Bad news for college baseball

Yahoo's Kendall Rogers tweeted this on Wednesday morning:

"Kept this under wraps Tues, but I've got some temporary bad news for college baseball aficionados. Yahoo has decided to go oppo direction."
http://twitter.com/KendallRogersYS

For those of us that cover college baseball, this is very sad news. What it means is that a great sport will now get even less coverage. Typical, I guess, but nonetheless sad.

 

Upper-middle-class white kids and their overbearing parents just can't catch a break in this world.

 

Awesome

I've always loved how no one gives a shit that every WASP with some pop in his bat leaves college early. But when black basketball players do it, it is some grand social problem.

 

I'm more shocked that there actually was a college baseball gig. I can't name one person who actually keeps up with it.

 

True and true. But let it not be lost that a comrade lost a good job.

 

Just another reason to read my boys at Baseball America, who own that level (and many others) anyway.

 

Those who dismiss college baseball coverage don't live in the Sun Belt.

Where I am, college baseball is (an albeit distant) No. 2 behind college football for the fans. It's not unusual for the local school to put 7k fans a night on conference weekends. But college baseball also has niche sites, like Baseball America and others (Collegiate Baseball, for what it's worth) that have long been go-to sites for college baseball fans. It would be hard for general sports websites (mostly from the northeast, where college baseball doesn't even qualify as an afterthought) to gain traction.

 

Very, very true. Not sure about California or Big 12 country, the other places where there's perennial powers, but here in SEC Land college baseball is almost as big as basketball.
Go to Starkville, Baton Rouge, Oxford, Fayetteville or Gainesville for an SEC weekend series and it's like a miniaturized version of a football Saturday. It's not uncommon for Mississippi State or LSU to draw 8,000 or 10,000 fans a game for a big series. Hell, the five-day SEC tournament drew a total of 126,000 last year. It's big-time here.
And the interest is good for us, because there's very little national coverage of it. You'll get scores and a quick highlight or two on the local news, but you aren't going to get it on Sportscenter. It's one of the few major college sports that newspapers can still provide the bulk of the coverage for.

 

I'd say Big 12 interest, at least in Texas, is similar to the SEC. The Pac-10 is different. Competitively, the West is on a par with the Sun Belt. As far as fan support, it's not even close. A lot of Pac-10 facilites aren't as big as a typical ISD ballpark in Texas or a Sun Belt Conference ballpark in the south. That's not to say they aren't nice. In terms of facilities for players, they are great. They don't need to accommodate a lot of fans though because, well, there aren't a lot out there.

I'll put it like this: I'd bet you that your typical SEC baseball fan can tell you more about Oregon's lineup this year than most Pac-10 fans outside of Eugene.

 

Arizona State has a pretty good fanbase, doesn't it? Them and Stanford are the only ones I could see being good enough on a consistent basis to get a lot of attention.
In the Big 12, I think Nebraska, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State do pretty well. Not as good as the SEC, but compared to other places.
It's amazing other conferences don't at least draw moderately well, though. It's almost sad to watch the ACC game of the week on FSN on some random Saturday and see about 500 people at a Georgia Tech-Duke game.

 

I'm not sure if Wichita State is still doing all that well attendance-wise. In its heyday, the Shockers drew well and were also in a much better ballpark than the Pilots/Wranglers. If both teams happened to be in town on the same day in April, WSU was the better draw.

 

College baseball is not incidental in a number of places, including where I live, but I guess the problem is it's big in pockets, not nationally, and you have to decide whether your resources are better deployed than serving a niche audience, albeit a pretty good one where it matters.