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By Matt Hickman
Herald/Review
BISBEE — The Bisbee Copper Kings will host a seven-team tournament this weekend at Warren Ballpark and at the baseball field at Cochise College.
The first-annual Bisbee Copper Kings Invitational Baseball Tournament kicks off Friday with three games, none of them featuring the host team.
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The Braves, an adult baseball team from Tucson, take on the Garden of Gears, a Phoenix-based team that is part of the Pacific Southwest Baseball League of which the Copper Kings are rookie members in the first game of the tournament at 2 p.m. at Warren Ballpark.
Meanwhile at Cochise College, Nogales takes on the Tucson Nationals at 2 p.m. and in the nightcap, the Longhorns, who, like the Braves are an adult team from Tucson, take on the Casa Grande Cotton Kings at Warren Ballpark.
The Cotton Kings figure to be the favorites to win the tournament along with the host Copper Kings.
“I think this just shows credibility and it will bring a lot more people and teams to Bisbee and Warren Ballpark,” Copper Kings owner Tom Mosier said.
Tonight, fans of Bisbee baseball history can take advantage of a presentation put on by Mike Anderson and Tom Reardon about the history of baseball in Cochise County with an emphasis on Bisbee at the the Bisbee Senior Center starting at 7 p.m. The program will feature power point presentations of colorful stories about famous athletes who played at Warren Ballpark. For more information, call Christine Rhodes at 432-5836.
After this weekend’s tournament, the Copper Kings will have one more home series the following weekend against the Garden of Gears before the end-of-the-season tournament the following weekend at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix where the Kings will try to earn a spot to the National Baseball Congress National Tournament in Kansas.
“It’s been a little below what we wanted,” Mosier said of attendance figures at Warren Ballpark. “We’ve been up to 300 some games but Sunday afternoons haven’t been very good... We’ve learned a lot of things that we can do better next year.”
To qualify for the national tournament in Kansas, the Kings would only need to finish second in the Pac Southwest tournament because league-leading Lake Havasu already has an automatic berth in the tournament having won it last season.
This weekend’s tournament figures to be a preview of which team has the inside track to capturing that bid to Wichita.
