Division I Brackets Are Fully Loaded

Six teams that spent at least one week during the season ranked No. 1 in the Southland by The Times will compete for the Southern Section Division I baseball championship beginning Friday.

And five of them are in the same half of the playoff draw.

In all, 33 teams that survived the rigors of the regular season have qualified for the Division I playoffs, which have been thinned out and strengthened this season.

Top-seeded Riverside Poly, which finished with a 22-3 overall record and was unbeaten in Ivy League play, ended the regular season ranked No. 1 in the Southland by The Times. To reach the championship game, the Bears will fight it out with former No. 1 teams Newhall Hart, La Puente Bishop Amat, Chino and Anaheim Esperanza, with the latter two meeting in the first round Friday.

“There’s not going to be an easy game,” Riverside Poly Coach Aaron Moore said.

Second-seeded Simi Valley Royal (23-3) finished atop the eight-team Marmonte League and played even better in nonleague games, going 12-0. The only former top-ranked team in its draw is Serra League champion Santa Ana Mater Dei (19-8).

However, third-seeded Saugus (23-3), the Foothill League champion, is riding an 18-game winning streak.

And don’t forget the Orange County teams from the Century, Serra, South Coast and Sunset leagues, who spent the last two months beating up on each other.

“Look at our league,” Esperanza Coach Mike Curran said of the Sunset. “The three teams that made the playoffs went 19-8, 18-8 and 18-8.”

To make room for a seventh division and simultaneously provide competitive equity, the section’s six existing divisions were shaken up during the off-season. Removed from Division I were the Almont, Pacific View, Citrus Belt, San Andreas and Baseline leagues. Added were the Century, Foothill, Marmonte and Mountain View leagues, which wound up accounting for three of the four seeded teams.

Teams from the Marmonte League defeated those from the Century League in each of the last two Division II finals. Another Century League representative, Villa Park, won the prestigious Placentia El Dorado National Classic last season.

Foothill League qualifiers Hart and Valencia have been nationally ranked in recent seasons, and the Mountain View League features teams from the Inland Empire, location of the nation’s third-largest Pony League.

“I think the whole bracket is brutal,” said Curran, in his 25th season at Esperanza. “They took out all of the leagues they felt would not win a championship and put in all the leagues that have won a championship. Now, it’s a super division.”

Rob Wigod, a Southern Section assistant commissioner, said the baseball advisory committee looked at the playoff records of teams from each of the six divisions over the last two years, then moved up the more successful leagues and dropped the less successful.

“It made sense up and down the spectrum,” said Wigod, who emphasized that the primary goal of the committee wasn’t to create more powerful divisions but to thin out the six existing divisions by creating a seventh and to eliminate the need for more than three dozen wild-card games.

“Wild-card games in some sports do not have quite the effect they have in baseball, the only sport that has a limitation on how much a player can participate,” Wigod said in reference to the 30 outs or three appearances per week limit for pitchers.

Riverside Poly’s first-round game will be against La Verne Damien, which defeated Moreno Valley Valley View, 5-2, in eight innings Tuesday in the division’s only wild-card game. It was one of only 10 wild-card games across all divisions.

If the Bears win Friday, among the teams that could stand in the way of a championship-game appearance June 4 at Angel Stadium include Bishop Amat and Mission Viejo Capistrano Valley -- teams responsible for two of Riverside Poly’s three losses this season.

“That’s the first thing I noticed,” Moore said of the pairings.

The upper bracket’s other seeded team, No. 4 Norco (21-4-1), winner of the Mountain View League, plays host to Glendale Hoover on Friday.

If the Cougars advance, they will meet Esperanza, winner of this year’s National Classic title, or Chino, which defeated Norco, 8-7, March 15 in the Chino tournament.

“In Division I, there aren’t too many soft spots,” Norco Coach Gary Parcell said. “You’re going to have to beat a good team every game.”