Top four should be easy picks at GMC Baseball Tournament seeding, but after that?

The Somerset County Tournament is already set, and even kicked off Wednesday night with another game coming Thursday afternoon. The Greater Middlesex Conference is next, with the league’s seeding meeting Friday morning.

And of course, Central Jersey Sports Radio – as always – will be there.

Make sure to follow Central Jersey Sports Radio on Twitter, as Mike Pavlichko will provide live updates from Friday’s 9 am seeding meeting, with a full story and brackets to follow!

The night before the meeting – as in all sports – the coaches get together and do their seeding of the tournament. Then, typically, two coaches will represent them at the seeding meeting, along with one Athletic Director from each of the four divisions, plus GMC officials.

Since there are two tournaments – the Jim Muldowney GMC Championship Tournament, and the Ray Cipperly GMC Invitational – there are no “guaranteed seeds” to the division winners. The 31 teams get seeded in order, and the top 20 make the Muldowney tournament.

The biggest rule to know is that no team can be seeded higher than a team above it in the standings.

This rarely comes into play, but it will this year. In the GMC Red Division, Woodbridge won the pennant outright with an 11-3 division record. But South Plainfield – which finished second at 9-5 – beat the Barrons twice in the regular season. Despite that, Woodbridge must be seeded higher than South Plainfield.

Getting to the predictions…

The Division Champions in the GMC is as follows:

• Red: Woodbridge
• White: St. Thomas Aquinas
• Blue: Metuchen
• Gold: East Brunswick Magnet

All that said, typically the Red Division champion gets the top seed, unless someone in another division is light years ahead of them. So we’re going to put Woodbridge in as the top-seed, a fairly easy choice.

Then you have South Plainfield and East Brunswick tied at 9-5 in the division. Ties are broken before the seeding begins, to determine a clear order in which teams come out. The Tiger and Bears split this season.

But comparing the two, we have to look at South Plainfield’s head-to-head wins over Woodbridge, which is what the committee would call “quality wins” – defined as a win against a team already “on the board,” or having been seeded.

By virtue of a two-game regular season sweep over the Barrons, the committee would have to break that tie in favor of South Plainfield. Then, compared with the White Division winner, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Tigers should get the No. 2 seed.

The Blue and Gold Divisions shouldn’t factor in here yet, as there are some really good teams in the White Division that should go before them.

The question is, does the No. 3 go to the Red or the White? East Brunswick or St. Thomas?

Well, the Bears dropped both matchups with Woodbridge this year, so there’s no “quality win” to factor in. But the two played each other, with Aquinas winning 13-11 last Friday. That should put Aquinas at three.

We think East Brunswick could get the nod at the four over Colonia. They’re 10-6 overall, 9-5 in the division with their non-division games a loss to Aquinas and non-conference win over Trenton. The Patriots are 12-3, 9-3 in the White. They beat JFK (down in the Blue) out of division, and Linden and Raritan out of conference.

To round out the top eight should be some mix of St. Joseph-Metuchen (10-6, 7-6) and Old Bridge (9-8, 7-7) out of the Red and Spotswood (12-7, 8-4) and Middlesex (12-4, 8-4) out of the White before getting to the Blue Division champion, Metuchen (13-5, 11-3).

The Bulldogs aren’t going to go as high as nine, as there are still some Red and White teams that could go first, including Monroe – which claims a win over Woodbridge as its best “quality win,” and Edison, which beat Metuchen head-to-head.

Where it could get really interesting is where the winner of the Gold Division will. East Brunswick Magnet is 16-2 and won the division at 12-1. Do they get in the Muldowney Championship or the Cipperly Invitational Tournament?

Going from the top eight seeds that we have set already – even though the order of four through eight could change – there are 12 spots up for grabs. Monroe and Edison would likely take two of them, as we talked about, before the Blue is even considered.

Metuchen, North Plainfield and South River – all with double-digit wins overall should also be in the main tournament. Coupled with Monroe and Edison, that’s five slots out of the remaining dozen, 13 overall.

The remaining teams at this stage would be the following, with seven slots to fill in the Championship Tournament:

• Red: South Brunswick (3-14)
• White: Sayreville (7-10), Perth Amboy (3-10), North Brunswick (2-12)
• Blue: Carteret (8-8), JFK (8-8) South Amboy (5-10), JP Stevens (5-13), Piscataway (5-11)
• Gold: East Brunswick Magnet (16-2), New Brunswick (10-2), Dunellen (11-6), Somerset Tech (6-6), Piscataway Magnet (8-8), Highland Park (3-12), Perth Amboy Magnet (3-11), Timothy Christian (0-11)

There’s probably room for East Brunswick Magnet to get in the Championship Tournament. Even if South Brunswick and Sayreville get in, that leaves five spots. Then let’s say you added Carteret at JFK, that’s three more spots.

We can’t see the 18- to 20-seeds in the GMC going to three-win teams or less from a division below the White, so that would eliminate Perth Amboy and North Brunswick.

That means the Tigers would have to battle South Amboy, JP Stevens and Piscataway for one of the last three slots. And we think they will get in over at least one, if not all three teams, and they could even go higher.

Make sure to follow Central Jersey Sports Radio on Twitter, as Mike Pavlichko will provide live updates from Friday’s 9 am seeding meeting, with a full story and brackets to follow!