The Australian Baseball League’s semifinal series opened today in the capital city of Canberra.
The host and defending champion, the Canberra Calvary, was defeated by the Sydney Blue Sox 18-11 in the first match of the postseason.
The Perth Heat awaits the winner of the ABL seminfal and has already qualified for the ABL Championship Series by finishing atop the regular season standings.
The ABL, which is overseen by Baseball Australia in partnership with Major League Baseball, opened in 2010, is in its 4th year and features six clubs: Adelaide Bite, Brisbane Bandits, Canberra, Melbourne Aces, Perth and Sydney.
The ABL champion automatically qualifies to the annual IBAF-sanctioned Asia Series between the league champions of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL), Confederation of European Baseball (CEB), Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), who are all IBAF members.
In the 2013 Asia Series last November, Canberra defeated CPBL’s Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions to become the first-ever ABL representative to capture the Asia Series title.
