[ArquimedezPozo]

Imagine:

It’s Saturday, October 11, 2025, the second to last day of the 2025 NABF season, and there are four games on today. At 1pm, you watch Game 6 of the Division 4 Championship series; it’s been a good one, with the Albuquerque Dukes leading the Charlotte Hornets three games to 2. It’s a tight contest through 7, but now the Dukes have the bases loaded, though they’re a run back of Charlotte. There are two outs, but the light-hitting shortstop Steve Willis is up; he’s only had two singles during the series and has struck out 7 times. The count runs to 2-2. Then, a fastball, away. Willis lunges and manages a bloop down the line - it’s fair! It bangs against the corner where the wall juts out and scoots just far enough to elude Charlotte LF Xenophon Korkoris. With one run already in, the runner at second is now being waved around - with two outs, he’d been off on contact, and now he dives, his hand sweeps over the plate as the tag comes in, and he’s safe! Albuquerque has taken the lead! They score twice more that inning, and it’s sewn up - Albuquerque takes the title in six.

You flip over just in time to catch the 4pm first pitch for Division 3’s Game 7. Another tight contest - this one a smashfest. You didn’t really have a rooting interest in D4’s ALB-CHR, but this one has a David and Goliath feel to it: The Padres are looking for their fifth Championship, and second straight after promotion from Division 4 in the offseason, while Ottawa - long one of the most hapless teams in the Federation - is here for the first time. You like an underdog, and they’re certainly that, but at the moment it doesn’t look great - after a few lead changes and almost as many pitching changes, San Diego is up by two heading into the ninth. We’re in Ottawa, though, so when ace Champions reliever Doug Klutz wraps up a scoreless top half, Ottawa’s top of the order comes due. Ottawa got here through pitching and defense, but they’ve turned on the power so far this series, so it feels like there’s a chance. When CF Nick Washington leads off the bottom half with a solo shot, the Ottawa crowd erupts, and no one sits down for the rest of the game. #2 hitter Herb Phillips Ks, and Frank Flanigan grounds sharply to third, but then the great Josh Randall steps to the plate. Randall signed with Ottawa in the offseason, as good a place as any to end a career, and then he found himself along for the ride. Randall has never won a Championship, and he wants it bad - he lines a single to the opposite field. Another single, this time from the speedy young 2B Lorenzo Escobar, and suddenly Ottawa has the winning run on first. Randall is lifted for a pinch runner as Josh Henry comes to bat. Henry is just 25, and didn’t even play a full season for the Champs, but was electric in the second half, and the crowd senses it. Henry doesn’t make them wait, turning on the first pitch and sending deep, into the RF corner - it misses a homer by inches and rolls toward the right fielder Gonzalez. One run is already in, and Gonzalez comes up firing but it’s too late! Escobar crosses home standing up, into a pile of his teammates - the Champions are Champions, and in walk-off style!

The exhilaration of that win almost makes you forget that the D2 Championship game 6 started at 7 - it’s already well into the third when you flip over. The Baltimore Terrapins had won an astonishing 115 games in 2025, easily the most in the Federation’s history, and their victory over Vancouver seemed an almost foregone conclusion, but they’d dropped the first game in Baltimore and had narrowly won the second. The Mounties crushed Danny Rzasa in Game 3, but the Pins came back to take the 4th and 5th, and now stood on the precipice of becoming the first team with championships in three different Divisions… but as you tune in, you see a 5-0 Mounties lead, already. This time they’ve victimized Martinez, who was brilliant in Game 2 but is on the ropes here. The Mounties add two more in the 5th, and another in the 6th; a Steve Mauck solo shot eases the pain in the 7th, but not by much.

The Division 1 game is starting up soon, and you figure you can flip back here and there - if the Pins come back somehow, you’ll catch it. They don’t, and you watch the Philadelphia A’s take all the drama out of their own Game 7, vanquishing El Paso 6-2 after a two homer performance by 1B Jake Haston - he hit two earlier in the series and is an easy selection as series MVP. You watch until he finishes his quick shoutouts, hoisting the MVP trophy while his teammate, the great catcher Corey Cerrone, holds the championship cup behind him. Then you switch it off and head to sleep.

So now it’s October 12, and only one game remains between baseball and the offseason: a Division 2 game seven between the best regular season team in NABF history, and a Mounties club whose 94 wins are hardly nothing, but still pale in comparison to that juggernaut. Or so people have said, anyway: here they are, now, one win away from an upset victory over a superteam. And it’s Rzasa, again: he’d had a terrible Game 3, which, if repeated, could mean a long offseason in Baltimore.

Rzasa hadn’t lasted past the second inning in Game 3, but in Game 7 he manages four plus before exiting, his Terrapins leading 6-4 after a Doug Padgett bases-clearing double in the third off promising young starter Danny Pierson. Philadelphia’s manager will take heat for starting the youngster in this series, you think. Padgett has given the Pins an extraordinary series so far, but once Rzasa left things have gone awry, and it looks like that effort might be wasted as Vancouver drops two on Baltimore’s pen in the seventh, tying it up. In the eighth, they finally get to David Linder, who has handcuffed them in four scattered innings over the rest of the series, and entering the ninth it’s 7-6 Vancouver.

Baltimore closer Matt Heitzman sits Vancouver down in order, as he has all series - in eight innings of work he’s given up only four hits. But the bottom of Baltimore’s order is up - 7, 8, 9 - and unless they get someone on for young phenom Mel Irving it will end there. 2B Gustavo Cortes lines the ball hard, but right at Vancouver’s rookie 3B Sam Webb, who snares it. SS Hector Delgado flails at an 0-2 slider out of the zone for the second out. But veteran catcher Jose Molina is batting ninth, and though he’s endured one of his worst seasons, he has a well-earned reputation for delivering in the clutch to live up to. He singles, weakly, through into right field, and Mel Irving steps to the plate.

Baltimore had already been good when Irving arrived in 2024, but the young CF was electrifying. He was, from the start, one of the best defensive players in the game, and he could flat out hit: in 2025 he slashed .300/.363/.507 with 23 homers to lead the league with 6.9 WAR. But he is still young, and has underperformed in the series, looking overeager, so the Baltimore crowd’s cheering has an extra tinge of desperation to it. Strike one goes past Irving, a fastball on the outside half. A curve misses, and is followed by another that Irving fouls back. Another fastball, also outside, but more so - Irving takes it and the ump signals a ball, with Vancouver’s ace closer Carter grimacing. The next one was supposed to be another fastball, also away, but this one misses the spot by two inches. It is still on the outer half, but hittable, and Irving connects - an opposite field drive. It’s not a no-doubter, so Irving sprints as he and the crowd and you watch, breathless… then erupt, as the ball lands in the first row of seats, ten feet to the left of the foul pole, and then fireworks as Irving rounds third, and then into the pile, and the greatest team in the history of the NABF is now the first to win in three Divisions and the second team in this one single shining postseason with a walk-off win in Game 7 - the first two times it had ever been done, and now with a homer from behind. What a game, what a postseason, what a game.

Next: The Unprecedented Years (Cycles 7 and 8)

Note: unfortunately I never actually kept all the box scores and game logs from these games. What I remember from this - I was GM of the Terrapins - was that both the D3 and D2 series ended on walk-offs. I remember Irving’s walk-off homer very clearly, as well as the general shape of that series, but much of it is conjecture based on player postseason stats. The others are mostly fabricated based on whatever I remember (I’m like 75% sure it was Henry who hit the game-winner for Ottawa) and supplemented with info from player stats. Regardless, it was an incredible set of series, so even if this isn’t how it went down, the outcomes are the same and it’s close enough.