Baseball Extraliga starts today. Arrows will try to retain the title
The first games of the Extraliga season are planned for Friday. Let’s see what we can expect.
Note that both Arrows games had to be postponed due to snow.
The biggest change in the league is undoubtedly the decrease in the number of teams playing. This season we will only see 8 of them as opposed to 10 before. The last time Extraliga was played with 8 teams was in 2016. This year, each team will play one another in three weekend series, giving each of them 21 games in the regular season. Each game will, hence, be important for TOP 6.
Extraliga 2022 also brings changes in the playoff format. Unlike in the previous years, there will also be games for 3rd and 5th place. Furthermore, Czech Series will now be played as the best of seven, for the first time since 2004 season, when Draci beat Krč Altron (now Eagles) 4-0 in the series.
We are beginning to see a new trend of foreign players returning to the league. And that is before all the foreign players were announced. But as mentioned by Tyler Smith on „Hroši podcast“, we can also look forward to seeing Alec Lemmon, who should be playing in Ostrava again. While Extraliga became leaner, the teams that remained took the talented players from the former Extraliga teams only further increasing the quality of the league.
We talked with Lukáš Ercoli and Jiří Vlach from baseball-stat.cz in podcast On_Deck, release by Czech Baseball Association, about the beginning of the season (Czech only).
What can you expect?
For the new season we at Milujeme Baseball are also preparing a few new things. Each Monday we would like to make a baseball debriefing, where we talk about the previous week (not only in Extraliga). One of the regular guests will be Jiří Vlach and we are already in talks with more people. All will be available as a video on our Youtube channel, but also in a podcast format. We would also like to bring at least one commented game in 2 weeks. If everything goes fine, we might even be able to broadcast few games from First League.
