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The Road To Omaha


Greggulator

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2 hours ago, DEAN said:

My VCU Rams scored 8 runs against UNC!

VCU actually beat UNC in the Saturday winner's bracket game 4-3. They were actually really good this year and were in as a 3-seed. The A-10 is usually a bottom feeder in NCAA Baseball but the Rams and Davidson were both pretty good this year. 

I was hoping that someone in the small smattering of Rams fans in Chapel Hill was going to pull out a "HAVOC LIVES HERE" banner.

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The NCAA Regionals are complete. I'll have a rundown of some more things in the next reply.

But here are some reasons why this is my favorite sporting event in the country:

1) This year, the balls went flying. That's not the case every year. But this year, it was just nuts and they had more home runs in this round than any other region.

2) Pitching is always at a premium in college baseball but it's even more so in college baseball because pitching is obviously not as deep. During the regular season, weekend series (especially in conference season) are the most important. Games held over weekdays are more like OOC games in college basketball. Great to build a resume for an at-large or seeding, but most teams don't think they are as important.

So teams usually essentially have a three-man starting rotation: The Friday pitcher is the ace, followed by Saturday and then Sunday. And then everyone else is in the bullpen. 

Only the real elite teams have three good weekend pitchers. The best one in recent years was probably Vanderbilt's one-two punch last year with Jack Leiter and Kumail Rocker, both of whom were first-round picks. (I won't get into what happened with Rocker.) But that's just really rare. So that means even during games between lesser opponents you have to get into the bullpen, and that's a crapshoot because even fewer teams have a top-end closer, let alone any kind of middle-man. 

3) And obviously fielding isn't as great, either. 

Combine 1-3 and you just get the wildest baseball games you've ever seen in your life. No lead is ever safe. 

4) You know those unwritten rules in MLB that are stupid? They have absolutely none of those in college baseball. Players twerp at each other non-stop throughout games. They talk so much shit. Players flip bats after home runs. Then a lot of teams have a routine celebration after a home run. VA Tech (who are the third seed this season) tosses a sledgehammer to the batter who hit a home run who drives it into the ground like Thor and the players and fans yell "BOOM" and fall back in the simulated shockwave. LSU brought with them an old-school 1980s boombox and would blast a song called "Crunk Ain't Dead" and dance after every big play. One team (I forget who) -- whoever hit the home run crouches at the plate and pretends to snap a Polaroid of the rest of his team posing for a family portrait. 

5) I think the games are the best atmosphere in US sports. That's beyond any college basketball or college football crowd or one of the small-market NBA teams when they're in the playoffs. You have bandbox stadiums. Most are 3,000 seats or so. The biggest one is LSU's at around 10,000. Packed-in crowds and drunk Southern college sports maniacs is just the best. But a lot also have semi-legal tailgate areas where people bring trucks or things like that and sit in the outfield and get trashed act like fools the entire game. The two best are probably ECU's "The Jungle" and Southern Mississippi's "Right Field Roost." The big SEC schools have authenticated their bootleg areas - Mississippi State's was legend -- but they do not enforce any law. 

6) The format of the regionals is unreal. First round is a double elimination tournament. On Sunday, it starts with an elimination game between two teams each other one loss. Then that team has to go on to play whoever is in the winner's bracket undefeated an hour after the first game ends. If they win that second game, they have a winner-take-all on Monday, which is what yesterday's games had at stake. 

Remember what I said about pitching up above? Teams facing elimination have to throw everything against the wall. You'll see things like "the starter from the night before pitching two innings of relief" or "random freshman lefty who has had 12 innings pitched all year because he's actually our shortstop" entering games in clutch moments. Last night, Texas State started their closer who went seven innings and gave up only one run against a loaded Stanford team. 

7) Now we have the SuperRegionals, which are the Sweet 16. It's a 2-out-3 series between two teams, and the winners go on to Omaha. These games are so fucking intense. The best SuperRegional in terms of atmosphere is going to be in Hattiesburg because Southern Miss is hosting Ole Miss. I do not need to explain that. East Carolina also has a wild crowd. Tennessee is the best team this season (and it's not even close - led the NCAAs in HRs and ERA) and their crowd is chaos. 

Best sport ever. 

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Georgia Southern (Notre Dame), Oklahoma State (Arkansas), Maryland (UConn), Miami (Ole Miss) and Florida (Oklahoma) are the seeds that didn't make it through.

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From literally flipping the bird DURING a home run trot to getting bounced by Notre Dame, the Vols cycled through "FA/FO" with all due speed.

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  • 1 month later...

I could've sworn we had a LLWS thread somewhere, but I guess not.   Anyway, terrifying sequence followed by awesome sportsmanship:

And if you want to see why I fucking hate Dave Portnoy and everything Barstool related....

Spoiler

FZvNFwOX0AI10jj?format=jpg&name=large

Boy, what a tough guy for ragging on a 10 year old for being upset for thinking he'd literally  (NOT FIGURATIVELY) killed a kid. 

 

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13 hours ago, John from Cincinnati said:

It shouldn't be possible to have a take that wrong about that clip. What a flaming asshole. 

Edit: And I see people out there saying the original Barstool tweet got deleted. Come on...

That tweet feels like an attempt at getting rage engagement. Whatever the reasoning, it's just gross. 

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There's a disturbingly large subset of parents/coaches/etc at kids games that actually think that way.  People with failed athletic ambitions trying to live through their kids.

I coached an 8 and under coach pitch team this spring.  The rules are that play isn't dead till the the ball is back in the pitcher's hands.  Most teams took that to mean that if the ball was in the infield the play was over and they'd hold their baserunners.  But not everybody.  One team decided to take advantage of the actual rule by having their pitcher essentially try to hide anytime the ball was in play.  He'd run off into a corner, turn his back to the play, and make it impossible to throw the ball to him.  Then, they'd have their runners going all the time they could.  In the field, they'd try to hide the ball and physically push my kids off the bases.  Their infielders would stand in the basepaths and try to block the baserunners.  

All of that because they desperately needed to win a damn 8u game.  I finally got fed up and said fuck it.  Told my better fielders that when they had the ball they needed to stand in front of the lead baserunner and stare at em till the umpire called time.  And told all my kids not to leave the base for any reason if they couldn't see the ball.  Then I left the field and sat behind the stands for half an inning so I didn't risk becoming that coach.

Funny part of that was I knew all the coaches on the other team.  And I'd been talking to one of em about having his company do the remodeling on my house, which is a fairly extensive, and expensive, project.  My wife beat me to saying hell no to using him after that game - figured if he's being that slimy about a kid's baseball game, there's no way were trusting him on something big.  That was an expensive game for him.

There was also the t-ball all star team my friends' kid was playing on, where their opponent had to forfeit a game after their head coach got kicked out, the assistant who took over got kicked out, and the second assistant spit on the umpire.  Nothing like the police getting called to a t-ball game.

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Oh, parents are crazy, no question. When I was coaching high school ball, we had a summer exhibition against the high school 45 minutes away. They were restarting baseball and wanted to get their kids some game action. It was really loose and informal with kids subbing in and out and so on. We had a kid who umpired summer rec league games calling the game behind the plate - and doing an excellent job. But once our kids started laying a beating on the other school, that school's parents started complaining about the umpire. After numerous warnings, they were finally kicked out of the ballpark and then had to be escorted out of the parking lot by the police because they wouldn't leave and wouldn't stop misbehaving. 

Another time, I took my freshman football team to another town to play their freshman team. During the game, we noticed their players seemed unusually large for freshman from a small school. That's when a parent came to me on the sideline and told me that the school's varsity was practicing during our game - with 3 kids. They'd suited up their varsity to play us. One of the kids had a beard thicker than anything I could grow today myself. 

It is absolutely unreal what people will do with youth sports. 

Edited by Tabe
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  • 3 months later...
4 minutes ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

Brown will make history as Olivia Pichardo will be the first woman to ever play on a Division I college baseball team. 

 

According to her web site, she throws in the low 80s so I do wonder how much pitching she'll actually be doing. 

Congrats to her either way. I hope she's massively successful. 

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4 hours ago, Tabe said:

According to her web site, she throws in the low 80s so I do wonder how much pitching she'll actually be doing. 

Congrats to her either way. I hope she's massively successful. 

Yeah - it seems that she last pitched for the US Women's National baseball team last year but on the collegiate level she has been playing all over the diamond (minus catcher)

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...

Apparently, Angel Hernandez is now working college games:

 

The umpire in question has been suspended indefinitely. 

Edited by Pete
Fixed the link - Pete
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