Ohio Northern to be the No. 4 seed in the 2018 OAC Baseball Tournament
By Tim Glon
ADA — Ohio Northern will be the No. 4 seed in the 2018 OAC Baseball Tournament May 10-12 at Otterbein.
The Polar Bears will play top-seeded host Otterbein in the first game on Thursday with second-seeded Marietta and third-seeded Baldwin Wallace meeting in the second opening round contest on Thursday in the double-elimination tournament.
Game times will be announced soon.
Thursday's winners will face off in Game 3 on Friday with Thursday's losers following in an elimination game on Friday.
Friday's final game will be another elimination game between the Game 3 loser and the Game 4 winner.
The two teams remaining will face off on Saturday in the championship game with a Game 7 immediately following, if necessary.
Ohio Northern (27-13 overall) finished in a 3-way tie for third in the OAC regular season standings with Baldwin Wallace and Heidelberg with an 11-7 record.
The tiebreaker came down to run-differential with BW taking the No. 3 seed with a plus-44, ONU the No. 4 seed with a plus-18 and Heidelberg then finished fifth with a plus-16.
The OAC limits each team to a maximum of plus-7 for any single game when determining the run-differential for tiebreaking purposes.
Otterbein won the regular season crown with a 14-4 mark and Marietta was second at 12-6.
This marks the third time in the last five seasons that ONU finished in the top four in the OAC, but Northern missed out on the tournament each of the two previous times due to tiebreakers.