The Road to Omaha: 2018 College Baseball Thread

Probably not more than 2,500. Its stadium has a listed capacity of 2,200.

 

Duke's first 15 innings at the Athens Regional: One run
Duke's last 31 innings at the Athens Regional: 46 runs, 28 of which were scored in the seventh inning or later.
Baseball makes no sense sometimes.

 

Well after watching LSU get absolutely destroyed this weekend I can think of one. But UW probably was better served being sent back east to an easier regional. ;->

Interesting note: Since 2006, the Pac-12 and SEC are almost dead-even at the CWS:

Pac-12/SEC National Titles:
Oregon State 2
South Carolina 2
Arizona 1
Florida 1
Louisiana State 1
UCLA 1
Vanderbilt 1

SEC 5, Pac-12 4.

Pac-12/SEC Final Four Finishes 2006 to present:
Oregon State 4
Florida 3
South Carolina 3
Vanderbilt 3
Arizona 2
Arkansas 2
Louisiana State 2
UCLA 2
Arizona State 1
Georgia 1
Mississippi 1
Mississippi State 1
Stanford 1

Pac-12 10, SEC 16.

SEC has about 40% more teams that play baseball (14 to 11), all in warm-weather sites, and gets to host far more regionals, which are so important to advancing, that's about even.

I'm biased but it's pretty amazing OSU has as many national titles, and more Final Four finishes, than any team in college baseball over the past 11 years. OSU has five CWS appearances since 2005 inclusive; all the other cold-weather programs in the country have combined for just four (Nebraska, Kent State, Stony Brook, Indiana).

 

This could end up being both a great and terrible day for the SEC.
Georgia shits the bed and loses twice at home to get eliminated. Florida lost to Florida Atlantic and now needs to play a winner-take-all game later tonight. Ole Miss got its ass kicked by Tennessee Tech this afternoon and is struggling in the elimination rematch. The conference's three best teams might be eliminated by the end of the night, while four of its mid-pack teams (Auburn, Vanderbilt, Mississippi State and South Carolina) advance.

 

Fastest way to go broke known to man is to bet baseball. And that's the bigs, not 20-year old and under baseball with metal bats.

 

It is amazing, especially considering they didn't have any baseball tradition to speak of before 2005. Pat Casey was there 10 years before they even won a conference championship. Then they come out of nowhere to reach the CWS in 2005, win it back-to-back the two years after that, and become a perennial contender built out of whole cloth.
Unlike some states in the SEC, where there's a great baseball culture and kids aspire to play college baseball, or places in California where there's an abundance of talent, I don't think Oregon was a real hotbed for the game at the high school and college level, either. That he was able to not just have that initial success, but parlay it into lasting success, is remarkable.

 

Is the SEC tournament a double-elimination thing? That's insane a week before regionals.

 

Conference tournaments in general are absurd. If you're the coach of a team that is clearly in the field, you might just want to put in your two games as ordered by league bylaws and rest the arms.

 

Playing the outcomes is a good way to do it I suppose.

I guess my thing is this. We say, "This team should've been higher." And then we grab interesting, sort of impressive sounding facts. But they're always squishy and weird. This team was ALMOST a champ, but it actually was a third-place team. This league is undervalued, but we don't exactly measure how or why (and there's gotta be a mathematical reason). But I can't apply the almost champ metric everywhere, nor can I seem to quantify why a league in question isn't getting the "respect" it deserves.

Now I'm no great fan of RPI (though I lack a good college baseball metric to replace it with) and I get that there are some curiosities in the selection process. But I'm not sure why a 30-23 team that was pretty inconsistent should get the benefit of the doubt unless it's applied to everyone, which just means you come back to them being a 3 seed.

 

Sort of.

Twelve teams make the field. Five through 12 play four single-elimination games on the first day. The survivors play double elimination with the top 4 until four remain, and then it goes back to single elimination.

 

A quarter to 1 in Gainesville and they're still playing.

 

Seeds 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16 gone before Supers. That's half the national seeds. Wow.

At least two unseeded teams certain to reach CWS.