Eh, that's stupid playoffs for you. It's a little weird that they come up with these not-very-representative playoff series in minor league ball. In the major leagues, sure, it's a bunch more money, but at the Saints' level the attendance plummets for playoffs. I supposed it still pays because you get these contests to win in your division, even if it is weak, and to get wild card slots -- boosting regular-season attendance.
I went to only a small fraction of the games this season. I did go to one of the games against the new team, Calgary. Another odd thing is that there were no home games against the other new team, Edmonton, this season. If you look on a map, you'll see that Calgary and Edmonton aren't even in the same general region of the continent as the rest of the league. (The nearest team is Winnipeg.) You have to take an airplane. I wonder how all those constraints get entered into whatever software the Northern League uses to generate schedules.
(Speaking of software, I've started using the Scheme Shell, scsh. So far, nice. I hate conventional shell programming (my shell of choice for that is zsh), and embedding a Unix shell in a Lisp is a great way to make it pleasant to write scripts. I do like functional programming, although my previous experience is with Caml, an ML dialect, rather than Lisp. I'm really looking forward to when scsh gets an interactive interface so you can use it as your login shell, although it will have to be pretty fancy for me to use it rather than zsh. They'll probably use GNU readline for the editing, and if so I'll probably stick with zsh.)
