WPIAL reveals 2021 baseball schedules with ‘long overdue’ 2-game section series

By: Chris Harlan
Tuesday, May 26, 2020 | 8:36 PM

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If a section opponent had a star pitcher, West Allegheny baseball coach Bryan Cornell always assumed his team would face him twice.

Next spring, that will change.

The WPIAL released revamped baseball schedules Tuesday that have section teams playing a two-game series on consecutive days in 2021. Now, a team won’t be able to ride the same starting pitcher in both section games.

Under PIAA rules, if a player throws more than 25 pitches, he cannot pitch again the following day. So the new home-and-home format benefits teams with pitching depth and limits teams with a dominant pitcher.

In years past, that wasn’t the case.

“We faced Brendan McKay every single time,” Cornell said. “That was a strategic plan on Blackhawk’s part to throw him against us. We saw him twice every year and three times in the playoffs.

“This makes you throw somebody else.”

The new format was approved by the WPIAL board May 18, but coaches had to wait a week to see the schedules.

“This was long overdue,” Serra Catholic coach Brian Dzurenda said. “It lets the better team win. Not necessarily the better pitcher, but the better team.”

Tuesday’s release also showed that WPIAL baseball teams won’t have a chance to ease into their section schedules next spring.

The 2021 season begins March 26, and some teams will start section play three days later. Seven sections have a home-and-home series March 29-30. The 13 others start section play April 6-7.

In recent years, teams were given at least 12 days to prepare for section play.

“Usually we had a couple of weeks to play around,” Dzurenda said. “Now you’ve got to be ready to get out of the gates quick. If we’re not prepared with good practices in the snow in early March, it’s going to be tough.”

In any other year, Dzurenda would’ve spent Tuesday watching or coaching in the WPIAL baseball finals — a tradition he’d kept 22 years in a row. Instead, he spent part of the morning hustling to fill the remainder of Serra’s schedule with 10 nonsection opponents.

The PIAA limits baseball teams to 20 regular-season games.

The new section format made the scheduling process a little more complicated than usual.

“Everybody filled up really quick, like within an hour,” Dzurenda said. “Everybody said: ‘We’re filled. We’re full. We’ve already got 20 games.’ A lot of these teams must have already had emails out. It was a lot different this year.”

Maybe, he said, that’s because baseball coaches had too much free time, since the coronavirus pandemic forced this season to be canceled.

“I’ve had the most beautiful lawn I’ve had in years,” Dzurenda said, laughing. “I power washed my whole house. I painted my kids’ rooms. I washed the garage. Everything is sparkling clean.”

Dzurenda and Cornell agreed that the two-game series was a good change, but they both wanted the WPIAL to go farther and add multi-game series to the postseason as well. The WPIAL baseball committee wanted to add best-of-three series, but the WPIAL board turned that down.

“I wish they would have voted yes for the semifinals and finals to go to a three-game series,” Cornell said, “but I think this is a step in the right direction.”

Chris Harlan is a TribLive reporter covering sports. He joined the Trib in 2009 after seven years as a reporter at the Beaver County Times. He can be reached at charlan@triblive.com.