something completely different

Millsaps College won the Southern Athletic Association regular season title to earn the right to host a four-team tournament this weekend at Twenty Field in Jackson. The Majors (28-10) are 16-4 at home this year and 9-0 overall against the other three teams in their pod. (No. 2 seed Birmingham-Southern is also hosting a four-team tournament.) The Majors, led by Wes Perkins (.420) and Keith Shumaker (.392), can flat-out hit (.346 team average), and they’ve got a pair of stalwart starting pitchers (Shumaker and Will Edwards). They should be feeling pretty good about their chances to win this tournament and advance to the SAA’s best-of-3 championship series. But that’s the thing about postseason baseball. It’s different. It feels different. The end of someone’s season is always lurking. Every pitch, every at-bat, every play in the field can be a season-changer. We’ll see how the Majors handle it. They open with 8-seed Sewanee at 6 p.m. on Friday. With a win, they’d play at noon on Saturday against the Hendrix-Oglethorpe winner from Friday. The championship round is Sunday.