Feb 18, 2022 4 min read

Last year’s Washington County entry into the Pony World Series included players who resided the Washington, Trinity, Canon-McMillan, McGuffey, Chartiers-Houston and Bentworth school districts.

In 2022, players from the Fort Cherry School District will be added to the mix as they join the Founder’s League on a full-time basis.

With the former Vesta League no longer sanctioning Pony Baseball, Washington Youth Baseball, which already included the Washington, Trinity and McGuffey school districts, applied for and received all of its former areas, as well.

And, with the additions of Burgettstown and Avella’s youth baseball organizations into the Founder’s Pony League this year on a provisional basis, nearly every baseball player who resides in Washington County will be eligible to try out for the area’s automatic entry into the Pony World Series. Players from Burgettstown and Avella will be eligible to play in the 2023 Pony World Series.

Full disclosure: I’m the Founder’s League president in addition to being Washington Youth Baseball’s Pony president.

To be eligible, players will still need to participate with one of the teams that competes in the Founder’s League. There also are some rules in place to ensure players compete in those leagues for more than just one season. For example. To be eligible, players must play their 12-, 13- and 14-year-old years in one of the competing organizations.

But the bottom line is, we now have a World Series team that more properly represents Washington County. That league figures to include around 15 teams and more than 175 players this year.

It’s a far different story than when I took over as the Washington Youth Baseball Pony president in 2015 and the pool of players from which the Pony World Series team was selected was about 20 eligible 14-year-olds.

No local recreational baseball league could compete at the international level with those kind of numbers.

It’s made for a much more competitive local entrant into the World Series in recent years. And that has, in turn, spurred more fan interest in the tournament.

Will there still be some talented baseball players from the county not included? Sure. Peters Township remains a holdout, while travel baseball programs still syphon off some players.

But it should be a team that creates a lot of community pride.

n It’s mock draft season. And that means you’ll be seeing a lot of crazy ones that pretty all include the Steelers trading up from their current pick of No. 20 to get a quarterback.

While the Steelers could move up in the draft to acquire a quarterback, what is unlikely to happen is a trade that moves them into the top 10. The price for that would just be too steep.

To move up into the top 10, the Steelers would likely have to give up next year’s No. 1 pick, as well. And I just can’t see them doing that.

n It seems some are panning the hiring of new offensive line coach Pat Meyer because the teams he coached previously didn’t have good offensive lines.

But those teams also didn’t use much capital – either via the draft or salary cap – on their lines. In this case, you get what you pay for.

Like all things, it’s the Jimmys and Joes, not the Xs and Os, that matter. If you don’t have good Jimmys and Joes, it doesn’t matter how good of a coach you are, you’re just not going to be as successful as the teams that do.

n No, Mike Munchak was not coming back to Pittsburgh to coach the offensive line. Munchak left Pittsburgh for Denver to be closer to his daughter and her new family.

That hasn’t changed, even though Munchak was among the coaches let go by the Broncos recently. He’s now 62 and has made plenty of money in his career. He’s quite content to spend time with his family.

n Joe Burrow was sacked 70 times this season, including 19 times in the postseason. That was the third-most sacks a quarterback has taken in a single NFL season.

He came out of the Bengals’ 23-20 loss in the Super Bowl to the Rams with a sprained MCL suffered during one of the seven times he was sacked in that game.

If the Bengals don’t fix that offensive line, there’s a good chance they won’t live up to their potential. Everyone is penciling the Bengals into future Super Bowls after Burrow led Cincinnati there in his second NFL season.

But remember, Dan Marino also led the Dolphins to the Super Bowl in his second season. And then never made it back again.

It happens.