SWL 2026 Regular Season Wrap & Postseason Preview
Fourteen weeks. Seventy-two games. A perfect season, a triple crown, and two seeding ties that had to be settled by run differential. Before the bracket takes over everything, three teams whose seasons end here deserve a proper thank-you.
So before we get to the playoffs, let's get to them.
To the Teams Whose Seasons End Here
Caught Cooking
Every league needs a team that shows up with a full roster, plays every game hard, and makes the contenders sweat. Caught Cooking was that team all season, and one man is the biggest reason why: Will Hippe led the entire league with 88 strikeouts, twenty-five clear of the field, across a league-high 44⅓ innings. Eight starts, eight complete games, and week after week he made good lineups look ordinary. He beat the playoff-bound Stops 3–1 on a 15-strikeout complete game, struck out 16 in a 1–0 heartbreaker against the Juice, and closed the year with 13 more in his final start. That's the kind of stuff that wins postseason games. Every playoff lineup should be glad he's watching from the bleachers.
The bats did their part too. Chris Bell hit .382 and was one of the toughest outs in the league to actually record. Dan Hanower hit .341, gave the staff steady innings behind Hippe, and earned the Week 14 win. Brian Penserini brought the thump with 3 home runs, Max Randolph drove in 13, and Jake Chitlik, James McAfee, and Travis Lavenski showed up ready every single Sunday. The record won't show it, but this team was a week-in, week-out problem.
Chicken 'n' Wiffles
If you watched the Wiffles in May and again in August, you saw two different teams. This group got better every week, and they never once mailed in a Sunday. Matt Pearson played all 16 games and hit .464 with a 123 wRC+, a genuinely excellent offensive season. Noah Purcell hit .467 with a .619 on-base percentage while also leading the staff in strikeouts, a true two-way workload he carried with pride all year.
And the improvement story of the season might belong to Aidan Rand. Watch his at-bats from early in the year against his last month: the plate discipline, the contact, the confidence. Completely different player, and the same story in the field, where he turned into a pair of palms his pitchers trusted. That's what a season of showing up and doing the work looks like, and it's the kind of trajectory that makes next year exciting. Liam Munro led the staff in innings and drove in 13, Mack Smith hit .545 in a two-game cameo that people will still be talking about at the draft, and Shellie Raleigh and Jesse Pearson kept the roster whole through fourteen weeks. They also beat West Coast Washout, a playoff team, head-to-head in Week 12. The arrow points up.
Berserkers
The Berserkers embodied what this league is about: come out every Sunday, get better, and finish strong. And did they ever finish: a 7–4 win over Caught Cooking on the final day, behind a complete game from Trey Gagnier, one of only two Berserkers to play all 16 games. And speaking of Gagnier: quietly, over the course of the season, he developed one of the sweetest swings on the team. The .321 average and the home run weren't accidents. That's a rebuilt swing paying off in real time, and his final-Sunday complete-game win was the perfect capstone.
Wallace Tillman led the way at the plate all year (.413, 2 HR, 14 RBI) and closed with a four-RBI homer in the finale. Matthew Bennett matched the 14 RBI with 3 home runs and took the ball six times without ever backing down. Conner Iverson hit .429 across ten games. And, lest anyone forget, he went back-to-back as In-Season Tournament champion with his win at the July 19 tournament, cementing his status as the league's reigning king of tournament day. Greg Markles never missed a game all season, and Tim McLaughlin and Jason Clark filled in wherever needed. Two wins doesn't capture a team that improved every month and won its last game. That's a foundation.
The Bracket
Six teams remain, and every playoff matchup is a three-game series, all played in a single Sunday, which changes everything about how these rosters line up. Depth matters now. Both mound positions matter. And here's the wrinkle every captain is already gaming out: the pitchers from games one and two are both eligible to come back in game three. A winner-take-all finale doesn't have to go to a third starter. It can turn into a tired-arm chess match, both aces back on the mound with an afternoon of pitches already in their shoulders.
Two seeding ties had to be broken by run differential, and both broke the same way twice: 100% Real Juice (+65) finished comfortably ahead of Sheryl Crows (+48) for the second first-round bye, and Swingdome (+75) took the 4-seed over Bilabial Stops (+35). The wildcard round is August 16, the divisional round (with a reseed) is August 23, and the Leaning Golden Man is handed out August 30.
Wildcard: #6 West Coast Washout @ #3 Sheryl Crows
The Crows' pitching plan is the story of this series. Sheryl Crows allowed the fourth-fewest runs in the league, and in a three-game format their staff sets up beautifully. Evan Gray (6–1, 2.06 ERA, 49 K in 29⅓ IP) and Drew Helgren are the two primary back-mound arms, giving the Crows two distinct looks from deep, while Connor Donovan (a perfect 5–0 with a 3.33 ERA and just 9 walks all season) pounds the zone and dares you to beat him. How they sequence Gray, Helgren, and Donovan across three games, and which of the first two arms they bring back if it reaches a decider, is the most interesting strategic question of the round.
And then there's the wildcard within the wildcard: Jeff Hanschmann. The offseason acquisition has been everything the Crows hoped for at the plate: .477, 8 home runs (second in the league), 25 RBI, and a scorching 3-homer Week 14. But here's the thing: Hanschmann is known around the league as a strong back-mound pitcher, and all three of his appearances this season came from the front. Whether that's circumstance or something being held in reserve, nobody knows. If he takes the back mound in this postseason, the Crows' rotation at full strength becomes a different animal entirely. John Trupin (.436), Grant Bronsdon, and Harry Page-Salisbury round out a lineup with no easy third of the order.
The Washout's path runs through Tony Nipert: .462, 4 homers, a .323 ISO, and the one bat in this lineup that flips a game with one swing. Andy Cahill (1.224 OPS) and Andrew Winter (16 walks) grind at-bats, and Michael Laudick brings real swing-and-miss (59 strikeouts, tied for fifth in the league) that plays up in a short series if the ball starts finding palms behind him. And WCW enters with a real scalp on the wall: they beat 100% Real Juice, the 2-seed, 9–8 back in June. A game-one ambush is live.
What decides it: whether WCW can extend innings against a staff that doesn't give away bases. In a three-game series the Crows' depth is a real advantage, but they have to solve Nipert three times.
Hitter to avoid: Hanschmann. Nothing over the plate with runners on. For the Crows: Nipert, same instructions.
Wildcard: #5 Bilabial Stops @ #4 Swingdome
The true coin flip, the best style clash of the round, and, over three games, a chess match about mound assignments.
Swingdome's rotation question is really an answer. They're the one wildcard team with three legitimate starters, and the three couldn't be more different. Jim Froio (5–2, 4.74 ERA, 40 K, just 8 walks in 34⅔ innings) is the front-mound deception-and-control artist. Behind him, the recently eligible Alex Hatch and Nick Ludwig (59 K, tied for fifth in the league) are both power lefties from the back mound. Hatch's last appearance was 5 innings of one-run ball against Wiffle House, which is not a thing that happens to anyone. That's the fewest runs anyone hung on that offense all year, and it produced the closest game Wiffle House played all season: a 1–0 escape on the final Sunday. Front-mound finesse, back-mound power, three games: Swingdome can show the Stops a different pitcher every game, and still have their first two arms eligible to come back if it reaches a decider. The lineup holds up its end: Quinn MacWatters hit .600 with 27 RBI, Steve McGinley hit .578 with 5 homers, and Froio hit .518 while anchoring the rotation all season.
The Stops' bullpen is unpredictable, and that might be the point. The bats are not in question: second in team OPS (1.286), second in homers (27), and a 31–2 combined final Sunday. Eddie Brown just finished as the league's most productive hitter per plate appearance (.632, 6 HR, 27 RBI, and a league-best 211 wRC+), Sam Matterazzo (.556, 5 HR, 30 RBI, plus 55 strikeouts on the mound) is the two-way engine coming off a 12-RBI, 12-K-shutout week, and Paul Rogers (.413 with a .522 ISO), Jose (Jose) (.452), and Gideon Manahan (4 HR) mean the lineup never exhales.
The mystery is the mound. Eddie Brown has made most of his appearances from the front this season, but everybody in the league knows he's an excellent back-mound pitcher, and if he's been sandbagging, a playoff series is exactly when you'd find out. A back-mound Eddie changes the math of this entire series. Rogers has historically been a very good back pitcher himself but hasn't thrown this year while working back from injury, one of the great what-ifs of the Stops' season. And the offseason acquisition of Max Melendez has given them a genuinely solid additional arm (23 K in his innings, and 2–0 in decisions). Between Brown, Matterazzo, Melendez, and the ghost of Rogers' arm, opponents simply do not know what's coming. In a three-game series, that's its own kind of weapon.
What decides it: free bases against patience. Swingdome's staff walked just 53 batters all season and their lineup drew 85; the Stops' arms were more generous with 127. If Matterazzo and company live in the zone, the stuff plays. If not, Swingdome will wait them out.
Pitching matchup to watch: whichever game pits Hatch's back-mound power against the top of the Stops' order. And keep one eye on the bullpen doors for Eddie.
Hitters to avoid: Brown for Swingdome; MacWatters for the Stops.
The Byes
#1 Wiffle House (16–0). A perfect regular season for the third year in a row (16–0 in 2024, 18–0 in 2025, and now 16–0 again). Wiffle House has not lost a game of any kind since Game 1 of the 2024 World Series, and the last two regular seasons have been swallowed by that streak whole. This year's version read like a typo: 198 runs scored, 16 allowed — and no opponent scored more than four in any game all year. The Thomas brothers split the pitching identically: Sam and Phillip each went 8–0 with a 1.20 ERA and 63 strikeouts, all sixteen starts complete games. Sam's season deserves its own sentence: 15 walks in 40 innings from the back mound, a level of accuracy that's genuinely hard to comprehend from back there, attached to a lefty release that hitters never seemed to pick up. His Week 14 finale was a 10-K shutout with zero walks. And Phillip made history: .651, 10 HR, 51 RBI — the first triple crown in league history. Around them, Reed McFeely hit .592, Azor Cole scored 40 runs, Liam McFeely drove in 26 in ten games, and Dustin Diemond hit .491 as arguably the sixth option. They await the lowest remaining seed on August 23.
One asterisk on the coronation, and the author will simply report the facts: Eddie Brown finished the season at a 211.3 wRC+, edging Phillip Thomas's 210.7 by six-tenths of a point, powered by a three-homer explosion in his final appearance. First triple crown in league history, second-best wRC+ on the leaderboard, beaten by a rounding error. I'm not mad about it. This is me, not being mad about it.
#2 100% Real Juice (11–5). The other bye, and the most stylistically distinct contender in the field. The Juice hit four doubles as a team all season — not a typo — and zero triples. Their offense is singles, walks, and the occasional ambush homer, led by Aaron Hunter, whose .582 average came on 32 hits, 31 of them singles. It works because the pitching is real: Hunter (7–1, 2.59 ERA, 63 K, tied for second in the league) and Epo Olivares (3.55 ERA, plus a .524 average at the plate) anchor the league's second-best team ERA (4.32), with Adam Brickett (31 K in 18⅓ innings) as a legitimate third arm for a three-game set. Zak Kosher (20 RBI) and Chris Balph (3 HR) drive the runs home. They await the highest remaining wildcard seed. If that's Sheryl Crows, we get a rematch of the Week 4 series that produced a 1–0 classic.
The Stakes
The Leaning Golden Man goes home with somebody on August 30. The honest read: five teams are playing for the right to take a series off a team that hasn't lost a game since Game 1 of the 2024 World Series. And notably, the last team to beat them won that game and still lost the series. But a three-game series is its own universe. One hot back-mound arm, one ambush inning, one Hanschmann or Hatch or Eddie-from-the-back plot twist, and everything changes.
Somebody has to beat Wiffle House. The bracket exists to find out who gets the chance to try.
@seattlewiffle | 2026 Season
