College baseball needs overhaul
When Florida State and Ohio State hook up and the final score is 37-6, you’d think it was a football game.
Not so. Florida State beat Ohio State 37-6 on Sunday in baseball. The Seminoles led 8-0 after the first inning, 20-0 after the third and 32-0 after the fifth. It was ridiculous.
And that wasn’t the only out of whack score that came out of the first weekend of the NCAA baseball tournament. Clemson beat Oklahoma State 15-1. Arkansas beat Oklahoma 17-6, then beat the Sooners again 11-0. There were other crazy scores — 12-1, 16-5, 16-3.
You can understand a baseball game getting out of hand every now and then, but these are NCAA tournament games. These are supposed to be games between the best teams in college baseball. You wouldn’t know it by the scores.
Is it any wonder that college baseball isn’t nearly as relevant as college football and college basketball? The number of truly good teams is a small group, maybe 30 or so. There just isn’t enough pitching to go around, and with the aluminum bats, that lack of pitching gets exposed and the scores get all out of whack.
So, it’s time for a change. The NCAA baseball tournament needs to shrink. Reduce the number of teams in the field from 64 to 48. Eliminate the 16 four-team regionals that feed into super regionals and go with eight six-team regionals.
That’s how the baseball tournament used to be, and considering how things have gone this year, it would fix many of these out-of-whack scores.
And while the NCAA is at it, it might as well make one other change to the tournament. Add the mercy rule. It’s used during the regular season, and while conferences have their own rules regarding it — the Big 12, for example, says if a team is leading by 10 or more runs after seven innings, the game is over — the NCAA could adopt its own standards. Up 15 runs after five innings or 10 after seven seems appropriate.
College baseball must make some changes if it ever wants to be more relevant. It will never reach the heights that football and basketball have reached, but it could help itself in a big way if it just tweaked a few rules.
Otherwise, we’re only going to see more blowout games, and really, unless Florida State and Ohio State are battling it out on the gridiron, no one wants to see either of them win by 31.
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How would reducing the number of teams in any way affect the outcome of games?!?!
As far as the mercy rule, what would you say to the teams that want a chance to come back after 5 innings? I’m sure somewhere in the history of the sport, someone has scored more then 15 runs in 4 innings…oh wait, it happened yesterday.
you just admitted in a video report that you know absolutely nothing about college baseball…so why are you pretending to have any clue on tyo what needs to be fixed about it!?