{"id":383745,"date":"2023-01-20T06:01:33","date_gmt":"2023-01-19T20:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=383745"},"modified":"2023-01-20T06:01:33","modified_gmt":"2023-01-19T20:01:33","slug":"santos-were-going-to-make-this-best-sbl-season-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/santos-were-going-to-make-this-best-sbl-season-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Santos: We\u2019re going to make this best SBL season ever"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
Saipan Baseball League held its managers and coaches meeting, headed by president Jay Santos, at the Gilbert C. Ada Gymnasium on Wednesday to discuss prospective team numbers in the 2023 SBL season in March. (LEIGH GASES)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You can now sing \u201cTake me out to the ball game\u201d and actually go to one this spring, as the Saipan Baseball League saw an interest from coaches and managers in bringing back baseball in March\u2014with SBL president Jay Santos saying that they will make it the best season ever.<\/p>\n

The meeting on Wednesday in the Northern Marianas Sports Association conference room at the Gilbert C. Ada Gymnasium was attended by SBL board members and prospective managers and coaches from teams such as the Falcons, Natives, GSM, Bears, Cardinals, Mariners, Comets, Jr. Nationals, D\u20199ers, and Blue Jays.<\/p>\n

With no finalized date yet for the start of the season in March and after he said that there will be no entrance fee this year for teams, Santos capped the teams off to 12.<\/p>\n

After the meeting, Santos disclosed that the SBL is a recipient of the grant from the Building Optimism, Opportunities, and Stability Together, or BOOST program, and that is why this time around, there will be no entrance fees for teams.<\/p>\n

As to what else the grant will be used for, Santos said that it will go toward operating costs, salaries, and also to send the CNMI U18 National Baseball Team to World Baseball and Softball Confederation tournaments around Asia, after the cancellation of their tournament in New Zealand last December.<\/p>\n

Santos said, \u201cThe money that we got is just great seed money. It\u2019s seed money that\u2019s not been available to SBL for a long, long time\u2026 It\u2019s going to be of great use and it\u2019s going to help us further develop the program.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re saving a large part of that money to be able to send them out because we feel horrible that we weren\u2019t able to make New Zealand happen. But we\u2019re hopeful that these guys can go to Korea, Japan, or somewhere in Asia and play a baseball tournament there against their peers. I\u2019m hoping to get an update from the other board member that\u2019s working on it. He\u2019s been tasked to find a tournament for the boys to play in because they\u2019ve worked very hard,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Despite much controversy with the BOOST program, Santos said \u201cwe\u2019re very thankful that we received it. And I assure the entire community that this board is going to make sure that that money is used right and it\u2019s going to be used to further develop baseball the best way that we can.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nSantos then said he was surprised at the turnout for the meeting, as he expected about only four or seven teams to show up, \u201cbut to have 10 teams come out and sign up, we\u2019re excited and we\u2019re going to make this the best season possible to kick off men\u2019s baseball here in the CNMI\u2014facilities wise, with food and beverage, and getting people out and enjoying the game. That\u2019s just our goal. And I\u2019m thankful that all the people that are interested came out.\u201d<\/p>\n

There will be a final meeting on Feb. 15 to discuss the game schedules, teams and roster, and the final rules and regulations of the season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can now sing \u201cTake me out to the ball game\u201d and actually go to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":383723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[731],"class_list":["post-383745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-sbl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}