The Senior League East Region Tournament at Mansfield Stadium in Bangor later this month will feature a Maine team for the first time since 2019.
The nine-team, double-elimination regional for players ages 13-16 will be held from July 16 to July 21.
This will be the fifth year that the tournament has been held in Bangor. There were no tournaments in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are two Senior League teams in Maine, Hampden and Gray-New Gloucester, according to Tournament Director Mike Brooker. They will play a best-of-three series on Sunday and Monday at Mansfield Stadium to determine who will represent Maine in the East Regional.
There will be a doubleheader on Sunday with games slated for 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. and, if the teams split, the deciding game will be on Monday at 5 p.m.
The East Region Tournament was supposed to be a 10-team affair but Washington, D.C., dropped out.
One team will get a first-round bye. The Connecticut champion earned the bye via a blind draw, Brooker said.
The Maine champ will take on the Delaware titlist in the third game on the opening day docket with game time set for 5 p.m. on Wednesday, July 16.
The tourney opener at 11 a.m. will pit the Pennsylvania champ against the New York titlist and the winners from Rhode Island and Massachusetts will play at 2 p.m.
Thursday’s three-game slate will have the New Jersey and Maryland winners squaring off at 11 a.m. and Connecticut will play its first game at 2 p.m. against the winner of Wednesday’s Pennsylvania-New York contest.
The 5 p.m. game is the first elimination game, with the Pennsylvania-New York loser taking on the Rhode Island-Massachusetts loser.
There will be four games on Friday at 10 a.m., 1 p.m., 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., with the first two games being elimination games and the latter two being winners bracket tilts.
There will be three games on Saturday at 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., and two apiece on Sunday and Monday at 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
The 4:30 p.m. game on Monday would be played if necessary.
Brooker is happy to have a Maine team in the tournament again.
OId Town represented Maine in the 2019 regional but there haven’t been any Maine teams since.
“Hopefully, this will be good for Little League and Senior League in Maine,” Brooker said. ”It will provide more exposure.”
Brooker said the Broncos Senior League team from Hampden will have one player from Hermon and two from Bangor to go with the Hampden players.
Several of the players on the Gray-New Gloucester team captivated the state in 2023 by being the first team from Maine in nearly 20 years to reach the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
That was a Gray-New Gloucester-Raymond team.
“They have stuck together. Good for them,” Brooker said in applauding the players’ passion for baseball and loyalty to each other and their communities.
The winner of the East Regional moves on to play in the Senior League World Series in Easley, South Carolina, from July 26 to Aug. 2.
Mansfield Stadium hosted the Senior League World Series from 2002 to 2016.
Brooker was the director for those tournaments. He is in his 37th year as a Little League volunteer.
The World Series was moved to Easley primarily because it was easier to access than to Bangor.
Auburn, Massachusetts, is the defending East Regional champs. Other recent winners have been Cherry Hill, New Jersey (2023), East Vineland, New Jersey (2022), and Wilmington, Delaware (2019).
