The growth and development of MAC baseball

BGSU33 · Post by **BGSU33** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 9:06 am

I'm really glad to hear about the change with the MAC Tournament. I hope the Chillicothe and MAC baseball communities embrace this event and help facilitate a working relationship to help this tournament flourish in its new home. I really like how the tournament field has expanded from six to eight teams. It still makes the regular season important to qualify for the event but it also allows more teams to compete and for more people to be interested in the tournament field. I also like the neutral site location, which is what many larger conferences are doing. Many larger conferences are also playing in minor league parks (some in AAA or AA). And in fact, the ACC will be playing in Jacksonville again this year before moving the tournament to Fenway Park in 2009!!! How cool is that for the teams that make the tournament field next season!

This stadium in Chillicothe is a nice facility to play in and it’s a reward for the players and coaches to compete in a nice facility during postseason play. The location obviously is closest to Ohio University, but it’s still not too far away for some other MAC schools such as BG, Miami, Akron, Kent State and Toledo. College baseball is growing and growing in popularity and competitiveness year after year. Many schools across the country are not only putting more of an emphasis in the sport, but are also building some fantastic on-campus facilities. Some schools in the MAC such as CMU, Ohio and Miami have already built some beautiful baseball facilities and I hope they serve as the model for which BG will follow. These new facilities are inviting to the student body and the local community. Some of them feature nice seating, grass hillsides down the lines so you can sit on blankets or the kids can play, locker rooms, upscale press boxes, indoor batting cages, nice bullpens, concessions with a concourse, landscaping, suite/donor boxes, etc.

I’m not saying MAC baseball is or will grow to the popularity of football or basketball, but it’s a sport in this conference that has a lot of potential to really take off in this conference. The winner of the MAC Tournament advances to an NCAA Regional which is a tremendous event. More and more games are being shown on television such as the ESPN networks and the NCAA Regionals, the Super Regionals and the College World Series are just fantastic. Oregon State, the defending back-to-back NCAA Tournament Champion, has proven that northern schools can not only compete but win on a national scale. Over recent years while OSU was making its push, they were playing in a very modest facility and had a very regional roster. But the university made the commitment to the program and the team responded and it’s huge for the growth of the sport of college baseball to see a team from way outside of the sun belt do what it has done.

I’d love to see BG make the commitment to our baseball program too. The potential is there, now it’s a matter of putting the pieces in place to make it a reality. We’ve done well for years with very little, and I have the hope and faith that our new administration will step up like they’ve done with football (recent renovations and additions), basketball (the new arena that is coming), hockey (upcoming renovations), tennis (new courts) and track (new upgrades) and put our baseball facility on the BG map.

factman · Post by **factman** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 9:45 am

I am glad to see someone else thinks this way!!!!!!!!!!!

+1,000,000

Falconfreak90 · Post by **Falconfreak90** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 11:50 am

I agree...the baseball facilities need to be improved a great deal. If CMU, OH and MU can do it, so can BG.

I dig college baseball...much more than MLB.

JoeFalcon · Post by **JoeFalcon** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 12:18 pm

Unless Rick Chryst invents a machine that controls the weather, I fear that MAC baseball and northern baseball in general will remain exactly where they presently stand in the food chain. You could build the Taj-Mahal at every northern D-I school and southern schools will still dominate. It doesn't alter the fundamental reasons as to why they're better.

Oregon State is a nice story and exception to the rule, but they're still in the Pac-10 and are more West Coast than north. Notre Dame rises up every now and then because of their national recruiting base, but even their own coach realized their limitations and made a lateral move to LSU last year.

Of course I'd love to see all programs at BG succeed and maximize their potential. For all the talk about facilities, the practice opportunities offered by our indoor field house are a nice luxury many other schools would like to enjoy.

factman · Post by **factman** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 3:03 pm

We have to do a lot, to just stay competitive with northern teams. I don't think anyone is thinking we will dominate nationally or be in the top 25 every year!

BGSU33 · Post by **BGSU33** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 10:43 pm

JoeFalcon wrote:Oregon State is a nice story and exception to the rule, but they're still in the Pac-10 and are more West Coast than north. Notre Dame rises up every now and then because of their national recruiting base, but even their own coach realized their limitations and made a lateral move to LSU last year.

Don't kid yourself about Oregon State, it's a northern school in collegiate baseball. Yes, Oregon State is in the Pac-10 and is on the West Coast, but in collegiate baseball, it’s considered a northern school. I was at Oregon State with Virginia for the 2005 Corvallis Regional in June, along with Ohio State and St. John's. It was cool, it was rainy, and it made Bowling Green, Ohio seem like Miami, Florida that week.

When I was the baseball SID at Virginia we hosted our first NCAA Regional in 2004. One of our biggest selling points for the selection committee was UVa’s consideration as a “northern school” in the selection committee’s mind. Charlottesville is very much a southern town and the entire Commonwealth of Virginia sits south of the Mason-Dixon line, but in college baseball, it’s a northern school as much as people hated to admit it there. Kentucky finds itself in a similar situation. In fact, while UK head coach John Cohen and his staff must battle with southern schools for recruits in the south, he has actually made a concerted effort to target northern players to come south to play there and has branched his recruiting efforts strongly into the Midwest nd has been very successful doing so. Other “northern” baseball powers like Nebraska and Notre Dame are able to use their geographic location to their advantage come NCAA Tournament Regional selection time. The NCAA Selection Committee wants to spread out the Regional sites as nationally as possible instead of all the bids being awarded to schools throughout the usual Southwestern and Southeastern hotbeds spots, particularly because of all the automatic qualifiers from the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest.

Prior to Oregon State’s back-to-back NCAA Tournament run, people told OSU head coach Pat Casey he could win anything big “up there” and that he was foolish for passing on other coaching opportunities. What OSU has done the past three years has been remarkable, going to the College World Series three consecutive years and winning it twice. Like Factman said, I don’t think anyone, including myself, is saying we can be or will be a Top-25 program in baseball. But we could certainly become a much bigger player in the state of Ohio, in the MAC and in the Midwest than we are now and what we’ve been during our past.

JoeFalcon · Post by **JoeFalcon** » Fri Apr 04, 2008 3:22 pm

BGSU33 wrote:The NCAA Selection Committee wants to spread out the Regional sites as nationally as possible instead of all the bids being awarded to schools throughout the usual Southwestern and Southeastern hotbeds spots, particularly because of all the automatic qualifiers from the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest.

It's definitely in their best interest to make overtures to the cold weather locales to combat the perception of college baseball as a merely regional sport like lacrosse. I'd love to see more Creightons and Oregon State's, but I don't envision the overall southern stranglehold over the sport being broken anytime soon.

BGSU33 · Post by **BGSU33** » Fri Apr 04, 2008 6:27 pm

JoeFalcon wrote:
BGSU33 wrote:The NCAA Selection Committee wants to spread out the Regional sites as nationally as possible instead of all the bids being awarded to schools throughout the usual Southwestern and Southeastern hotbeds spots, particularly because of all the automatic qualifiers from the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest.
It's definitely in their best interest to make overtures to the cold weather locales to combat the perception of college baseball as a merely regional sport like lacrosse. I'd love to see more Creightons and Oregon State's, but I don't envision the overall southern stranglehold over the sport being broken anytime soon.

There's no question collegiate baseball is in the "southern world" - both southeast and southwest. The rest of us just want to play in it. Unless global warming goes wild, or they move the season into the summer, Mother Nature will always have the upper hand in determining where most of the elite programs derive from.

Schadenfreude · Post by **Schadenfreude** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 7:43 am

BGSU33 wrote:When I was the baseball SID at Virginia we hosted our first NCAA Regional in 2004. One of our biggest selling points for the selection committee was UVa’s consideration as a “northern school” in the selection committee’s mind.

Ha.

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