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College Baseball 101 - The Season and Tournaments

Moved from diaries...

Second in a series of stories about College baseball and the KU Jayhawks.  Earlier entries:
KU Baseball Preview

There are roughly 300 NCAA Division I baseball teams.  There are at least that many more teams playing in lower level divisions, at NAIA and junior colleges.

NCAA Division I teams can schedule up to 56 games a year, although there are some ways around this restriction. For example, KU has been able to play 61 games each of the last two regular seasons because the NCAA gives teams exemptions who travel to Hawaii. These game start in February, and must be wrapped up in late May before the post-season tournament.  This means that teams play either four or five game most weeks, almost always playing three games from Friday-Sunday.  The large number of mid-week off-days has resulted in a pretty standardized use of starting pitchers in college.  Teams save their best three starters for the more important weekend series, and use fill-in pitchers for the less important weekday games.

Division I teams are limited to 11.7 scholarships per year, while each team carries about 25 players on their roster.  This means that it is pretty uncommon for any player to receive a full scholarship, most playing under partial coverage.  Some believe this shortage of scholarships has caused college baseball to become a predominately middle-class sport as promising players who come from less affluent backgrounds can often not afford to play college ball and also pay for half of their expenses.  Many players who are recruited by universities from these families instead sign minor league contracts with minimal bonus payments for financial reasons.  While I don't know if the shortage of scholarships is entirely to blame for this phenomenon, it certainly is true that there are a disproportionately small number of black and Hispanic players on college teams.  It seems to me that the baseball and NCAA community are very aware of this issue, but I don't know if they have developed any method to address it.

NCAA Div I teams normally wrap up their seasons with conference double elimination tournaments.  The Big-12 only allows the eight highest ranked teams to compete in the tournament.  After these tournaments the NCAA announces the post-season tournament field.

64 to 16 - Much like basketball 64 NCAA teams advance to the post-season.  About 30 of these teams are conference winners, the rest are at-large bids.  Only the first 16 teams are officially seeded, these are called "regional hosts."  The top eight teams are called "super regional hosts."  Each of the 16 "regional host" teams then hosts a weekend double elimination tournament on their home field.  Four teams are sent to each regional site, by the end of the weekend only one will emerge, thus narrowing the field from 64 to 16 in the span of a few days.  The tournaments are double elimination.  Teams which suffer early losses can recover, but must do so on the hard road, winning a double header on day two and defeating the winner bracket team consecutively on days 3 and 4.

16 to 8 - The 16 teams that emerge from the regional sites are paired up and sent to play a best-out-of-three series with another surviving team at one of the "super regional" locations, provided these top eight teams made it out of the first weekend of play.  The eight teams that emerge from this "super regional" round earn their way into the College World Series, played every year in Omaha.

8 to 1 - The College World Series is an eight team, tournament, normally lasting about two weekends.  Most of the tournament is broadcast on ESPN.

Teams which make it all the way to the CWS thus play about 70 games during the season.  Teams in the major conferences normally see 40 wins during the season as a mark of distinction and a strong indication that they will make the post-season tournament.  Last year KU went into the Big-12 tournament with a 38-23 record.  This put them on the bubble for the NCAA field, a situation the Jayhawks took care of by winning four games in four days to take the tournament championship and claim the automatic bid.  This was a hell of a weekend for KU baseball.

KU was sent to Corvallis Oregon for regional play and, after winning their first game vs. (#25) Hawaii, lost consecutive matches to the eventual CWS champs (#4) Oregon State Ducks and their rematch with Hawaii, ending their season June 4th with a 43-25 record.  While it was disappointing, just the fact that KU made the NCAA field for the first time in over a decade has be considered a positive indication of the growing strength of the program.  Another indication of this strength was the selection of six players in the following MLB draft, a school record.

The Jayhawks need to reload for 2007.  They must replace all three of  their weekend starting pitchers, their closer, their lead-off man and center fielder, their starting short-stop and their clean-up hitter.  In the next couple of weeks I'll write up more information about the college game and about the KU team as it moves towards the 2007 season, which opens on February 1st at Hawaii-Hilo.