We're getting A LOT of football scores this year. I haven't looked at the annual stats, but maybe it's time for wood bats in college.
It seems like they have trouble finding the happy medium. As a fan of a team who at least at one time was the poster-child, if not the author, of gorilla ball, I'm kinda okay with it, but I get its lack of appeal to a lot of fans. But I'd take that over what they did back 13, 14, years ago when the CWS scrapped Rosenblatt, built TD Ameritrade intentionally at the highest point, made it face against the wind, at the same time the sport adopted ~30% less active bats.
The CWS became unwatchable for me, and the field tilted. I don't care what purists say, and I know not everyone agreed with me. They're free to be wrong. Small-ball teams had the advantage. Previously, all kinds of teams could make Omaha and have a fair shot at competing.
They claimed they wanted the game to be more like the MLB. Back then I checked, and the MLB averaged over 1 HR per game. I watched an entire CWS one year where out of all games played at TD Ameritrade, there were 4 HRs, total. We had two of them, and couldn't win either game we played. Nowhere near 1 HR per game. You take away the excitement and the importance of the long ball, I'm out. Creighton, who played their home games in that place, had
0 HRs that year.
And as much as I love great pitching--and a fine pitcher's-duel-type game--I also hate rewarding a pitcher who floats a lame duck over the strike zone, when he should be punished. When a batter gets into that, it should be gone. Bailing out crappy pitches because the bats and the wind kill everything inside the park isn't a great pitcher's duel, it's just rewarding mediocrity on the mound and punishing batters.
That same year I mentioned, a great LSU team made the field and went 2 and out. The park punished everything about that team. They lost g1 to eventual winner UCLA 2-1. Granted, LSU did a lot wrong in that game so I can't blame the loss entirely or even mostly on the state of the game. But it's also true that it seems LSU should have prevailed even in spite of some mistakes and an uncharacteristic string of lead-off singles from the pitcher. Because you can tell by the sound the bat makes when a ball is launched. At least I can. Twice that game, LSU batters blistered what would've been solo shots anywhere else, and everybody knew it. Except they weren't. Died in center field, like every other crushed ball. I couldn't escape the feeling that despite UCLA being genuinely good, and despite us playing an overall worse game, we still should've won that 3-2. I can coulda, woulda, shoulda, the other things as well. Fine. But you're supposed to be able to overcome
some mistakes with great moments. In that park, we just couldn't, and that Bruins pitcher got away with two pansy pitches that he should've had to eat.
After that we lost to UNC, another power hitting team, who just flat outplayed us, but I couldn't help but notice they should have absolutely drilled us, but they couldn't, because the same thing happened to them. Our pitcher wasn't up to the challenge that day, they got a hold of some that should've been long gone....except they weren't.
After that I basically stopped watching the CWS until they changed the seams in the balls, which brought some offense back. Now, I'm not sure what's going on because I haven't been keeping up with it the last few years, but I'll take games like SC's in the College Station regional over the small-ball-required snooze-fest that Omaha was for several years.
