Everybody Wins When the Astros Lose

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about the Houston Astros in this case.  I went to my second collegiate summer league game last week.  I went to a game in the Hamptons league earlier this summer.  Long Island also has the Blue Chip Collegiate Baseball League and that’s the league I saw last week.  There’s also the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League, which has games stretching from Pennsylvania to Long Island.  Based on where the players go to college, it seems like the Hamptons league is the best of the three.  I wanted to get to a game in each league, but it looks like I’m not going to get to the Atlantic league since their regular season is coming to an end this week.  I had planned on going earlier in the summer, but weather and other stuff got in the way.  I could have gone to a game in the Atlantic league this week, but it would have been played at the same field as the Blue Chip league game that I went to so I didn’t feel like doing that again.

Anyway, the Blue Chip League has a team called Long Island Dodger Nation.  I had planned on seeing them play for obvious reasons, but weather and stuff prevented that.  Also, they play at various fields and many of them are turf.  I didn’t want to watch a game played on turf if I didn’t have to.  I was never able to have the weather, my schedule, and a Long Island Dodger Nation game on grass line up so it didn’t happen.  So I did the next best thing.  I went to a Long Island Astros game and rooted against them because they’re the Astros.  They were taking on the Long Island Noreasters.  The Noreasters had blue in their uniforms and their starting pitcher was wearing number 22 (he was right-handed, but whatever) so I had no problem rooting for them against the Astros.  It was 89°, but the feels like temperature was 98° for a game that started at 11:00 in the morning.  And that was cooler than it had been for a few days.  The game was at Eisenhower Park.  There were two games in the same league happening on fields right next to each other.  I watched for a little while from the stands near first base.  But it was pretty rough in the sun so I watched the rest of the game from the shade beyond the fence in left field.  The other field with a game going on had no shade anywhere around it.

It was a really hot day for baseball.

Anyway, I enjoyed the game as the Noreasters pounded the Astros.  The Noreasters hit a ball off the fence for a double.  I was surprised to see a ball hit that far.  There were no distance markers on the fence, but they use wooden bats in the league and these players are used to using metal bats in college.  But then they hit a home run later in the inning (I looked up their stats and they have 11 home runs in 24 games as a team).  It was a good inning as they scored six runs to go up 7-0.  It was after that inning that I moved to left field.  They also tried my favorite video game play:  the double steal where the runner takes off from first and then the runner from third goes home on the throw.  It didn’t work as the runner was thrown out at home.  But it was total domination.  I wasn’t really keeping track of the score, but I knew that the Noreasters had scored a lot of runs and the Astros hadn’t scored.  At home point, the Noreasters scored a run and the Astros just walked off the field and the game was over.  Being way out in the outfield, I didn’t hear anybody say anything, but I assumed there was a mercy rule and the website confirmed that there is a 10-run mercy rule after five innings.  This was supposed to be the first game of a doubleheader.  With the heat, I wasn’t planning on staying for both games and that was it for me.  It was also it for the two teams as strong thunderstorms came through Long Island that afternoon.

I didn’t last in this spot very long.

You can’t really tell from this picture since I put my phone right up to the fence, but I was standing in shade on the other side of the chain-link fence.

So the two collegiate summer league games I got to were fun, but they don’t really compare to the ones I went to in Alaska three years ago.  The Alaska games were much closer to going to a minor league game.  These games were probably more like high school games.  I could have gone for a hot dog and a beer, but they definitely didn’t have anything like that (there was a solid food/beer selection in Alaska).  There actually was an ice cream truck parked by the field for a little while, but I didn’t check it out.

Anyway, hopefully the real Astros will lose in the playoffs.  Right now they trail the Yankees by two games for the top seed in the American League.  The Mets are 4.5 games behind the Dodgers for the top seed in the National League.  And the Astros and Mets might want to stay right where they are.  The Dodgers and Yankees might have very little to play for at the end of the season.  The magic number for the Dodgers to clinch a bye is 55.  For the Yankees, it’s 54.  Something would have to go very wrong for either of those teams to not get one of the two byes.  But either team could finish as the 2 seed instead of the 1 seed.  And the 2 seed might be more desirable.

The likely 4/5 matchup in the National League is the second place team in the NL East against the Padres.  The winner of that would play the 1 seed.  The 2 seed would get to play the winner of the NL Central or the third wild card.  I guess the Padres don’t have the second wild card spot locked up, but let’s assume that they’re the fourth best team in the NL.  The three best teams in the NL are the Dodgers, Mets, and Braves.  We’ll see if the Padres are one of the top four teams, but there’s a pretty good chance that the best team in the NL will have to play the third or fourth best team in the NL in the second round and the 2 seed would likely get to play the fifth or sixth best team in the NL.

In the AL, the Yankees and Astros are pretty far ahead of everybody else.  The wild card contenders are not separated by that much, but the 1 seed will play the winner of the top two wild card teams and the 2 seed will play either the AL Central winner or the third wild card.  Obviously the 1 seed gets home field advantage until at least the World Series, but the 1 seed is likely to get the tougher opponent for their first playoff matchup than the 2 seed in both leagues.

We had the same issue last year with a different playoff format.  The Giants had the best record in baseball and their reward for that was playing the team that was one game behind them for best record in the first round.  It all worked out for me since the Dodgers beat the Giants, but that was pretty silly.  The Mets and Braves could be the two best teams in the NL (I hope not, but it’s a possibility) and if they are, they shouldn’t play each other before the NLCS, but that’s exactly what would happen unless one of those teams got upset by the second wild card.  Although the Giants got a bad matchup last year, they did have one advantage for being the 1 seed.  They got to play a team that had to do whatever they had to do to win a Wild Card Game whereas the 2 seed had to play that didn’t have to survive a game like that.  That advantage is gone this year as both of the top two seeds will play a team that has to get through the Wild Card round.

So this format doesn’t reward the 1 seed enough.  We could easily fix this problem.  The first thing is that they should reseed after the Wild Card round.  If the 6 seed pulls off the upset over the 3 seed, why does the 2 seed get to play the team with the worst record to make the playoffs?  The second thing I would do is give the 1 seed four possible home games.  They would play their first game on the road and then the next four at home.  Those two things combined would make it really difficult for the 6 seed.  And if you’re the sixth best team in the league, you don’t really belong in the playoffs anyway so why not make it as difficult as possible?  The 6 seed in the NL last year would have been the Reds, who were 83-79.  They would have to win a best of three series on the road and then they would have to come home for one game to start a best of five series and then play the rest of the series at the 1 seed’s home stadium.  And the last thing I would do is seed 3-6 just based on record.  In many years, you’re going to have at least one wild card that’s better than the third best division winner.  Last year, the Dodgers won 18 more games than the 3 seed, but the Dodgers were the 4 seed.  Even though the Dodgers won 11 more games than the 2 seed, I would not give them the 2 seed since they didn’t win their division.  So you’d have to be a division winner to get a bye, but the third best division winner would not be guaranteed the advantage of the 3 seed (being a division winner would be a tie-breaker over a wild card).  So here’s how the seeds would look as of right now under my system:

1. Dodgers (64-32)

2. Mets (60-37)

3. Braves (59-41)

4. Padres (55-44)

5. Brewers (54-44)

6. Phillies/Cardinals (51-47)

1. Yankees (66-32)

2. Astros (64-34)

3. Blue Jays (54-43)

4. Mariners (53-45)

5. Twins (52-45)

6. Rays (52-45)

Under my system, the worst case scenario for the 1 seed would be to face the fourth best team in the league and have four possible games at home.  Under the current system, we saw the worst case scenario last year for the 1 seed when the Giants had to play the second best team in the NL and only get three home games.  I’m definitely not going to root for the Dodgers to lose and fall to the 2 seed.  It is nice to have Game 1 (and possibly Game 7) of the NLCS and hopefully the World Series at home, but I’m not going to be happy if the Dodgers are the 1 seed and they have to play the Mets or the Braves before the NLCS.

Before I wrap this up, I have a basketball thought.  Under no circumstances should the Celtics trade Jaylen Brown for Kevin Durant.  I have many reasons for being opposed to this idea:

• Kevin Durant is getting old.  He’ll be 34 in September.  Jaylen Brown turns 26 in October.  For comparison, the Celtics traded for Kevin Garnett two months after his 31st birthday.

• Durant already had a major injury.  Since recovering from his injury, he’s played 90 total regular season games in two seasons.  Garnett had played at least 76 games in every season before coming to the Celtics, except for the lockout season when he played 47 out of 50 games.  And we saw what happened to Garnett after he got hurt in 2009.  He was still good, but he wasn’t the same.  Durant is going to be declining (we already started to see it in the playoffs against the Celtics when he had pretty bad shooting and rebounding numbers).  Brown is still getting better.

• They would have to trade more than just Brown.  One of the reasons they lost to the Warriors was the lack of depth.  They’ve made a big upgrade in depth with Brogdon and Gallinari.  They don’t need to give up some of that depth.

• With Tatum, Brown, Smart, Williams, Brodgon, Williams, White, and Pritchard, they have a window of many years to compete for championships.  That window gets much narrower if you trade Brown and another young guy/draft picks for Durant.

• Kevin Garnett was loyal and hungry for a championship.  Kevin Durant is neither of those things.  He’ll ask to be traded if at some point.

• Obviously he wouldn’t be bringing Kyrie Irving with him, but why would anybody trust a player who decided that he wanted to play with Kyrie Irving?

There are probably more reasons to be against the trade, but I think that’s a pretty good list.  Just sign the best veteran big guy you can (not Dwight Howard) and call it an offseason and then go win the championship in 2023.

Anyway, I’m in the second half of my summer.  I’ve only been to one professional baseball game this summer (a Ducks game), but I’ll get to at least one more before summer is over.  Hopefully I’ll be able to enjoy the Dodgers playing some really good baseball for the rest of the summer.

It’s less than 40 days until college football so I’m definitely starting to long for that.  Marcus Freeman is exactly who I want to be representing Notre Dame so I really hope he’s successful.  Everybody is expecting Notre Dame to lose against Ohio State to start the season.  I can’t really say that I’m expecting to win that game, but it would be awesome if we ever did win that one.  Hopefully we’ll get on a good run after that game either way.  But I still have plenty of summer to enjoy until then.

Fine-Tuning the Experiment

I went to my second ever Long Island Ducks game last week.  It was a Thursday afternoon game. I’m definitely a fan of day baseball as long as it’s not too hot.  The forecast was good and we were sitting in the shade the whole game anyway.  My dad and I got there right before the national anthem so that was well timed.  It was the Ducks against the Staten Island FerryHawks.  The FerryHawks are in their first year and they play where the Staten Island Yankees played when they existed.

A lot of the 2,503 fans listed in attendance came dressed as empty seats.

With the Atlantic League, you’ll get some familiar names.  The Ducks are managed by Wally Backman and the FerryHawks are managed by Edgardo Alfonzo.  I am aware of who Wally Backman is, but I don’t have any memory of him as a player.  He played for the Mets from 1980-1988 and then for five more years after that on four different teams.  I definitely remember Edgardo Alfonzo.  He played for the Mets from 1995-2002 and then for four more years after that on three different teams.  He hit .292 with 120 home runs in almost 4,000 at bats for the Mets.  He was really good in 1999 and 2000.

As for players, there were a few names I knew.  The Ducks have eight players on their roster who reached the Major Leagues.  The only ones that I had much memory of were Lew Ford and Alejandro de Aza.  Lew Ford had a pretty good year for the Twins in 2004 and didn’t do much other than that.  He’s 45 years old now.  He’s listed as a coach and a player on their roster so I was wondering if he’s actually playing games.  I checked the stats and he’s only played in five games, but he’s 7 for 19 with a home run.  He’s played for a bunch of different teams since his last year in the Majors in 2007, but he’s played games for the Ducks in every year since 2009 except for 2010 (he was playing in Venezuela and Mexico) and 2020 (pandemic).  Since playing some winter ball in 2016-2017 in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, he’s only played for the Ducks.  He’s hit 79 home runs as a Long Island Duck.  Alejandro de Aza played in the Majors in ten seasons from 2007-2017 (he didn’t play in the Majors in 2008).  He wasn’t all that noteworthy as a Major League player, but he had six seasons with more than 100 games played.  The Ducks list the highest level of baseball for each player on the roster on their website.  The FerryHawks don’t do that, so I’m not sure how many of their players had been in the Majors, but the one name that I recognized was Dilson Herrera, who played for the Mets in 2014 and 2015.  As I’m writing this on Wednesday night, he’s not listed on their roster anymore, but he was listed in their starting lineup on Twitter five hours ago.  So I’m guessing that’s just a mistake on their website.

Anyway, the game was a pitchers’ duel.  The FerryHawks started the second inning with three straight hits to take a 1-0 lead, but that’s all they got in the second inning.  And that’s all anybody got.  It was a 1-0 victory for the FerryHawks.  The Ducks came close to winning in the bottom of the ninth.  They got a runner on with a one-out walk.  The next batter hit a long fly ball to right field.  I thought it was gone.  It was caught at the wall and was probably a couple of feet from going out (go to 3:08:20 in the video below).  The next batter flied out to center to end the game.  The teams combined to use just five pitchers with Ducks’ starter going eight and the FerryHawks’ starter going six.  Fourteen combined innings from the two starters is a good thing, but it is very rare these days.  It’s one of the reasons that the game was only two hours and 42 minutes.  I’ll have some thoughts about how we can make starters going deep into games less rare at the end of this post.

The box score says that attendance was 2,503.  Considering that the capacity of Fairfield Properties Ballpark (the new name of the stadium) is 6,002, I would say the actual attendance was nowhere close to that.  I’m saying maybe there were 1,000 people at most.  It was a weekday afternoon three days after the Fourth of July so people might have been returning to work or still away on vacation so it’s not surprising it wasn’t a big crowd.  The Ducks are actually leading the Atlantic League in attendance at over 4,400 per game (second place is just over 3,000 per game).  The FerryHawks are last in attendance at fewer than 1,200 per game.  I hope the FerryHawks can survive because that stadium has such a cool location.

I had a hot dog and a Brooklyn Lager at the game.  There wasn’t a huge food selection, but a hot dog is all I wanted at my first professional baseball game of the year.  The problem was that they only had yellow mustard.  As Cosmo Kramer knows, that's bush league.  This is New York, not the Midwest, you need some real mustard.  I would have preferred a Sam Adams Summer Ale, but since my ancestry as a baseball fan goes back to Brooklyn, Brooklyn Lager would be my second choice for a baseball game in New York.  But the beer was not well poured.  So I could have had a better food and beverage experience, but I was just happy to be having a hot dog and a beer at a baseball game again.

The Atlantic League has partnered with Major League Baseball on experimental rules for the last few years.  My favorite one is that you have to have two infielders on both sides of second base.  Let’s get this in the Majors already.  I was watching the Dodgers and Cubs the other day and I saw the Cubs’ shortstop nearly record an unassisted force out at first base.  The third baseman should play third base and the shortstop should play shortstop.  Batters would be rewarded with more hits for putting the ball in play so it would give them an incentive to not strike out as much.  Another rule is that the batter can try to take first base on any ball that gets away from a catcher, not just a third strike that isn’t caught.  This one is just silly.  We saw it in the game we went to.  And it gets scored as a single if you make it.  How do you get credit for a hit without hitting the ball?  Scoring it as a walk would make more sense, but it would still be stupid because the pitcher doesn’t deserve credit for a walk if he didn’t throw four balls.  The rule is so stupid that Rob Manfred must love it.  But the most interesting experimental rule is the double hook rule.  The rule is that the DH is tied to the starting pitcher.  If you take out the starting pitcher, the DH’s spot in the lineup becomes that pitcher’s spot.  That was the rule last year, but this year they modified it so that you don’t lose the DH if the starter goes at least five innings.  So let’s look at the good and bad parts of this rule.

Good:

• This would immediately kill the opener.  I’m pretty sure the Rays started the nonsense of having relievers start games. Third basemen should play third base, not short right field, and your starting pitcher should be a starting pitcher, not a reliever.

• We would have the possibility of pitchers hitting again.

• It increases strategy.  Do you put your DH at the top of your lineup to get as many at bats as possible before you lose the DH?  Or do you put the DH at the bottom of the lineup so that you minimize possible at bats for the pitcher’s spot (the number 3 spot in the order comes up a lot more over the course of a season than the 8 or 9 spot)?  Managers would also possibly have to deal with the pitcher’s spot and pinch hitting and double switches late in the game.  This is much more interesting than just setting a lineup at the beginning of the game and not thinking about it at all except for maybe sending up a righty to pinch hit for a lefty against a tough lefty reliever.

Bad:

• It uses the DH.

• Pitchers would almost never hit.  We would never get the Clayton Kershaw home run in the bottom of the 8th to give the Dodgers a 1-0 lead again.  Even when the DH’s spot becomes the pitcher’s spot, it’s almost always going to be a pinch hitter in that spot.  But there would still be the possibility of the Daniel Camarena grand slam off of Max Scherzer.

• It gives the visiting team an advantage.  Your DH could hit in the top of the fifth and then you could take out your starting pitcher in the bottom of the fifth.  But the home team would need their pitcher to go five innings for their DH to hit in the bottom of the fifth.  This problem could be fixed by requiring the starting pitcher to face at least three batters in an inning for the DH to be eligible to hit in that inning.  So if the visiting team had their DH hit in the top of the fifth, the starter would need to face at least three batters in the bottom of the fifth.  On the other hand, if the home team took out their starter after loading the bases in the top of the fifth, their DH would still be eligible to hit in the bottom of the fifth.

• There is no incentive to have a starter go beyond five innings.  If the DH was tied to the starter for the whole game, there would be an incentive to have starters go as many innings as possible, not just five.  Sure, having a starting pitcher go five is better than having an opener go one inning or having a starter go four and a third, but it’s not as good as having a starting pitcher go seven, eight, or all nine.  One of baseball’s problems is too many pitching changes.  If you get the starter to go deeper into games, you get fewer pitching changes.

So there are problems with the rule, but it’s definitely better than what we have now.  I just don’t get how people think having the DH is more interesting.  Yes, pitchers are generally bad hitters.  But there’s no rule that they have to be.  Shohei Otani is definitely my favorite non-Dodger these days because he can pitch and hit.  If your logic for liking the DH is that pitchers are bad hitters, then why not make baseball like football and have nine guys play the field and nine guys hit?  Then you don’t have to watch bad fielders or bad hitters anymore.  I mean, did anybody enjoy watching Hanley Ramirez play the field?  I certainly didn’t when Clayton Kershaw had his perfect game turned into a no-hitter.  But nine designated fielders and nine designated hitters would make baseball much less interesting.  There’s so much less strategy involved with the DH and there’s nothing interesting about a DH hitting.  When you get the rare Clayton Kershaw home run or the Daniel Camarena grand slam, it’s an unforgettable moment.  I fear that abolishing the DH is like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.  But if implemented correctly, having the DH with the double hook rule will actually fix one of baseball’s biggest problems.

Summer Musings

About a week and a half ago, I went to a Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League game.  It’s a league for college players who still have eligibility to play in over the summer.  There are lots of leagues like that throughout the country and one of the best is in Alaska.  I saw a couple of games in the Alaskan league three years ago.  I don’t think I’m doing any traveling this summer, but I still want to go to as many baseball games as possible. So for the first time, I went to a collegiate summer league game on Long Island. As far as I can tell, Long Island has two leagues and teams in another league that also has teams in the city, Westchester, and New Jersey.  Looking at the rosters for some of the teams in these leagues, I suspect that the Hamptons league is the best one based on the schools the players go to.  I’m planning to get to games in the other leagues at some point this summer and I was going to combine them into one post, but I had some other thoughts to get out in a post before they’re no longer fresh.

I saw the Sag Harbor Whalers take on the Riverhead Tomcats.  The Tomcats play about 45 minutes away from me without traffic and they’re the closest of the teams in the Hamptons league.  I was thinking about going to a doubleheader the following day, but it was supposed to be hotter that day so that’s how I decided on going to this game.  What I did not know until I was at the game and I looked up the rosters was that the Whalers had a player from Notre Dame on their team, Brock Murtha, who was starting at third base.  So I was rooting for the Whalers.  The starting pitcher for the Tomcats was from Rutgers, but apparently he’s transferring.  The Tomcats also have players from Boston College, Wake Forest, Xavier, and St. John’s.  The Whalers have players from Cincinnati, Xavier, and Northwestern.  And both teams had many players from schools in less notable conferences.

It was a great day for baseball.

The game was scoreless until the fifth inning.  Both teams had RBI singles in the fifth.  In the bottom of the sixth, Brock Murtha made a nice catch on a line drive and then threw to first base before the runner could get back for a double play.  But then Murtha made an error on what would have been the third out.  After the error, three straight doubles brought in three unearned runs.  And that was all the scoring for the game and the Tomcats won 4-1.  It was a rough day at the plate for Murtha as well, as he went 0 for 4 with four strikeouts.

I think I took this picture when Brock Murtha was batting.

So that was my day seeing a Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League game.  The weather was really good and it was fun.  But it’s definitely a different experience from professional baseball or even the Alaskan league games I went to.  For the Alaskan league, there were a good number of fans and you had to pay for tickets.  They had food and beer available.  I would say there were maybe 50 fans at this game.  It was free and there was no food or beer.  A hot dog and a good beer would have been very nice while I was enjoying some baseball, but I wasn’t really expecting that they would have anything like that at the game.  I suspect it will be the same thing if I go to any more collegiate summer league games on Long Island.

But I did want to write a little bit about Notre Dame baseball.  Brock Murtha just finished his sophomore year.  As far as I can tell, he did not play at all as a sophomore.  He played in six games as a freshman, but only got one at bat.  What’s interesting is that he was playing in the Hamptons league while Notre Dame was still playing in the College World Series.  Now that might not be unusual at all.  I counted 41 baseball players listed on the Notre Dame baseball roster.  Obviously not all of those guys are playing (and Murtha was one of the guys who wasn’t playing).  So maybe they’re not bringing all of their players when they travel.  I wish I knew more about how college baseball worked.  I do know that baseball teams are limited to 11.7 scholarships (although from what I understand, this might change soon).  I have no idea how those scholarships are divided.  Do any of the players get full scholarships?  I have no idea.  But with only 11.7 scholarships, I would assume that a good number of the 41 players listed on the roster aren’t getting any scholarship at all.  In football, you have 85 players on scholarship plus a bunch of walk ons.  Pretty much all of your contributors are going to be on scholarship.  I do know that the Notre Dame football team isn’t bringing all of the players to away games.  But they do bring them all to the bowl game.  So I don’t know if it was weird or not that Brock Murtha wasn’t with the team in Omaha for the College World Series.  I thought maybe that meant that he was transferring, but I’ve heard about four Notre Dame baseball players transferring and he wasn’t one of the names I saw.

Anyway, I did want to write a little bit about Notre Dame’s baseball team.  We just finished an excellent run of three years under Link Jarrett.  The coach when I was at Notre Dame was Paul Mainieri.  His record at Notre Dame was 533-213-3.  He was there for 12 years and made the NCAA baseball tournament his second year and then his last eight years.  He made it to the College World Series in 2002.  So he had a really good run at Notre Dame.  Over the next 13 years, our record was 367-357-1.  We made the NCAA tournament one time during that stretch.  So that wasn’t good.  And then Link Jarrett took over.  In 2020, we started 11-2 and 3-0 in the ACC and then the season was cancelled.  It seemed like we would have made it to the NCAA tournament.  Last year we went 34-13.  We made it to the NCAA tournament and advanced to the Super Regional, but we lost against Mississippi State two games to one.  We were one game away from the College World Series.  Considering that we had only been there twice, getting there would have been a huge accomplishment.  We were close, but we lost to the team that ended up winning the National Championship.

This year we ended up 41-17.  We got a bad seed in the NCAA tournament.  We didn’t get to host a regional (one of the top 16 teams) when some people thought we were in the running to host a Super Regional (the top 8 teams as long as they advance past the regional).  We were with the 16 seed in the regional so it was like were the 17 seed.  I pretty much had no idea how the NCAA baseball tournament worked until last year so I’ll explain it for anybody else who doesn’t know.  It alternates between four-team double elimination tournaments and two teams playing a best of three series.  So you start with 64 teams that are divided into 16 regional tournaments with four teams each.  One team advances from each regional and then you have eight Super Regionals that are two teams playing a best of three.  The winners of the Super Regionals go to the College World Series.  The College World Series has two separate double elimination tournaments with four teams each.  And then the two teams that win those play in the championship series (again, two out of three).

We were in a regional with Georgia Southern, UNC Greensboro, and Texas Tech.  We went 3-0 to advance to the Super Regional against Tennessee, who was the number 1 seed.  Tennessee was heavily favored.  I think they led college baseball in runs scored per game and fewest runs allowed per game.  We won Game 1 and then lost Game 2.  I texted my friends saying that I hoped Game 3 wouldn’t be Link Jarrett’s last game at Notre Dame.  With the success that he had at Notre Dame, it was looking likely that other schools would be after him.  We were down 3-1 in Game 3 going into the seventh.  With two outs, our catcher hit a two-run homer to tie it.  That was followed by another home run to give us a 4-3 lead.  That was pretty cool, but a one-run lead didn’t feel safe with everything I heard about how good Tennessee was.  We added three more runs with two outs in the eighth on a two-run double and an RBI single.  And we shut down Tennessee to win 7-3.  After getting so close to the College World Series the year before, we were going there for the first time in 20 years.

The College World Series got off to a great start with a 7-3 win over Texas.  With the double elimination format, you pretty much have to win your first game.  If you lose that first game, you have to win four in a row to advance.  Once you win that first one, you start dreaming.  But the second game is also really big after you win the first one.  If you lose that one, you have to win three in a row to advance.  If you win those first two games, then you have two chances to win one to advance.  Unfortunately, we lost the second game 6-2 against Oklahoma.  That meant we would have to beat Texas A&M (who beat Texas in the loser’s bracket) and then win two straight against Oklahoma to advance.  It was not to be as we lost 5-1 against Texas A&M and our season was over.  Oklahoma eliminated Texas A&M and then lost the championship series against Ole Miss.  Of the eight teams who make it to the College World Series in Omaha, two of them get eliminated without winning a game.  And two other teams will lose their first game and are highly unlikely to advance.  At least we won a game and it was our first game so there was hope for a little while.  It was a fun ride.

Not surprisingly, the loss to Texas A&M was Link Jarrett’s last game at Notre Dame.  He was quickly hired at Florida State.  Link Jarrett went 86-32 at Notre Dame (after the team was 367-357-1 the 13 previous years) and only the beginning of the pandemic kept Link Jarrett from getting to the NCAA tournament all three years (after the team had made it once in 13 years).  We knew we had a really good coach and we hoped he would stay, but considering that Link Jarrett went to Florida State, we knew this was coming.  I have no problem with Link Jarrett leaving.  This was much different from Brian Kelly leaving the way he did.  I would root for Link Jarrett against anybody other than Notre Dame.  The only way I would root for Brian Kelly is if he was playing Michigan or if it was a situation where LSU was playing somebody like Alabama and Alabama losing would help Notre Dame.  Brian Kelly won a bunch of games, but he never won a major bowl game and didn’t win big games against good teams on the road with the exception of Oklahoma in 2012.  Link Jarrett beat the number 1 team on the road in an elimination game to get to the College World Series.  So yeah, what he did in three years was more impressive than what Brian Kelly did in 12 years.

Speaking of football, I’ll just give quick thoughts on USC and UCLA going to the Big 10.  I hate it so much for college football.  There are going to be more moves, but this will likely lead to the demise of the Pac 12.  Obviously, it makes no sense geographically, but when you only have to travel for maybe six road games and they’re all on weekends, whatever.  But for the other sports, it’s pretty ridiculous.  I’ve thought for a while that conferences in football shouldn’t be the same as conferences for the other sports.  Like Texas and Kansas are in the same conference until Texas goes to the SEC.  Texas and Kansas being in the same conference for football doesn’t make much sense (you can make your own joke about how Texas needs an even lower level of competition than Kansas after Kansas beat them last year).  But it does make sense for the other sports.  If the Pac 12 isn’t going to survive, it’s hard to imagine that the Big 12 or ACC will be able to survive as major conferences also.  It looks like we’re headed to two mega conferences between the SEC and the Big 10.  It seems like anybody who matters in college football will be in one of those conferences.  It’s going to be like the AFC and the NFC and I hate it.  College football is on its way to becoming NFL Jr. and that’s not a good thing for the sport.  Between the realignment and the professionalization of college athletes, it’s going to be like minor league baseball, except without teams being affiliated with NFL teams.  And I do enjoy going to a minor league baseball game, but I don’t pay any attention to what’s going on in the minors.  If you told me that I wasn’t going to care about college football in ten years, I would hope that won’t be the case, but it’s very possible.

I have no idea about what moves are going to happen next.  I wouldn’t be suprised at all if Oregon, Washington, Clemson, Miami, Florida State, and maybe a few other Pac 12 and ACC teams would end up in the Big 10 or SEC.  These decisions are all about TV money.  USC and UCLA are going to get a lot more in the Big 10 than they are getting in the Pac 12.  My question is if all of the Big 10 and SEC teams will survive.  Are Michigan, Ohio State, and USC going to decide that they don’t want to share money with Rutgers, Illinois, and Northwestern?  Are Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and LSU going to decide that they don’t want to share money with Vanderbilt?

And then there’s the Notre Dame question.  We used to get more money from NBC being independent than we would have gotten being in a conference and sharing TV money with a bunch of schools.  That is not the case anymore.  We would get a lot more money if we joined the Big 10 or SEC.  I thought we would stay independent as long as the Power 5 conferences survived.  But if we’re down to two power conferences and it’s just the champions of those two conferences playing for the National Championship each year, I fear that we will join one of those conferences.  That goes against everything in the history of Notre Dame.  Notre Dame became what it is because Fielding Yost was anti-Catholic and refused to have Michigan play Notre Dame after we beat them for the first time.  And not only that, he also got other teams in the Western Conference (what became the Big 10) to refuse to play Notre Dame.  Since those Midwestern schools wouldn’t play Notre Dame, Knute Rockne had to take the team around the country to play teams like USC, Army, Georgia Tech, etc.  Rockne and independence made Notre Dame into a national power in college football.  And that was important because it’s not like we’re Texas and every kid in Texas wants to play at our school.  We needed that national recruiting base.  Now it seems likely that if we join one of the mega conferences, it will be the Big 10.  Obviously the conference now goes from New Jersey to California.  But you don’t have any southern schools in the Big 10.  Playing in the Big 10 would definitely hurt our recruiting in the South (which is extremely important in football these days).  If we have no choice but to be in a conference, I don’t mind being in a conference with USC, UCLA, Wisconsin, and Ohio State.  There are a bunch of Big 10 teams that I don’t care about one way or the other.  And then there are two Big 10 teams that I have no interest in ever associating with:  Michigan and the Cult of Joe Paterno.  We should have just never played Michigan again after we beat them 37-0 in 2014.  And we haven’t played Penn State since 2007 and I’m fine with never playing them again.

So I think this is bad for college football in general.  It’s bad for Notre Dame if we end up with two mega conferences.  Does it end up affecting college basketball?  Do the mega conferences become NBA Jr. in basketball?  The NCAA basketball tournament is so wonderful.  You had St. Peter’s beat Kentucky and make a run in the NCAA tournament this year.  Do they not get that chance in the future because it’s just teams from the Big 10 and SEC competing?  In 2020, Notre Dame saved the college football season.  The Big 10 and Pac 12 had cancelled their seasons and if we weren’t going to play and the ACC was probably next.  Instead we played, nobody else cancelled their season and the Big 10 and Pac 12 ended up starting their seasons late.  I hope that there’s some way now that Notre Dame can save their independence and the relevance of other conferences in college football, but I can’t say I’m too optimistic at this point.  There’s still some time before USC and UCLA go to the Big 10 and Texas and Oklahoma go to the SEC.  I really hope Marcus Freeman can win a National Championship at Notre Dame while I still care about college football.