God-awful baseball score -- no April Fools' joke needed

No, that's more humilating. If the other team can't stop you from hitting or scoring, that's their problem. Swing away, don't take extra bases, definitely no stealing, and don't hurt yourselves. That's all the winning team can do.

 

Quality.

The thing about that first inning play-by-play, when you read it, is that this was more than a simple mismatch of talent. You can be that much better than a team, and still some of those line drives wind up in the gloves of infielders.

This was a matter of everything finding a hole, too.

 

Eastern is a decent lower-tier D-I program. K-State is a mid-tier D-II program, which hasn't been good in a long time from what I was told when I covered the football and basketball teams.

 

That's kind of what I figured.

 

Then this is definitely not a gem in scheduling for EKU. It does them absolutely no good to pick up Ws over D-II programs.

Our D-II programs around here would not be caught dead playing a D-III school for that very reason. It means less than nothing on the resume.

In the same vein, a couple of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (D-II) schools would kill to play at Penn State. And PSU will never, ever, ever let that happen. Not in the Nits' best interest.

 

The gap between D-II and D-III is far wider than that between D-I, even low D-I, and D-II. No scholarships at all in D-III.

To me, a school like EKU scheduling a D-II is no worse than a school like LSU scheduling EKU. Of course, they shouldn't be scheduling BAD D-II schools, which KSU obviously is.

 

But if you are EKU, who do you schedule for mid-week non-conference games, particularly in an age when $100 in gas money for the team bus can get you dirty looks from the athletic department?

 

D1 is 11.7 scholarships, D2 is (or at least was) 9 scholarships. Not much of a difference there, and many of the mid-major D1 programs won't come close to the allowable total simply due to available money.

Kentucky State could well be a D2 baseball team in name only, with no scholarship money available.

 

I covered a 43-1 game once between the fourth-place team in the high school region I covered and the sixth-place team.

Of course, the sixth-place team was from the Indian Rez where they didn't start playing baseball til age 14 or 15, so that made sense ...

 

I would have shot myself at 12-1.

 

The big question is, were any hitters brushed back?