Nashua Mayor James Donchess chats with Silver Knights' Kyle Wolff after throwing out one of the ceremonial first pitches in Monday's holiday game at Holman Stadium. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

Here’s a few tids and bits as we move on from the Fourth and see the summer speed up to the start of training camp in less than three weeks, good grief:

– The state American Senior Legion tournament is at Holman beginning July 22, and two of the top teams could be Merrimack Post 98 and Nashua’s James E. Coffey Post #3. At mid-week, Merrimack was 9-2 atop District A and Nashua 9-1 atop District B.

It’s just too bad that the two teams weren’t scheduled to face each other during the season. Granted, the non-district games don’t count, but the two local rivals would always give each other good games.

“We just couldn’t get them on the schedule, Tim (Nashua manager Lunn) fills up his schedule pretty quick,” Merrimack manager Mike Henzley said. “In fact we had trouble getting a few non-district games this year.”

Let’s do it next summer, OK? Maybe they’ll square off in the tourney.

– If you’re looking for one play that may have changed the Nashua Silver Knights season, look no further than ESPN’s Sportscenter for the morning of June 29. That’s when the network’s Plays of the Night were shown, and one of them happened to be Knights reliever George Welch’s lucky snag of a hot liner back to the mound with men on base in a tight game vs. Worcester the night before. Welch has the trademark blue glove and Nashua embarked on, as of this writing, what was a seven-game win streak starting with that game.

– Speaking of playing each other, with the 119th New Hampshire State Amateur Golf Championship coming up this week, and James Pleat going in as the two-time defending champion and his Dad Phil, a three-time champ, also playing as usual, here’s the question:

Have the Pleats ever played each other in this event? The answer is no.

“We’ve had a couple of close calls I think,” James Pleat said. “I think once we were one spot away from playing each other. But no. We played in the Nashua Country Club Club Championship a few years ago in the finals. That was weird – I won – but it still felt very strange. We always said we never want to face each other in the State Am unless it was in the finals. A no-lose situation in that case. It would be fun.”

Yes, it sure would be.

– One of the biggest off-season topics in the FCBL is one we’ve brought up here before: three umpires per game instead of two.

It was three for a couple of seasons until this year, when financial constraints and the feeling two really good umps would be money better spent than two average and one below average forced the reduction to two per game.

Mistake, and you can tell FCBL commissioner Joe Paolucci agrees, knowing there are some tough calls away from the play that just don’t work.

“We’re going to talk a lot about it in the off-season,” Paolucci said with a smile. “We knew that going into it there’d be some blind spots, and some issues regarding that. We’re definitely going to consider (going back to three) in the off-season.”

Paolucci would have loved to do it sooner.

“I was actually floating the idea of going with three for the second half of the season,” he said. “But it’s kind of too late with the umpires being booked.

“I didn’t want to get into a situation where some games we’d have three and some games we wouldn’t. We’ll certainly talk about it for next year.”

– Still on the FCBL, the 3,254 that the Silver Knights had for Education Day likely won’t be seen in the attendance figures kept by the state company PointStreak on the league site.

“Pointstreak probably doesn’t allow us to do it for an exhibition or it would be kept as a separate number,” Paolucci said. “But I’ve been really happy with the attendance (league-wide).”

So the figures prior to this Thursday and Friday’s scheduled home games show Nashua with an average of 1,295 fans – third in the league behind New Britain (1,963) and Vermont (1,671).

But if you add in the number the team drew for its game with Brockton on June 8 – dubbed an exhibition because of the fun rules the players had to follow that students submitted – Nashua’s number goes up to 1,392, still good for third. We’ll add it in at season’s end.

– We told you in our on-line product what a success the July 4 Silver Knights game was and how it should become part of Nashua’s holiday tradition.

Hopefully it can be scheduled again next year – that would be a no-brainer. It showed what a partnership with the city and its major sports tenant can produce, an event in which you can truly say a good time was had by all.

Like we said earlier this week, a lot of the country values baseball on July 4. It’s time Nashua start doing the same.

– Speaking of which, who is the moron at Major League Baseball that scheduled an off-day on July 4 for the New York Yankees?

You don’t have one of your premiere franchises playing on the Fourth when the game is part of the festivities of the day? Really makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Tom King can be reached at tking@nashuatelegraph.com or on twitter@Telegraph_Tom K.