on quite a show.
Have a great week!

Joe MacIntyre is a local life insurance broker. His column appears every Saturday. Comments and suggestions can be sent to [email protected].