12/07/2022 - 17/07/2022

 

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European Baseball Championship Qualifier 2022 - Official Payoff

Men’s European Baseball Qualifiers by the view of WBSC Europe Baseball Commission

Men’s European Baseball Qualifiers by the view of WBSC Europe Baseball Commission
19/07/2022
Over the weekend, the three Qualifiers for the European Championship 2023 in Czechia finished. Qualifiers winners Hungary, France and Switzerland will fight at a play-off tournament early next year and only two of them will advance to the main tournament.

Report by the WBSC Europe Baseball Commission

WBSC Europe Baseball Technical Committee has decided about the system of qualification on its meeting in Zagreb in January. At that time, nobody thought about any war, we had Belarus involved in our schedule too.

We took into consideration several options, looking also at the possibilities of organizers who mostly have only one field so we could have involved only six or five teams. Number of countries that applied for a qualifier as well as our experience from past that not all the teams always arrive were also important facts for our decision.

At last we have decided about double qualification system and following rules:

  • 2 countries (France, Slovakia) have relegated from 2021 European Championship
  • 2 countries will advance to 2023 European Championship
  • 3 winners of 3 qualifiers (France, Switzerland, Hungary) in 2022 will play a play-off tournament in the first half of 2023 – only 2 of them will advance to European Championship
  • these 2 winners plus 14 other countries will make the total number of 16 participating teams
  • this rules will apply only if all qualifying teams can participate

Russia ended on the 9th place in 2021. We still have not decided about 2023 and time for the decision is getting shorter.

In 2022 tournaments have been played in three cities – Utena (Lithuania), Belgrade (Serbia) and Blagoevgrad (Bulgaria). We would like to thank to all tree organizers, especially their flexibility with all the schedule changes was very helpful. We also thank to umpires, technical commissioners and scorers. Their job is never easy and above that we are aware that they did not work there in the capacity they should have.

Most important is that we could have played.

Congratulations to France, Switzerland and Hungary, qualifying teams. Huge thanks to all other teams who did they best on the fields.

Petr Ditrich
WBSC Europe Baseball Vice President

Photo by Glenn Gervot