Sports

Newton Kansan WICHITA — There will be at least one Kansas team in the finals of the 88th National Baseball Congress World Series after Thursday’s quarterfinals at Eck Stadium. The Liberal BeeJays downed the Haysville Aviators 6-1, the Hays Larks downed Austin Lonestar Baseball 5-2, the Seattle Studs outlasted the Hutchinson Monarchs 2-1 in 14 innings and the defending champion Santa Barbara Foresters downed the Mansfield TBT Ballers 8-0 in seven inningson the eight-run rule.Hays will meet league rival Liberal in an all-Kansas semifinal, while Seattle will meet West Coast rival Santa Barbara in the other.

It’s almost fitting that on my way to Thursday’s quarterfinal games of the 88th National Baseball Congress World Series, there was a story on the radio about the SavannahBananas. It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard of the outfit, a summer college team in the Coastal Plains League, where the Bananas are in the fight for their third league title andsecond straight. In addition to their summer college games, they play a number of games of “Banana Ball,” old school barnstorming with plenty of comicantics. Both versions of the team feature a lot of audience participation and dancing — both on andoff the field. Sadly, the Coastal Plain League is not an NBC affiliated league, because the grand daddy of summer tournaments would be perfect forBanana Ball. Attendance at the NBC World Series has been down for the past few seasons. COVID has played a pretty big part of that in the last two orthree years. Venue changes and weather hasn’t helped either. Hundred-degree days are a regular occurrence during the early days of August, but this year the number of consecutivetriple digit dayshave been pretty bad.