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.
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