CBB Column: Q and A for Jan. 13th

You know, if you’re going to represent yourself as an authority on college baseball, you ought to do enough research to avoid appearing foolish.

For example, in your January 13 Q&A column, you make two assertions which — to be very candid — demonstrate ignorance of the game

DRAFT & FOLLOW: You claim MLB’s new August 15 deadline to sign June drafts is an advantage to college coaches because a drafted player will now make his decision to sign or attend college “much further in advance of the season” than the first day of fall classes.
The August 15 deadline is a few days to a week or so before fall classes. You consider that difference a great advantage to a college coach? That’s absurd. Where does a Division I coach find a quality prospect to sign on August 15? Ask Rob Walton at Oral Roberts U how much an advantage that was to him this year.
By the way, most draft-and-follow players were chosen in the lower half of the draft. The clubs rarely made an effort to sign them before the school year. As often as not, those players received NO OFFER AT ALL from the drafting MLB club. The purpose of the D&F was to see how much the player developed during the year — and then decide whether to sign or decline him in May before losing rights in the next June draft. That process had nothing to do with a college losing the player in August or September.

MICHIGAN: You chose Michigan as your “dark horse” to win the College World Series this year. Why don’t you poll coaches in the last 5 or 10 CWS championship games. Ask them if a Big 10 team could win the CWS in the forseeable future. You’ll get a unanimous “No”. First, a team must play a strong schedule to have any decent chance of making the CWS. There were no Big 10 teams among the top 90 in 2008 strength of schedule — or in any other recent year. Second, an athletic program must invest in exceptional facilities to be a national power. No one in the Big 10 has.
The cold weather teams (Big 10 Big East, etc) can screw up the rest of college baseball schedules for the next 10 years. They still won’t be competitive. The sport has left them behing because they won’t make the necessary investment to compete. Thus, their chances of winning a national title are roughly equal to their chances of changing the weather.

If you want your blog to be taken seriously, you need to invest some serious thinking before sitting down at your keyboard. I would not write so bluntly if you had not developed a pattern of thoughtless comments over many months.

Since there were so many comments which referenced my first post, let me try to address them by category or writer….

Brian, the whole point of my criticism is you shouldn’t coment on the Draft & Follow issue until you’ve learned enough about it to comment intelligently. Your claim that you try to know more about the players & teams than about the MLB draft says a lot. The MLB draft, you see, IS important to college baseball. It has a lot to do with the talent which will be available to college teams, not to mention the impact the draft and college baseball have had on one another over the years.

DRAFT & COLLEGE RECRUITING — BullysRHman, thanks for your thoughtful and cogent posting. I would take exception to 3 points. First, Brian is not correct about the draft and, I’m sorry to say, neither are you. Your point was that college coaches come out ahead in the draft rule changes because the August 15 deadline still allows them to go get jr. college players. Hardly.
One of my duties as a community college asst. coach is placement of our players in 4-year schools. I’ve done it for 20 years. We had over a dozen players transfer on 4-year baseball scholarships this year. JuCo players are not signed as much early in the spring. Instead, the best scholarship opportunities for JuCo guys are from May through early July. That’s when nationally-competitive colleges’ coaches realize, “Gawd, I’ve GOT to find a weekend starter (or catcher or leadoff hitter, etc) and now! JuCo players who sign in this period usually receive much larger scholarships than high school seniors (top-10 rounders and those rare certain starters excepted).
Last year, all of my players has signed scholarships by early July. That’s pretty common from year to year.
There aren’t any quality junior college guys left by August 15. If the 4-year coach signs a freshman, it’s usually from an in-state JuCo. (That kid had better be awfully good, because by signing a JuCo’s freshman in August, the 4-year coach is probably burning his bridge with that JuCo for any future prospect.)

COLD WEATHER SCHOOLS — Brian claims Louisville and Missouri State (2008 & 2003 CWS participants) disprove my claims that cold weather schools will never compete for a CWS title. I wouldn’t call either of those a “cold weather school”. Even so, comparing Lousiville & MO State to the “northern” schools (let’s use BullysRHman’s term) proves my point. L’ville invested in a new facility with pro lights, field turf, a 30′ x 40′ scoreboard with live video, and full clubhouse & training/rehab facilities. MO State built an 8,000-seat facility with all the same amenities but artificial turf & scoreboard video. Michigan, on the other hand, plays in a park built in 1923. Their indoor practice facility is a metal building with a couple of batting cages. A metal building in a Michigan winter? Can you say FREEZING?

BullysRHman says it doesn’t make sense for northern schools to invest in quality basebal facilities. No problem — as long as they quit crying when they can’t compete because they won’t make the necessary investment.

Look, the northern schools’ problem is commitment and investment more than weather. Oregon State and Nebraska manage to do it in “northern” weather. In the meantime, U. Minnesota has fallen from a nationally-competitive baseball program to a nobody. They can’t blame the weather because they play in the Humphrey Dome.

BullysRHman says the RPI is unfair. OK, let’s look at Michigan. They were 46-14 last year. They were 25-6 in one of the nation’s weakest baseball conferences (Big 10). You can’t be blamed for your conference, you say. Well then, why didn’t they beef up their non-league schedule? Their non-league wins were against Villanova, Pitt, Mighty Toledo, Presbyterian (I thought that was a religeon. Is there a Bhuddist U?), Ball State, Oakland, IPFW (is that a union?), and several minor in-state teams. If they were truyl committed to get better, they could have played Tennessee or Vanderbilt or Louisville instead. The truth is they’d rather stay home and play the patsies because that’s the only way they could pad their schedule enough to get a regional bid.

Nothing casts this issue as clearly as the Big East/Big 10 pre-season tournament. All these schools (except Louisville and maybe Cincinnati) were leaders in the shortened-season movement. So, how do they demonstrate their commitment to becoming competitive? They rent Florida spring training facilities for a tournament in which THEY PLAY EACH OTHER!!!

No one — let’s be emphatic, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE — who’s serious about improving their game travels 1,500 miles to play Penn State or Northwestern, let alone Seton Hall or St. John’s or Connecticut. These schools bi*ch and moan about having to go on the road — and then they go on the road to play teams as unprepared as they are! Yessiree, that’s commitment.

While they’re in Florida, Michigan will also play Sienna, Akron, Wisconsin at Milwaukee and — be still my beating heart — Jacksonville. They end their pre-coference schedule with IPFW and Eastern Michigan. Goodness, that ought to prepare anyone for the College World Series!

Lets’s just call a spade a darn black shovel: The northern teams know they haven’t a prayer of becoming competitive with quality teams by improving themselves. That’s why they conned the NCAA bureaucrats into allowing them to “improve” by undermining everyone worse. If it damages college baseball, if it puts greater academic pressure on every college player…. Oh well.

Every time a coach has lost his competitive edge, he’s hopped on this “let’s make baseball less competitive so I can win” bandwagon. Look at Wichita State’s Gene Stephenson. When he couldn’t compete any more (he hasn’t won a regional in, what, 15 years now?), he became a big proponent of the shortened season. This is the same guy who holds the NCAA record for most games played in a season.

You don’t see the Pac 10 or SEC teams crying to the NCAA because they can’t compete for college hockey championships. Now that the Big 10 is no longer competitive in football, maybe they’ll petition the bureaucrats to force Florida and Texas and Southern Cal to play their first 6 games in Alaska.

THE TRANSFER RULE. I’d go BullysRHman one better: Every D-I baseball coach should certify the upcoming season’s scholarships in August. Any player who’s had his scholarship pulled or reduced would be elegible to transfer, and to play immediately.