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Storm's a Coming

There's a reason I don't do news. News makes me feel like I feel right now a lot of the time. Nonetheless, there's a story that's been making it's way around the periphery of the game for the last week or so that needs to be addressed.

As I've said before, for all that it's cussed and discussed, the NCAA is not really much of a centralized organization -- it's really just a collection of committees with a support staff attached. One of the consequences of this is that some of the rules don't really match up with what goes on in the real world, and as long as no one really cares, things just go on indefinitely.

One of the subjects that's covered in the official NCAA rule book is what constitutes an official game. It's not a particularly thrilling rule -- it's rule 5-8 in the rulebook if you want to go look -- as all it does is describe a baseball game. You know, nine innings and all that, with provisions for the home team winning and shortened games for weather and unsafe conditions. There are provisions for 7-inning doubleheaders in conference games or by mutual agreement, but that's the only real exception. There is a potential loophole, in that section 5-8b begins with, "It shall be a regulation game if called by the umpire at any time after five innings have been completed," and there's no further limitations in that section on why the umpire can call the game, but the language is unclear in that way that it gets when non-lawyers try to write like lawyers, so it's unlikely that this was intended to be an opening.

Custom in real life, of course, doesn't look all that much like this. Teams play games with mercy rules in place. Tournaments are scheduled (especially when the schedule gets compressed by rain) with 7-inning games. Teams play 7-inning games against two different teams (not defined as a doubleheader by the rules committee) on the same day. Whole conferences have getaway rules which allow Sunday games to be played with a travel curfew to accomodate travel cost constraints. All of this has gone on for decades and no one minded, because it was just the way things worked. This year, though, someone minded, or at least noticed -- an unnamed coach who was playing 9-inning games during a marathon Florida trip early in the season noticed other teams playing 7-inning games and inquired of the NCAA office whether this was legal. The answer was that it was not, and that schools should not report games that did not meet the legal definition.

This matter has already swept through Division II and Division III; the D1 schools are just starting to get wind of it. If this ruling is upheld, the results will be considerable -- my best estimate is that 300-400 games are at risk at this point of, in true Orwellian fashion, unhappening. Rice, for example, has three games at risk -- a 6-3 loss to Nebraska on 2/27 that was called due to the Huskers' travel arrangements after 8 innings, a 12-1 mercy rule win over Southern California on 3/5, and a 16-2 mercy rule win over Sam Houston State on 3/22. Not only would those games not be counted in tournament selection, the stats accumulated during them would be tossed out as well.

This is not yet a settled matter -- the baseball rules committee met yesterday (4/14) and has not yet issued a decision on the matter -- so it's still possible that they'll just issue warnings for this year and either enforce the rules or change them for next year. Nonetheless, it's a serious matter, and one that makes it well worth keeping an eye on the NCAA web site over the weekend for news.

Quick notes on the email from last week's column.

• Surprisingly few people took offense, which is a good sign of the intelligence of my readership. There's an awful lot of self-awareness out there.
• USC West doesn't really annoy anyone but UCLA fans, and they're too mellow to complain. Miami, on the other hand, annoys quite a few folks.
• LSU gets really mixed reviews -- LSU fans are generally considered to be really poorly behaved inside the stadium and really hospitable outside it, so they get some slack.
• Even some Texas fans dislike other Texas fans, and everyone else really dislikes them. They can use that, of course, as a motivator, but it's a fairly widespread phenomenon. I missed the parallel between Disch-Falk and Yankee Stadium, both slightly funky older stadiums that the fans treat as Holy Ground for some reason.
• Lots of folks are the Devil Rays. Oklahoma State used to be the Phillies, but they've mellowed. Either USC East or Clemson would be the Red Sox if the other had ever managed to win a title.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East         Miami, Florida   Coastal Carolina     Arkansas
A10                  Florida State    UC Irvine            Alabama
CAA                  North Carolina   Long Beach State     Auburn
Horizon              Georgia Tech     Cal State Fullerton  Vanderbilt
MAAC                 Clemson          Cal Poly             Tennessee
MAC                  Central Florida  Oregon State         Mississippi State
MEAC                 Texas            Stanford             Northwestern State
Ivy                  Texas A&M        Arizona State        Wichita State
Brigham Young        Nebraska         Washington           Evansville
NEC                  Texas Tech       Arizona              Rice
OVC                  Baylor           Southern California  Nevada
Patriot              Missouri         California           East Carolina
SWAC                 Texas Christian  Louisiana State      Tulane
Pepperdine           Illinois         Mississippi          Southern Mississippi
Oral Roberts         Rutgers          South Carolina       Coll. of Charleston
Louisiana-Lafayette  Winthrop         Florida              Georgia Southern

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

The Frega count is a correction based on an actual count.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Storm's a Coming

About the author, Boyd Nation