Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
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The weirdness of the Pacific 10 Conference baseball season has kind of snuck up on me. Here and there I've caught glimpses. UCLA losing game after game. Washington State winless. Stanford unable to put together any kind of a streak.
But I finally got a look at the standings, and who's up in first place? Oregon State, with a 17-4 record in conference play and 39-8 overall. The Beavers are ranked third nationally by Baseball America.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in my memory, Oregon State is a program rarely heard from come College World Series time. What baseball alumni has the Beaver program produced? Ken Forsch is probably the best, but perhaps the most famous is ... Steve Lyons.
I remember when it was the 6-pack. When did that change?
The nine-team Pac-10 is just another reminder that we're only human.
vr
Xei
vr
Xeifrank
Apparently Phil Knight doesn't like baseball enough to write one of his monstrous checks to endow that part of Nike University.
The Oregon and Washington schools were north. Everybody else was south, including Cal and Stanford.
I asked why. It had something to do with how the schedule would work out every other year. I never did get a clear explanation.
Remember the Over/Under of 6 1/3 for Penny tonight. 7IPs is his best outing so far.
vr
Xeifrank
For a few years, the Pac-10 North and South winners would have a playoff series to see who would get the automatic bid for the NCAA playoffs. As if there was any doubt that the South team wouldn't go. Or even the North winner.
Anyway, nice to see some people out there are following college baseball.
Our best player of the last few seasons is now playing for Cal State Fullerton and a couple of guys end up in the Southeast, but for the most part, Pat Casey, the coach at OSU, gets to over-recruit for every position from the entire state.
I would imagine that he's also able to recruit a bit from Washington with the horrible baseball weather found in that state. OSU also has a recently renovated million dollar facility.
Now, with 8 other teams in the league to play every year, the teams only meet for one weekend (the season isn't long enough to have 16 weeks of conference play). This makes for some very unbalanced schedules. Generally each Pac-10 team plays one of the "matched" schools home and one away. For instance, in a given year UCLA might play Stanford on the road and Cal at home, Arizona at home, ASU on the road, et cetera. If one of the matched schools is up and one is down that particular season, the luck of the draw (which one you get at home) can make a major difference.
Some of the home-and-home flavor remains (USC and Stanford play two different 3-game sets, as do Cal and Stanford) but only the second three game series counts in the conference standings.
People interested in college baseball should check out Boydsworld.com for more accurate rankings than the polls or the horribly flawed RPI and ncaa-baseball.com for quick links to scores and standings.
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