Welcome back to another installment of the Delco Baseball Now newsletter where we breakdown everything going on in the Delco Baseball summer ball world.

It was a pretty light weekend overall, as our Little League, Legion and Cal Ripken coverage has all come to an end. The Broomall-Newtown 13’s are the last local team still going and their World Series will not start for another two weeks.

We still had some great playoff baseball action in our three main summer “adult” leagues around here. The Delco League has really shifted into a high school/college league, although, the league’s likely MVP is 36 years old, so that isn’t always the case.

The Delco League at this point is really just a 16+ league. The Mid-County league I believe is officially 18+, and the MSBL league that I play in is 25+. There are a lot of available options for people like me out there that still want to play ball and have fun but are past their days of being able to consistently hit baseballs coming 90 MPH at them.

Let’s dive into the action, and make sure to subscribe down below to stay up to date:

Delco League:

After dominating all throughout the high school season en route to winning our Most Valuable Player award, Radnor’s Austin Havertine shined in his Delco League playoff debut as well. Just two hits allowed and one unearned run for Havertine is a great way to make your first playoff appearance, and his offense gave him some great run support.

Alex Barrist missed a lot of the second half of the summer after going to a different college league, but having him back has been huge. Wayne scored four in the fourth, one in the fifth, and four in the sixth to put the game out of reach.

As for Upper Darby, the Burman and Burman combo in the 3/4 spots in the lineup is lethal. Upper Darby scored two in the first and four in the second, which was more than enough to take down Aston Valley.

All season long, and really, for the last five years, Wayne and Upper Darby have been the best two teams in the league. No one else has won a title besides them since the 2018 Narberth Mudcats (now Drexel Hill Ducks).

We are one win away from the third championship meeting between these two teams since 2022, where Wayne won in 2022 and 2023.

MSBL:

The Springfield Cardinals were in the driver’s seat after an 8-0 Game 1 win, but the Collingdale Colts fought back and won the next two games.

They grinded out a 6-5 win on Saturday in Game 2 then ran away with Game 3 late to punch their ticket to the championship.

This is a funny storyline here because this is a championship rematch from 2024, but from a different league. My team is now called the Drexel Hill Phillies, but last year we were sponsored by Casey’s Bar in Drexel Hill.

We played the Colts in the championship but that was a different league called the Delco Adult Baseball League (DABL) which merged with the MSBL this year to form a ten-team league.

So this is a rematch from last year where Drexel Hill won, but this is our first time in this league.

I think it should be a good series. I think we have the pitching advantage overall but the Colts have a very good offense which will make things interesting. We are unsure where the games will be played as Dermond is having the fences removed for football season. I’d guess O’Hara or Bonner next Saturday

Mid-County:

This is another series that should be very good as both of these two teams have been fantastic so far in the Mid-County (formerly EDCO) playoffs.

Clifton is made up of a lot of former Upper Darby HS players and Aston Valley has a ton of former Sun Valley HS guys. There are plenty more players added in on both sides, but a lot of these guys have been playing together for a while.

We will do our best to keep you up to date on where games are being played. Both the Mid-County and Delco League Aston Valley teams have told me they are playing at Sun Valley’s Buggy Field on Tuesday night, so someone should probably figure that out before four teams show up to the same field and zero games get played.

Phillies:

Thanks to Otto Kemp for being good at baseball on Sunday, no one else really tried to do so however.

I’ll always take a road series win, but it is so frustrating to watch this team consistently win the first two games of a series and then lose the third one with the punt lineup in.

Hopefully they can sweep away a rough White Sox team before a very good Tigers team comes to town this weekend.