An effort to reduce costs spurred this year’s tournament changes.
It might seem at first glance that it would be easier to win a six-team double-elimination baseball tournament compared to an eight-team double-elimination baseball tournament.
Not necessarily, Dane Peavy said.
“It changes (your preparation) a little bit, because you’re talking about four days’ worth of rest as far as pitchers you’re getting into,” said Peavy, the head coach of the Bossier City (La.) Phillies. “Whereas you have a five-day tournament, you can hold a guy under 80 pitches and then come back on the fifth day.”
Peavy’s team was one of 24 participants in American Legion Baseball’s new regional format this season. Instead of eight regional sites with eight teams apiece, four regionals each included just six teams: the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Mid-South and Central Plains. And two sites each hosted two regionals: the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic in Shrewsbury/Worcester, Mass., and the Mid-South and Southeast in Cherryville/Gastonia, N.C.
The eight-team regionals maintained the usual Wednesday-Sunday format, while the six-team regionals played Thursday-Sunday.
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Under Legion Baseball’s pitching rules, pitchers must have one day of rest after throwing 31-45 pitches; two days rest after throwing 46-60; three days rest after throwing 61-80 pitches; and four days rest after throwing 81-105 pitches, the maximum allowed in a single game.
With the four-day schedule used for the six-team regionals, that means any pitcher topping 80 pitches on Thursday would be ineligible to pitch the rest of the tournament.
“Thank goodness we have enough pitching that we feel we can come back,” Peavy said Saturday, the day before Bossier City forced a doubleheader against Tupelo (Miss.) Post 49 to decide the Mid-South Regional.
“But at the end of the day … it’s easier on your pitching when you win, so you don’t want to lose,” Peavy said.
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Chesapeake (Va.) Post 280 coach Larry Bowles expressed a similar sentiment. Before his team’s season ended with a loss to Florence (S.C.) Post 1 on Saturday in the Southeast Regional, the coach of the 2025 American Legion World Series champions talked about how coaches had discussed the format changes.
“You have to line up and beat who you play,” said Bowles, whose team moved to the Southeast from the Mid-Atlantic with 2026’s changes. “We can think about it and talk about it, but at the end of the day, you got to beat who’s in front of you.”
Ultimately, the goal of the changes to the regional format is twofold, Americanism Commission Chairman Mark Avis said: to mirror the format of the College World Series and to lower expenses for American Legion Baseball.
“It was basically to try to bring ourselves back to revenue-neutral as far as the program,” Avis said. “We’re going to critique it after the year’s over and figure how we can improve it. … Hopefully it takes off and becomes cost-productive for us.”
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