June 9, 2008: Of College Baseball

It is Sunday night. Game 2 of the NBA finals is being played as we speak. Am I watching? No. No I am not watching. Instead, I am sitting in the Reckling Park press box covering game two of the Rice-Texas A&M super regional. Of course, when I say covering, I use the term rather loosely. You see, while Rice does have one of the nicest press boxes you will ever see at a college baseball stadium (this is actually true and not just me being sarcastic), Reckling Park remains a college baseball stadium so even the best press box still only has room for a handful of people, namely real media with deadlines, the rest of us have been relegated to “overflow seating.” For me, that means sitting in the media hospitality area outside of the press box and luxury boxes with a host of other disgruntled media members watching the game on television. When I imagined how being a member of the press and covering a game would work (maybe I was naive to think that I would actually watch the event..). Making this particularly strange is that because I am watching the game on television, there is about a five second delay. So every time something happens, the crowd reacts to the play in real time, and then about five seconds later, we get to see what happened. This is generally pretty annoying, but I have parlayed it into twenty dollars by betting with my esteemed colleagues on what the crowds cheers are a reaction to (I make my money on Rice walks…). Anyway, I am generally pretty bitter that I am missing game two and I decided that I hate college baseball because of it. Since this is a totally irrational, I decided to do something of a cost benefit analysis to figure out if my hatred of college baseball is based on any sort of rational logic.

Cons

--PIIIING!!!! Unlike the pro game, college baseball players use aluminum bats. This sucks for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the painfully obnoxious sound that the bat makes on contact (so much for the “crack of the bat”). But beyond just being unpleasing to my ears, the metal bat influences virtually every single aspect of the game. Metal bats create cheap home runs and cheap hits. A good pitch in on the hands will break a wooden bat and create a weak grounder, but in the college game the bat won’t break and often what would have been a nubber to the third baseman turns into a bloop single. Along those same lines, would be weak fly balls often turn into home runs. Oh, and I almost left out that one of these days, a pitcher is going to be killed when he gets hit in the head with a line drive that comes smoking off of one of these metal tennis rackets that they hit with. I actually admire any pitcher willing to stand in the box and throw to a giant first baseman holding one of those sticks. I truly would be afraid to do it. I think that baseball should go back to wood bats regardless of level of play, but I understand why metal bats make sense from high school on down to tee ball (the kids are weaker, wood bats are often too heavy etc etc) but the arguments proponents of aluminum pose are not applicable to the college game any longer (if they ever were at all). Today’s college athletes are big and strong and absolutely can handle the wood stick. I don’t really know how the NCAA justifies allowing aluminum to itself, but someone is actually going to get killed and that’s a shame because anyone with half a brain can see that a change is needed right now for safety reasons. So why no change? The NCAA claims that wood bats are too expensive, but I don’t buy it since most major division one programs are sponsored by a bat maker like TPX (which is owned by Louisville Slugger) or Easton and get their bats for free. Thus I think the reason for the change lies more in the fact that the makers of aluminum bats make big money selling the bats that kids see in the college world series to high school and little league players. The college world series is the only major showcase of aluminum bats, and as a result the sponsors are understandably reluctant to allow for a change.

--The games are too long. Yesterdays game lasted almost four hours, and today’s is moving at a snails pace. This is largely a product of the fact that too many runs get scored, and this is largely a result of metal bats. But too long is too long. Also, I would like the score lines to look like baseball scores instead of football scores. But maybe that’s just me.

Pros

--The season is relatively short. Actually, its pretty long (over 50 games) but all but the most die hard college baseball fans (if those exist..) don’t start paying attention until the conference tournaments. I personally glance at the conference tournament brackets to see how Texas and Rice are positioned, read the papers for scores during the regionals, and apparently I know cover the super regionals. Omaha is always fun, particularly if Rice and Texas are involved.

--ESPN has a great College World Series Jingle which they have stuck with for as long as I can remember (“back home in Omaha”).

--Comically bad coaching. Get this. In the bottom of the 4^th inning, Texas A&M seized the lead and loaded the bases with two outs and their five hole hitter set to bat. Rather than let one of the best hitters on the team possibly bust the game wide open with a single (which would have scored two and given the Aggies a three run lead) or a double (which would probably have cleared the bases, giving them a four run lead) Aggie Coach Rob Childress called a triple steal, i.e. the Aggies tried to steal home. The play was surprisingly close, but the runner was thrown out at the plate ending the inning with the five hole hitter not having taken the bat off of his shoulder. Better yet, when I asked Childress about the call in the press conference, he actually defended the move as a “smart, aggressive baseball play.” I’m here to tell you that it was not a “smart baseball play” but rather one of the single stupidest moves I’ve ever seen. I practically expected Rice manager Wayne Graham to list Childress when he was naming players that came up big for his team.

--Rice is a power in college baseball. I like any sport where a school like Colgate (small, academic power traditionally awful at sports) can consistently compete for a national championship. Go Owls!

--College baseball is the only sport where players get drafted before the end of their season and the way that the major league baseball draft is set up, players can get drafted in multiple years if they don’t sign. I don’t know what intrigues me about this; I just think it’s interesting. 12 Rice players were selected in this year’s draft, and I suspect at least half of them will be back. But consider that right at the apex of the college baseball post season, these players find out where they were drafted. Can you imagine the various emotions that this must set off, with some knowing that they are about to make the big bucks while other teammates might be bitter because they didn’t get drafted at all.

I suppose college baseball really isn’t worth hating, and might even be worth following in the post season, even if you do have to listen to that awful PIIING. Where else can you see the “triple steal” attempted without the manager being fired immediately following the game?