Published: May 10, 2008 11:36 pm         

All-MSAC is again a mockery

Once again, the Mountain State Athletic Conference is making a mockery of its own all-conference team.

Either the coaches who voted are anti-coalfield, guilty of collusion or they don’t understand the sport they’re coaching. In this case it’s baseball.

For the second straight year, Woodrow Wilson catcher Lanny Meadows won’t be named to the all-MSAC first team according to a source with knowledge of the team, which won’t be released until later this week.

Which would be just fine, if he weren’t one of the best catchers in the STATE.

Rewind to last spring.

Meadows was named first-team Class AAA all-state catcher. But he wasn’t named to the all-MSAC first team.

That’s right. He was deemed the best catcher in the state but wasn’t good enough to make the all-MSAC team.

This year, all Meadows did was better his numbers.

He is hitting .494 this season heading into Monday’s sectional title game at Nicholas County. He has scored 43 runs and has a school-record 29 stolen bases.

That’s only half the story.

He has also thrown out 14 runners trying to steal, and that doesn’t include the runners he has picked off first. Teams won’t run on the senior. And he has no passed balls and, according to Woodrow Wilson coach Mark Daniel, “has saved us a ton of wild pitches this year.”

It would be tragic if it wasn’t such a comedy of errors on the part of the coaches of the MSAC.

The MSAC again is proving to be so anti-southern coalfield that it has rounded ridiculous and is heading for stupid.

In Woodrow Wilson’s stunning 15-14 win over Nicholas County last Wednesday, when the Flying Eagles wiped out an eight-run deficit in the bottom of the seventh, Meadows went 3-for-4 with a double, three runs and three RBIs.

“It’s not right, but what are you going to do?” asked Daniel, who would neither confirm nor deny that Meadows wasn’t on the first-team all-MSAC team. “It’s a losing battle.”

It’s a sham and a shame.

— E-mail: demorrson@

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