Greenjackets have great year-fail to make postseason

 For the second-consecutive year, the Augusta Greenjackets finished with the best overall record (79-59) in the South Atlantic League’s Southern Division and for the second-consecutive season failed to make the league’s playoffs.  Like eight other minor league systems, the South Atlantic League uses a split-season format in which division leaders from the first and second half advance to the league’s playoffs. The Greenjackets finished second in the first half of the season with a 41-29 mark, one game behind Savannah; then finished 38-30, good for a third-place finish, 2.5 games behind Greenville in the season’s second half.
 Despite failing to make the postseason, Greenjackets’ General Manager Nick Brown, who was recently named the South Atlantic League’s General Manager of the Year, was pleased with his team’s performance.
 "We're all really proud of the way the GreenJackets played hard this season and finished with the best overall record in the Southern Division," Brown said in an e-mail. "The success of the team on the field was one of the reasons we were able to set a new single-season attendance record this year for the third time in the last four years."  Having been through it all before, Brown and the team knew what they had to accomplish to make it to the league playoffs.
 "Many minor leagues opt to have a split-season format during the regular season and going into it, we all know the pluses and minuses of it," Brown said. "The good thing is that more teams have a chance to contend for longer in the season while the downside is that occasionally situations happen like what happened to the GreenJackets in the last two years where the team with the best overall record doesn't qualify for the postseason."
 The split-season playoff is used for competitive balance explained South Atlantic League President Eric Krupa.
 "Typically, clubs in the SAL experience a number of roster changes in the middle of June," Krupa said. "The reasons for this include the amateur draft in early June, rosters for all of the Minor League affiliates tend to change as the short-season league begin play (in mid-June) and decisions are made about whether to promote, demote, or release players at other levels. From a competitive standpoint, it makes sense to reset the standings and begin with zero wins and zero losses for the second half of the season."