Legion Baseball alumni on both sides of World Series

The American Legion

The 2020 World Series will pit a manager with American Legion Baseball experience against a team featuring a record-setting batter who also played ALB.

The Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays finished the pandemic-shortened regular season with the best two records in Major League Baseball, but both teams needed Game 7 wins in the league championship series to advance.

Leading the way for the Dodgers was shortstop Corey Seager, the MVP of the National League Championship Series who played American Legion Baseball for Post 115 in Kannapolis, N.C. Seager set NLCS records with five home runs and 11 RBI as the Dodgers rallied from a 3-1 series deficit to defeat the Atlanta Braves. It’s the 21st World Series appearance for the franchise, second only to the New York Yankees in major league history.

"It wasn't me, it was this team," Seager said. "...We grinded all the way through this series; this wasn't an easy one, and we're glad to be on top."

The Dodgers will face the Tampa Bay Rays, who almost blew a 3-0 lead in the ALCS but held off the 2019 AL champions, the Houston Astros, with a 4-2 win on Saturday to advance to the World Series for the second time in franchise history.

Rays manager Kevin Cash (Post 111, Tampa, Fla.) said reaching the World Series was a “pretty special feeling.”

“I don’t know if I’ve had many better, other than getting married and having three kids. This is right there below that. It can’t get much better than that,” Cash said.

In a 2018 interview with The American Legion, Cash said playing American Legion Baseball “taught us some consistency.”

“We were playing baseball it seemed like every night in American Legion; it was busy. We liked it simply because it taught us some consistency, whereas in high school, one game a week, one game on Saturday; American Legion, it was pretty loaded up and especially when you went to the different tournaments throughout the summer,” he said.

The schedule for the World Series (all games on Fox, 8 p.m.):

  • Game 1, Oct. 20.

  • Game 2, Oct. 21.

  • Game 3, Oct. 23.

  • Game 4, Oct. 24.

  • Game 5, Oct. 25, if necessary.

  • Game 6, Oct. 27, if necessary.

  • Game 7, Oct. 28, if necessary.

All World Series games will take place at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, which also hosted the NLCS.

Tags: Baseball