[Elendil]

May 2017
The new league needed some heroes and some action if it was going to survive. It had the good fortune to get a little of both in its first two weeks of regular-season play.

There are few heroics in baseball quite like the walk-off hit. In just its second game, Concord got one from Erik Komatsu, a double going the opposite way that plated two and gave the Wild a come-from-behind, 4-3 win over the Humpbacks.

For full-game performances, it was hard to beat Nashua 3B Marquez Smith's 5-for-6 with a base on balls day, helping the Silver Knights to a 7-5 victory in 13 innings in Plattsburgh. Plattsburgh got their revenge the next day, though, crushing the Silver Knights 14-0 behind Joe Gandy's excellent, eight-inning pitching performance.

Even the weather cooperated those first two weeks; it was warm and dry, and the crowds came out.

The first pitcher to toss a complete-game shutout was Mickey Storey of the Old Orchard Beach Surge, who shut down the home Humpbacks on three hits and a walk on May 26.

The paucity of home runs relative to MLB (and abundance of doubles and triples) didn't keep scoring down too much, but it did make the games more exciting, because there were fewer blowouts. Any time you got some late-inning tension, that was good baseball, whether the home team won or lost. There were an abundance of one- and two-run games, as well as extra-innings affairs.

At the end of May, the standings looked like this:

East Division
Concord 9-3
Bangor 6-6
Old Orchard Beach 6-6
Seacoast 6-6

West Division
Plattsburgh 9-3
Nashua 6-6
Rutland 3-9
Upper Valley 3-9

In the early going, the East was looking better than the West, and there were some early warning signs for the small-market Rutland and Upper Valley clubs.

But bigger threats began to materialize on the first of June, when two things happened. First, the Concord Wild sold the contract of their best player, Mike O'Neill, to the Boston Red Sox. He'd been hitting .396/.482/.500, and after being bought was assigned just up the road to Portland. If teams started getting rid of their best players, how would the league ever build up fan loyalty? Was the league simply going to deteriorate into a player-flipping scheme, a training league for MLB?

The other big happening, although it didn't seem so big at the time, was the desertion of 26-year-old Concord Wild reserve roster center fielder Brandon Magee. Magee didn't want to wait around for an injury to have a shot at playing in the GWL. The whole reason pros from around the country came to play in New England was to, well, play. If they didn't get playing time, they couldn't get a major-league contract.

GWL players did have a non-compete clause in their contracts, and so Magee couldn't sign with another professional organization after skipping out on the scrimmage squad. But he could go back home and work in another field while he continued to work out and eventually try again next year. It seemed unlikely that many non-local guys would continue to stick around if they weren't given playing time. And if that happened, the quality of the league's play would fall as the season progressed and injuries took their toll on active rosters.