2023 college baseball/softball thread

The B1G likes to hammer the drum of gender equity, so I'd guess the Women of Troy will be strongly urged to come up with a softball team fairly soon.

 

Only other team to win the title in the past 23 tournaments after losing its Omaha opener is South Carolina in 2010. The 2002 Gamecocks are the only other team in this span to make it to the last stage -- one-off championship game in 1999-2002 and the best-of-three championship series from 2002 onward -- after dropping the opener.
So by my math, 42 of the 92 teams (45.6%) to win their opener have survived the double-elimination bracket stage, but only 4 of 92 losers of openers (4.3%) have done so.

 

IDK, there's just no place near campus to shoehorn a stadium in. Plus I'm not sure USC wants a program so it can pay for 6-7 trips for 30 back to Big Ten land in March and April.

 

That travel thing works both ways; any B1G team with any delusions of competing on a nationwide basis in softball has to pluck a few players every year out of California so I suspect all the cold weather teams will be very happy to make a swing to La La Land every year, so my guess is the rest of the conference would love to have USC jump into the pool (at least for the first few years until they get it rolling) to give them extra excuses to make that swing.

As far as a playing site on the USC campus it's obviously not likely a new softball stadium can be carved out of the present territory but I think there are several community parks/rec areas in LA within a mile or two of campus I'd guess some kind of cooperative deal could be worked out -- USC uses a couple million of the sweet sweet B1G teevee money to build a DI caliber softball facility and the city of LA gets to use it for rec purposes several months out of the year.

 

This was worth staying up til midnight to watch via DVR.

 

Good points all. But if I'm USC, having Minnesota, Indiana and Iowa hounding me to spend $3 million a year for a softball program so they can recruit better in my back yard and so the tundra teams can have a warm place to play in March isn't exactly a selling point.

Softball is a huge sport in the Pac-12 and has been for decades. Yet somehow USC (and Wazzu) has survived just fine without it. Can't see that changing.

 

I hope he can get out of this CWS without injury. Can’t help but think of Kumar Rocker.

 

An inside the park homer and a pitcher having to be pulled because the head coach accidentally made too many mound visits. This ORU-Florida game has everything!

 

I'll be that guy -- it's a triple and an error. The kid dropped/fumbled picking up the ball. If it's clean that kid stops at third and if he doesn't he would have been dead at the plate.

 

Noticed something interesting in looking at rumors of SMU to the Pac Whatever: SMU does not have a baseball team.
Didn't know that, but when I thought about it, I thought to myself, "Ya know, I've never heard of SMU being in the NCAA tournament." One of only three Division I schools in Texas without baseball: UTEP and North Texas are the others.
One of only four private Southern Division I schools without baseball. Tulsa, Furman and Hampton are the others. Furman surprised me.

 

I was at Furman’s last baseball game, in March 2020.