Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Celebrating the Good

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Celebrating the Good

I started this last year, and I think I'm going to try to make it a tradition -- this week to close out the season I want to talk about the best stories of the year, the things that made me happy or interested. In no particular order:

• East Carolina runs off the nation's second-longest winning streak at 19 games. Georgia Tech had a longer streak against tougher competition, but the ECU streak pleases me because of their recent hardship with Keith LeClair's illness; it's good to see Randy Mazey putting his stamp on the team.

• Cal State Fullerton revives. On April 3, this team was sitting at 15-16 and facing the possibility of a sweep by Long Beach State. Since that time, they're 30-6, and tomorrow night they play for the national title. One of the things I'm working on for the offseason is a measure called Season Similarity Scores, designed to show how similar two teams have been over the first fifty games of their season in hopes of predicting how they'll do the rest of the way out. One early result I can give you is that no one's had a season at all like this one for Fullerton in the recent past.

• Jered Weaver puts up Prior-like numbers. OK, it's only been three years since Mark Prior's historic 2001 season, but it seems reasonable at this point to use it as a measuring stick. Weaver was very close to that level over most of this season against much of the same competition; only the one bad outing against Miami tainted an almost perfect year.

• Jacksonville reliever Ashley Roque pulls a woman from a burning car. The full range of human behavior can be found in our little community, and this was the best of us.

• Newcomers to Division I continue to enrich the game. UC Irvine, in their third year back in D1, flirted with the top 10 all year. UC Riverside had another solid year and should have been in the tournament. Birmingham-Southern ran away with the Big South. Dallas Baptist, not even really in D1 yet, managed wins over TCU, Texas-Arlington, Oklahoma State, Fresno State, and Baylor.

• Arizona State schedules their way to a #3 RPI and a national #1 seed. This will probably end up being the story with the biggest impact on the game in the long term. The team was slightly better than recent models but not much; the difference in their RPI compared to past seasons is almost all due to replacing series against Western powers with series against Florida State, East Carolina, and Tulane. One would assume that other Western schools will follow suit.

• Washington joins the ranks of the national elite. They still have RPI problems, but Washington spent most of the year in the ISR top 10 and finished second in the Pac 10, joining the ranks of top schools thriving under difficult circumstances.

• Perennial doormat Vanderbilt makes a run at the SEC title and wins a regional. Powered by top prospect Jeremy Sowers and a stingy defense, the Commodores may drop a bit next year but appear to be doing things the right way to build a solid program.

• Texas Southern pulls off what could be the biggest upset in college baseball history, beating Rice 4-3 in the opening game of their regional. I always want to see the best teams in Omaha, but there's something appealing about the thought of a school with the lack of resources faced by Texas Southern knocking off their big-name crosstown rivals.

• The College World Series continues to break attendance records. Increasingly, attendance at the CWS is independent of the teams playing, as local support continues to grow. This is good in several ways, one of them being that it reduces the temptation to try to give teams whose fans travel well an easier path to Omaha.

For those of you who have joined me for the first time during this season, first of all, welcome. I hope I've provided something of what you were looking for or wanted but didn't realize it. Breadcrumbs is a year-round endeavor, although I do take the occasional week off during the offseason (usually one a month, generally around holidays), so stick around; the offseason efforts tend to be a bit more theoretical or analytical than the stuff I have time to do during the season. This year will be a bit unusual in that I'll be taking a few weeks of paternity leave some time soon, but overall I'll be here.

My mother always told my father, "Cecil, I can read as well as you can," at times like this, so with that in mind, I'll just point out the following stories from the news:

• Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delaney threatens to create a de facto Division 1AA if the season isn't moved back.
• Arkansas Volunteer Assistant Coach Tom Pagnozzi speaks out against excessive pitch counts.

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.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Celebrating the Good

About the author, Boyd Nation