With 85 of the top teams in the United States, Canada and Latin America all coming together for one weekend of baseball, the challenge of ranking the teams and picking an eventual champion is an intimidating one.
So to dodge that responsibility, we’ve broken up the field into what we see as the top 30 championship contenders, put them into three categories and listed the teams in alpha order within the categories.
The Top Contenders are those teams that are coming to Jupiter with the expectation that they can and should win if everything goes well. A trio of them, defending champion ABD, two-time champion East Cobb and Midland have won before. Present and future Aflac All-Americans dot these rosters and they come with deep pitching staffs that can withstand the need to play eight games in four days.
The Hopefuls are the teams that realistically expect to cruise through pool play and potentially get deep into t