WSJ regains softball championship

The Wall Street Journal softball team won the New York Media Softball League on Saturday with a 6-5 victory in extra innings against WNYC.

The Journal had tied the game at five with an unearned run in the bottom of the seventh inning with two outs. The game then went to the 11th inning before the Journal scored the winning run.

Julie Wernau‘s grounder led to Mike Siconolfi scoring the winning run after a wild throw. The Journal had trailed 5-0 through 3 1/2 innings.

The Journal had won the league in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 and had finished second during the 2015 regular season. It lost in the 2014 championship game.

The High Times Bonghitters, which had finished first in the regular season with an 11-1 record and were the defending champions, were upset by WNYC by a 10-8 score in the semifinals earlier on Saturday. Bloomberg Businessweek had recently called the Bonghitters the Yankees of the league.

Meanwhile, the Journal, which had a 9-3 regular season record, defeated Forbes by a 9-2 score in its semifinal game. Forbes, which beat High Times for third place, had finished the regular season with a 7-5 record.

Institutional Investor, which won the title in 2013, finished the regular season 3-9 and did not make Saturday’s playoffs, which were held in Central Park.

The winner took home the highly-coveted Bloom Cup, named for the league’s founder and commissioner, Steve Bloom.

The NYMSL started in 2007. High Times won the first title, followed by BusinessWeek in 2008.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.