Sanctions have been imposed on the Willowbrook Royals of the SESBL after a league grievance committee ruled that members of the Royals baseball team were out of order during Game Two of their SESBL quarterfinal series against the Langenburg Indians on Friday, July 17.
Throughout the course of the game in question, members of the Willowbrook Royals baseball team and plate umpire Alton Baldwin exchanged comments in regards to a play at the plate, balls and strikes and tactics used to stall the game, which would have to be restarted if Baldwin was forced to call the game due to inclement weather or darkness before the completion of the fifth inning. “The home plate umpire did engage the Royals in banter back and forth,” SESBL president Reg Ellingson told Yorkton This Week on Monday morning. “There were clouds moving in, rainfall and whatnot and there continued to be more and more discussion about balls and strikes, arguing, different tactics used that the umpire didn’t appreciate while the Royals didn’t appreciate the umpires performance and it just escalated to where he called the game due to darkness at the end of the fifth inning.”
However the verbal jousting between the Royals and umpire Baldwin was not the only altercation on the evening. One member of the Royals also threatened an opposing player, others were seen attempting to distract Langenburg players from making plays, while another allegedly intentionally bumped Baldwin as the player made his way back to the dugout.
Those added altercations were part of the report that Baldwin filed with SBA (Saskatchewan Baseball Association), however the SESBL decided to take responsibility for the incident and make a decision on punishments so as to keep it an internal matter and not an SBA problem. “What happened is that the SESBL opted to address the situation themselves internally,” said Ellingson, continuing, “The home plate umpire had filed his report with the SBA and the SBA normally won’t step in if the individual league is going to administer the discipline themselves.
“That was the route that we wanted to take so as the president of the league, what I chose to do when I first heard of some of the issues that occurred, was to create a grievance committee which is something that we have done at different times in the past when issues arose.”
Ellingson said the grievance committee – comprised of three people not associated with either the Royals or Indians – reviewed over 20 emails from members of both teams involved as well as both umpires, then made a decision over two separate meetings to suspend the entire Willowbrook team for the rest of the season, one Willowbrook player for seven games for verbal abuse towards another player and to deny both umpires the right to umpire another game in the 2015 SESBL playoffs.
The initial ruling caused Willowbrook to appeal the decision, meaning Ellingson and company could either ignore the appeal or take it into consideration. “We could have rejected the appeal and just went with the grievance committee’s recommendation but instead we chose to give a different three man committee an opportunity to form an appeal committee to review everything,” offered the SESBL president. “The three individuals selected were not actively playing in the league this year so it gave them a little bit of separation from the league, however all three have been involved in the past and are baseball guys so they knew what they were dealing with.”
Ellingson said the new committee – the appeal committee - met for a four-hour meeting, taking into consideration all of the previous emails as well as the initial ruling, deciding to uphold part of the ruling while slightly altering another. “The appeal committee felt that the suspension to the individual player was fine and they upheld that. The felt that the suspension to the umpires would be slightly altered in that they didn’t want them to work the rest of the playoffs together as an umpiring pair and the third major change was they opted not to suspend the entire
Willowbrook team for the 2015 playoffs solely on the grounds that the league had never had to formally warn or suspend Willowbrook in the past,” said Ellingson, continuing, “In addition their manager Randy Nesbitt was asked to step aside for the remainder of this year and all of next year and the last piece of that committee’s recommendation was that all of Willowbrook’s remaining home games for the 2015 playoffs would not be played in Willowbrook but a neutral site for the rest of the season.”
